The Thirteen Factories

1 · POSITION

The Thirteen Factories were the foreign trading quarter of Guangzhou on the Pearl River, from about 1684 to 1856 — the only place, under the Canton System of 1757 to 1842, where Western merchants could trade with China. They were not hotels. Foreign merchants lived most of their daily lives inside them, which is why the register holds them beside Dejima and the Old English Court. [1]

2 · WAREHOUSE BELOW, HOME ABOVE

Each factory was office and store at once: warehouses filled the ground floors, living quarters the floors above. The name is traditional rather than a count — there were eight factories in 1748, seventeen by 1770, and seventeen or eighteen in the early nineteenth century. The Chinese called them hongs, merchant houses; the English word meant an agency, and nothing was manufactured in them. [1, 2]

3 · THE RULES OF RESIDENCE

Western traders were confined to the approved quarter and to dealings with licensed merchant houses, the Cohong, who stood guarantor for their conduct and their taxes. They came with the monsoon, arriving between June and September and leaving between November and February — a seasonal residence written into the terms of trade. From 1741 they had to withdraw to Macau when the season ended. They could not visit the rest of the city, and knew it through the views Chinese artists painted for them; the factories’ bedrooms and clerks’ rooms upstairs were simple and spare. [1, 2]

4 · FIRE AND THE MOVE TO SHAMIAN

The factories burned by accident in 1822, again in 1841 in the First Opium War, and finally in 1856 at the start of the Second. The foreign traders worked from Honam island for a time and then rebuilt on a new enclave, the Shamian sandbar — the quarter the register holds under its own code. [1]

5 · ⚑ CANDOUR

⚑ The Canton System is dated 1757–1842 by both sources, its beginning sometimes carried back to 1700. The comparison with Dejima and the Old English Court is the register’s. [1–2]