Sino-Korean Trade, Manchu Contractors, and Northeast Asian Capital Circulation, 1680–1780

This presentation revisits the prosperous Sino-Korean cross-border trade in East Mukden during the Qing period and reveals its significance in shaping the international trade network in Northeast Asia and promoting economic development in Chinese borderlands. In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, East Mukden, a backwater for more than two hundred years, suddenly saw the rise of a golden age of Sino-Korean trade. This trade led to robust, interregional capital circulation that both individual traders and state powers enthusiastically engaged in and a wave of domestic immigration from Inner China to the Manchurian borderlands. This trade began with the emergence of Manchu contractors who monopolized the long-distance transportation of Korean tribute and goods in the Sino-Korean tributary framework. In the 1680s the Korean missions began to carry silver rather than ginseng and furs for trade in China. Korea was not rich in silver, but could obtain the precious metal through its trade with Japanese merchants from Tsushima Prefecture. Fenghuang City, a small Manchu-controlled outpost guarding the Sino-Korean border since the 1630s and the base for the Manchu contractors, quickly grew into the hub in a tripartite trade network in Northeast Asia. Abundant commercial opportunities and the influx of Japanese silver and Korean goods turned East Mukden into a magnet for Han Chinese merchants and immigrants who dramatically changed this frontier region’s urban landscape and demographics. This presentation examines the formation of a powerful trade, financial, and political network connecting the borderland with the political center of the Chinese empire, and the thriving capital circulation in Northeast Asia that constituted a part of early modern capitalism in world history.