– where Chin Ming’s journey begins.
The position of Guangzhou, at the meeting point of inland rivers and the sea made it an ideal commercial centre. As far back as the third century, this place had been a port that had served as a doorway for foreign influence. It became known as an exporter of products such as sugar, fruit, silk, timber, tea and herbs. The British East India Company established a ‘factory’, a place where foreign traders had their residences and business bases in 1685, and throughout the eighteenth-century other foreign nationals also established trade relations in the area known as the Thirteen Factories.
A number of writers include scenes which use the Thirteen Factories as their focus, but most of the stories are set much later than A Strand of Gold. Amitav Ghosh, for instance, in his Ibis trilogy makes the profusion of traditions and cultures that make up Guangzhou central to his brilliant novels, set just before the Opium Wars. A number of writers include scenes which use the Thirteen Factories as their focus, but most of the stories are set much later than A Strand of Gold. Amitav Ghosh, for instance, in his Ibis trilogy makes the profusion of traditions and cultures that make up Guangzhou central to his brilliant novels, set just before the Opium Wars. A Strand of Gold begins thirty-seven years before the main action of Ghosh’s trilogy takes place, but there is already a problem with the amount of opium being brought into China by the British.
Between 1805 and 1820, there were an estimated three hundred junks operating in East and Southeast Asia, and nearly three times that under the flag of the East India Company. By the 1820s, virtually the only product the East India Company imported from China was tea, and duties amounted to ten per cent of the British government’s total revenue. However, as British and other foreigners had little the Chinese wanted to exchange, they had been forced to pay for their tea in silver. The Napoleonic Wars in Europe and the escalating costs involved in the administration of India had forced the Company to search for an alternative to silver and this took the form of opium from Bengal. They paid little heed to the fact that this trade was that it was illegal in China, where legislation to ban opium for nonmedicinal purposes had been passed nearly one hundred years earlier.
The disappearance of Chin Ming’s father, revealed in the Prologue is centred around the fact that he reported a gang of illegal traders to the authorities. The starting point for the first chapter of A Strand of Gold, is Chin Ming’s need to find some means of getting herself to Singapore, where she believes questions surrounding her father’s disappearance might be answered. We see her in the midst of the hustle and bustle of the port; the markets, the hawker stalls, the magnificent vessels. She needs to plan her escape and devise a means of getting herself aboard the magnificent Golden Phoenix.