TOPICS OF THE DAY.

CHINESE TRADE, FOREIGN AND DOMESTIC. Ti the manufactures and trade of England were in a healthy Con- dition, the prospect of extended commerce with China would be a source of unmingled congratulation. A body of experienced mer- chants, incited by the prospect of increased gain not goaded by embarrassments, would feel their way, and extend their dealings boldly yet with due caution. But at this moment we have manu- facturers whose warehouses are and have long been crammed with more goods than they know how to dispose of, and others who suffer less by working their mills at a loss than by allowing their machinery to rust in inaction. One consequence of this state of things has been, in the American trade, that year after year goods have been sent, not to order, but upon speculation ; which, after being hawked about unable to find a customer, are brought to the hammer to pay warehouse-expenses, if a high enough price can be got. China will open a new field for these unsaleable commodities : herds of sharkish adventurers, who hear that China is a large country with numerous inhabitants, but are totally ignorant of what the Chinese want or can give in return, will obtain any credit from the plethoric warehouses of Leeds and Manchester, will inundate the five open ports of China with goods unfitted for the market, and for which that country has nothing to exchange. There will be a temporary briskness in English trade, and a crash. A circumstance that ought to render all who have any thing to lose cautious how they speculate on the opening of the Chinese trade is, that limited though the foreign trade of China is, the country does not at present supply commodities to balance the im- ports of Canton alone. The oozing of the Sycee silver out of the country, to pay for commodities for which the country has nothing else to give in exchange and the consequent derangement of the internal currency, is believed to have been a chief cause of the measures for excluding foreign opium which gave occasion to the war. The Chinese are a money-loving, acute people, energetic and enterprising in their own way, possessed of great mechanical talent, and inhabiting a country which has many fine provinces. In time, their land must become a rich and profitable resort for merchants ; but any immediate extension of their trade is little less problema-

tical than the great trade with the Niger which worthy Mr. BUXTON was to conjure up. Almost nothing is known of the economical condition of China, and what little is known does not promise immediate great results.

The tea-trade is the great staple of China—the point upon which all the mercantile speculations of the Chinese turn—the line of business which gives form and direction to their other enterprises.

Mr. M'CuzLocn, notwithstanding his habitual accuracy, says that China has "capacities for raising unlimited quantities of tea." The

cultivation of tea in China is limited to the provinces lying between

the 24th and 33d parallels of North latitude ; and even within this range all places are not capable of growing tea, or tea of a high

quality, any more than the whole valley of the Rhine is fit for vine- yards, or fit to produce Jobannisberger. The tea-provinces of China consist of two groups. The Western group comprises portions (not the whole) of the four provinces—Kiang-nan, Kiang-si, Che-kiang, and Fo-kien, one district of Honan and one of Hooquang. Only one of these tea-districts lies on the North side of the Yang-tse- kiang, and they stop short of the most Southern part of Fo-kien. The Eastern group of the Chinese tea-districts lies between 27 and 30 degrees or at the very utmost 31 degrees North, and is nowhere more than from 200 to 250 miles in breadth. It is to this group that the growth of the finer teas is exclusively confined, and even here they succeed only in some favoured spots. The Western group embraces nine districts in Yunan, Setchuen, and Koeitchoo, (most of them in the upper valley of the Yang-tse-kiang and its larger affiu- ents,) and extends beyond the limits of the Chinese empire South- ward into Tonquin and Burmah, and Westward as far as Assam. This region is much more extensive than the Western group ; but the tea-culture is more thinly scattered, the tea of a very inferior quality, and the nature of the country and climate in many places

such as to render it not very probable that its quality or quantity will ever be materially increased or improved. 1 hat the tea-culti-

vation has not yet extended beyond the limits now indicated, is not for want of a sufficient demand, for much greater quantities of (nominal) tea are every year consumed in and exported from the Chinese territories than the tea-countries can supply. The tea is mixed with the leaves of the kindred camelia, with the olea fragrans, and besides with numberless mosses, ferns, and other plants ; and of the "tile-tea," as the Russians call it, a large article of export by land, tea is the least component part. It is less for its extent and numerous ramifications (though these too are wonderful) that the tea-trade of China is remarkable, than for the influence it exercises over the whole commerce of that country. As our object at present is to look at it in this latter point of view—as it is its distribution and the proportionate amounts sent in different directions to which we are desirous of at- tracting attention—we do not take the latest statements of the sea- borne exports for that would derange their relations to the exports by land. The most recent accounts, accessible to us, of the trade from the tea-provinces to China Proper, Chinese and Independent Tartary, and Russia, come no later down than 1830; and to com-

bine these with returns of the trade to Europe for 1840 would give a distorted view of the system. It is the system we seek to de- lineate.

European countries (with the exception of Russia) and America have hitherto drawn their supplies of tea from the Eastern lea- districts through the port of Canton. About 1830, the annual im- portation of tea into Great Britain amounted to nearly thirty millions of pounds; the consumption of the United States varied from six to eight millions ; the consumption of Holland to something more than two millions and a half; the importations of Germany to about two millions ; the importations of South America, France, Italy, and Spain, scarcely amounted to one million. Some tea must have been exported from the harbours on the South-east coast of China by the junks trading with Tonquin and Cochin China Singapore, and '

other places in the Eastern Archipelago but we have no means of conjecturing its amount. The trade with Canton at the time we are referring to was principally in the hands of the East India Company, (now thrown open,) the country-traders of India, and the Americans, in the proportions of one-half to the country-traders and one-half to each of the others. The exports to England consisted exclusively of tea ; the exports to America chiefly of tea, along with small quantities of nankeens, raw and wrought silks, sugar, and some minor articles ; the exports to India were to a trifling amount tea, china-ware, sugar, nankeens, cassia, and camphor, but the imports from that country were chiefly balanced by bills and bullion. The imports from England consisted of woollens in value one-half of the whole, cottons one-quarter, metals and miscellaneous articles an- other quarter. The imports from America were in value cottons one-half, woollens one-quarter, and miscellaneous articles another quarter. The imports from India were—opium to the value of more than two millions of pounds ; cotton, tin, pepper, betel-nut, and other articles to the value of about a million. The articles of export are exclusively the produce of the Chinese provinces South of the Yang-tse-Kiang. Two of their staples (cotton and earthen-ware) are imported to a considerable amount. And the whole of the commodities they produce are not enough to pay for the necessary imports, woollen and cotton cloths, and opium, (also become a necessary for them, let moralists say what they will,) for the latter is always paid in cash.

The trade from the tea-districts to the Northern provinces of

China, to Chinese Tartary, to Russia, and to Independent Tartary, is active and extensive. The annual import of tea into Russia alone, in 1830, amounted to five millions and a half pounds. This was the amount of the legitimate traffic at the station of Kiachta, but gives no idea of the busy trade along the Great Canal, supply- ing the whole of the provinces of China, except Setchuen, north of the Yang-tse-kiang, the whole of Central Asia north and west of China Proper, and numerous remote hordes within the Russian frontier, who procured supplies of tea of which the -Government knew nothing. Some idea of the state of this trade may be gathered from what was witnessed by TIMICOWSKI on his route from Kiachta to Khalgan on the Great Wall. At Urga, he met several caravans of forty camels, laden with tea, for Uliassutai, a station in Chinese Tartary west of the road he travelled. From the 25th September to the 2d October he met daily small parties of traders, all of whom carried ventures of tea ; on the 2d October he met a Chinese caravan, with two hundred cars laden with fine black tea for Kiachta ; on the 6th and 9th he met caravans with equal quantities, the last of still finer quality ; on the 4th November he met "the great tea-caravan for Kiachta" ; on the 6th, another scarcely less numerous; from the 12th to the 14th, (the day on which he reached Khalgan,) he met numerous tea-caravans of 100, 200, and 250 camels. At Khalgan, he was informed that there was constantly a depot of tea large enough to load at any time 2,000 camels. When he recrossed the desert in July from Kbalgan to Kiachta, the tea. caravans which he passed seemed quite as frequent. TIMKOWSIC1 travelled along the principal line of traffic north of the Great Wall ; but there are many minor routes to the east and west of it ; and an equally-frequented line conducts from the Hoangho westward to Kashgar on the South, Guldja on the North. Tea is a necessary of life in China and Chinese Tartary, and scarcely less so in Russia, and among the independent nomades and great trading towns between the Chinese frontier, the Oxus, and the Caspian ; and all these conntries are supplied from the Eastern groups of tea-countries. The returns from Russia are furs ; of which a greater quantity is required to balance the tea and other imports than that country itself can spare ; and furs are consequently im- ported for the demands of this trade. The Chinese would take silver, but its exportation is prohibited in Russia. The returns from Tartary and Northern China consist of cattle, some articles of domestic manufacture, some articles of European manufacture, which find their way into Central Asia, and drugs—gin-seng from the land of the Mantchoos, and rhubarb from the mountainous region on the upper Hoang-ho. The teas sent to the North are- the finest blacks, and the tile-tea above-mentioned,—a villauous compound of the refuse of the better teas, mosses, ferns, boiled up with bullock's blood or some other animal substance, and made up into cakes like chocolate.

The tea of the Eastern group supplies the domestic consump- tion of the provinces immediately adjoinitip and is exported into Siam and Burmah, and westward through fhibet as far as Ladak. It is of the coarsest quality, and, as far as can be learned, most fre- quently prepared much in the same way as the tile-tea. But beyond the fact of there being a steady permanent trade in this commodity along the route indicated, scarcely any thing is known with certainty. The tea-districts are the centres of the productive industry of China, and of its commercial wealth and enterprise with reference both to its foreign and domestic trade. They are to China what Staffordshire, Lancashire, and Yorkshire are to England. The minor traffics cluster round and take their direction from the great staple trade. The principal porcelain manufactories are in the Eastern tea-districts. The articles of foreign manufacture imported at Canton, and the Russian furs imported at Kiachta, find their way of course to the producing-districts, and from them are distri- buted through the empire, or reexported in the junks of Fo-kien and Che-kiang, to be exchanged for trepang, edible birds-nests, shark-fins, and tortoise-sbell. The trade of the Eastern tea-dis-

tricts is the centre of vitality of the overland trade to the port of Canton ; of the coasting-trade from Fo-kien and Che-kiang to

Mantchoo Tartary, and of the trifling trade to Japan ; of the traffic on the Grand Canal, and along the roads which branch off from its termination to the Amur, Kiachta, Ili, and Kashgar. It lends greater energy to the coast and river fisheries, and keeps alive the manufactures in the coal-district North-west of Pekin. The Western tea-districts are on a smaller scale, and after a ruder fashion, for Setchuen, Koeitchoo, Yunnan, the North of Siam and Burmah, and the Thibets; while the Eastern group are for the wealthier coast-lands, and the whole of the rest of the world. To understand and appreciate aright the commercial capabilities of China, it is necessary to master thoroughly the condition and relations of these two groups of provinces.

Unless fresh misunderstandings intervene, the throwing open of the four new ports to British enterprise will soon and materially alter the condition and direction of the commerce of the Eastern tea-districts, and of all the countries which trade with them. To Canton the new arrangement will in all probability be a heavy blow. Its chief articles of export are tea and bullion : the former will henceforth be shipped in preference at the ports in the tea-pro- vinces; and the exportation of silver, if tolerated, can be effected as easily at Shanghai as at Canton. If return-cargoes can be ob- tained, the first of our manufactures likely to find an increased sale in China are our woollens. The inclemency of the winters even in the provinces at the mouth of the Yang-tse-Kiang, and still more in the mountain-regions which abound in the Chinese empire, render warm clothing in great request. This it is that occasions the ready sale of Russian furs. There was at one time a consider- able importation of furs from America ; but the increasing scarcity of the game, and the rising of furs in the general market owing to the purchase of them by Russians to send to Kiachta, induced the Americans to substitute woollen cloths ; and it has been found to answer. The game is decreasing in Siberia as well as in America ; and, with four harbours in the very heart of the trading provinces, we will have better opportunities of bringing our woollens into com- petition with the furs introduced at one point of a remote frontier. The woollens of France, Belgium, and the Rhine provinces, must come into competition with us; bat even with that competition, there are fair grounds for expecting a decided advantage to our woollen manufactures, if our traders act judiciously.* It is not , China alone that we have to look to : Chinese traders will carry our woollens into the very heart of Central Asia. The immense frontier of Asiatic Russia cannot be guarded against their entrance. Next in importance, most likely, will be our exportations of cotton- twist to China. Already considerable quantities are carried there to be worked up : the increased impetus given to its internal industry by our more direct and extensive trade with the tea- districts will increase the domestic manufactures of China, and its demand for this partly-manufactured commodity. As the Chinese have already begun to work up our cotton-twist, and have a strong mechanical turn, it is not unlikely that the exporta- tion of machinery, and their noble and numerous rivers, will induce them to take large quantities of steam-boat machinery. Other articles of our manufactures will by degrees (not slow) enter in the wake of these two; but they will be the first. The great difficulty at the outset will be to find appropriate articles for return-car- goes. Even with its existing limited foreign commerce, China

pays for no inconsiderable portion of its imports in bullion and bills. Its supply of the precious metals is scanty, and rendered more so by the prohibition to export silver from Russia. The slow progress of just views of the commerce in the precious metals by more civilized nations affords little room for hope that Russia will soon abandon its unwise interference, or the Chinese Go- vernment cease to have cause for being alarmed at the de- rangement of their currency. It is extremely questionable whe- ther the cultivation of tea in China can be extended, or its use elsewhere, so as to balance a very moderate increase in the im- portation of our manufactures. If it can be extended in China, so can it in the adjoining countries ; and this will neutralize the in-

crease. Silk, cotton, tobacco, China can produce, abundant in

=quantity and excellent in quality, but not more so than countries as easily or more easily accessible. The truth is, that the wealth and resources of China are yet very imperfectly developed : time will be required to develop them ; and till that is done, China can afford us nothing like the market which dreamers talk of. The ex- tended trade with China will not of itself prove a panacea for our economical ailments.

• The grand attraction for customers in England is cheapness; the Chinese look mainly to good guatity, of which they are most shrewd judges—none of your manufacturing "Devil's dust" tricks for them I