Labor Inputs and crew sizes, Late Imperial Chinese oceanic vessels

I had originally just ran with the first statistics I found for crew sizes, those in Dr. Nanny Kim's "Mountain Rivers, Mountain Roads: Transport in Southwest China, 1700‐1850."

The numbers given for crew size/labor-input for both large (400 tons) river vessels and ocean-going freighters are very high (1 crew per 53 tons, 1 crew per 27 tons) compared to a lot of the statistics I found subsequently, One figure from Bozhong Li indicated a crew size of 1 crew per 24 tons for oceanic vessels in the first half of the nineteenth century, while the overwhelming bulk of statistics were 12 tons per sailor or less. For river vessels the average ton per sailor was much lower, overwhlemingly in the 2 to 7.5 range. Crawfurd and certain other 19th century sources give the same tonnage for oceanic vessels, as does Antony in his work on Piracy gives crew sizes of 15-25 for coasting junks, and 60-100 for larger vessels, which would present a maximum of 12 tons/sailor for large oceanic vessels, but probably much lower as most ships were 100-400 tons.

So the numbers in the secondary literature vary widely, and I really would like to get at some of the primary sources for this type of information. But it has been very difficult to try to obtain a copy of the primary sources on oceanic crew sizes, Chen Chen Fang has published various Filipino records of the junk trade which list crew sizes and vessel tonnage (華人與呂宋貿易（1657—1687)), but attempts to purchase the ebook were stymied by my lack of a credit-card issued by a Taiwanese bank.

A major Japanese compendium of trade ship reports, which I believed includes crew and tonnage is Hayashi Harunobu, Hayashi Nobuatsu, comps., Ura Ren’ ichi, anno., Ka-i hentai (Tokyo, 1958)

But I have similarly been unable to find a version of it to buy as a book or Pdf. There is secondary literature which gives some of the info I'm looking for, but not both sets of data (crew sizes and tonnages).

The search for a full monograph on this topic or a accessible form of the historical data continues.

The Hoppo Book of 1753

I spent most of my free time during the last week building a historical price list for trade goods in Guangzhou. Similar European resources for a variety of historical periods are found with a simple google search. But I was unable to locate a similar price-list for an East Asian port at the other extremity of the silk trade-system.

I found small lists of prices in variety of academic articles, and stitched these together with some rough math to get prices for about 1750 CE, where a good chunk of the data was from. Some very rough inflationary calculations translated prices I found from the 1780s or the 1820s back to my baseline.

After about a week of steady work assembling, organizing, and cleaning up the data I ended up with a .pdf I was happy enough with and comfortable selling for $2 on drivethru.

But during a final edit, I was checking something in one of the source papers and found a fleeting reference to a Guangzhou valuation book from 1753 which apparently listed far more goods than I had been able to reconstruct data for.

It took a few hours to locate a version of this source, the "Guangdong Maritime Customs Record." The only typescript version is a book in Mandarin from the mid-nineteenth century, the 粵海關志 ('Gazetteer of Guangdong Maritime Customs'; 1839) by Liang Tingnan 梁廷楠. The only English version of the source I could find was the scan of the 1753 manuscript "The Hoppo Book"

The manuscript is only partially translated, employs a number of interesting historical abbreviations, and the cursive is difficult to parse in many places. However, it has already provided a more fulsome and coherent picture than the previous week of research.

It has been very gratifying to locate this source and get into the process of transcribing it into textscript, but I can only wryly chuckle at the week of wasted labor which preceded this development.