洋關の成立をめぐって

Abstract

Most of the previous studies on the establishment of the Chinese Imperial Maritime Customs have been pursued in the light of diplomatic/treaty relations between China and the West. In this paper, more importance is attached to the duty-collecting system of the maritime custom under Sino-British commercial relations at Shanghai since the opening of the treaty ports. The custom-house authorities at Shanghai made an attempt at levying yishui 夷税 the duties on Western trade at four newly opened ports, through the intermediary of Chinese brokers such as pre-treaty Co-hong. Such a system, however, broke down owing to change in the mode of transactions at Shanghai before long. In the meantime, the xinguan 新關 (lit. new custom-house) which had control entirely over Western trade was established there. That was the beginning of separation of the 'foreign' customs from the native ones. The foreign inspectorate of customs at Shanghai, created in 1854, did not reform the xinguan establishment root and branch, but merely regulated its corruption which facilitated evasion of duties. In some foreign merchants' opinions, Anglo-Chinese direct trade centered at Shanghai, consisting of bartering tea and silk for British manufactures, would be undermined without introduction of the foreign inspectorate at the other ports, especially at Fuzhou where tea exports had rapidly increased. Furthermore, the British maintained that the function of the inspectorate should be applied to barriers in the interior for the prevention of seemingly arbitrary levies there. The Qing authorities at Shanghai accepted these claims from fiscal point of view. The formation of the various features of the 'foreign' customs is based on the above process.