Before the US-China trade war: how America wooed the Qing dynasty with ginseng and furs

Amid the tumultuous trade war engulfing China and the United States, a major new exhibition at the Hong Kong Maritime Museum steps back from the brink to explore the distant origins of trade between the two economic giants.

The exhibition, which runs until mid-April, illustrates how the thorny issue of trade imbalances is nothing new.

“The China-US trade is a highly sensitive issue at the moment, but as a museum we can only reveal the story of the earliest days of this important trading relationship, and the many benefits it produced. Others are free to draw their own conclusions,” says museum director Richard Wesley of “The Dragon and the Eagle: American Traders in China, A Century of Trade from 1784 to 1900” exhibition.

The exhibition of some 250 objects has been some four years in the making, and includes rare artefacts and documents loaned from prestigious museums and archives in the US, including the Baker Library at Harvard Business School, the Peabody Essex Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Together, the objects piece together the origins of a partnership that began on February 22, 1784 when a small sailing ship called the Empress of China sailed from New York harbour bound for the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou – then known as Canton.

In 2017, US trade with China was estimated at US$710.4 billion, but 234 years ago, as ship captain John Green – a burly Irish veteran of the American war of independence – packed his sea chest, China-US trade did not even exist.