junk-trade

Updated: June 26, 2025

When we consider the vast importance of the Chinese junk-trade to Singapore, and take into account the cheaper rate we can supply them, now their ports are open, at their own doors, with every commodity they require from the Malay islands, the risk, trouble, and expense they will save by supplying their wants or disposing of their superfluities, in the harbours of Shang Hae, Ningpo, Foo Chow, or Amoy, instead of undertaking the long voyage to the Straits of Malacca for that purpose, one is at a loss to conceive on what grounds the sanguine expectation can rest, that the opening of China will do Singapore no harm.

G. F. Davidson - Trade and Travel in the Far East: or Recollections of twenty-one years passed in Java,: Singapore, Australia and China.