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The Straits of Malacca, Indo-China, and China
The Straits of Malacca Indo-China and China Author:John Thomson Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE NATIVES. 11 mainland, there is a Kling bazaar where all sorts of foreign commodities are sold, and at prices which rarely exceed the sums they can be boug... more »ht for, in the countries where they are manufactured. There are also a number of grog-shops and lodging-houses. The town contains, besides, a large Chinese population, made up of merchants, shopkeepers, and handicraftsmen, immigrants MALAY BOY. from the island of Hainan, Kwangtung, and from the several districts of the Fukien province. These men are the most successful traders and patient toilers in the Hast. We could not do without them in our Malayan possessions, and yet they are difficult members of society to manage. To convey some idea of their usefulness, I need only say, that they can make anything required bya European; and in trade they are indispensable to us, as they have established connections in almost all the islands to which our foreign commodities are carried. Their agents reside in Sumatra, Borneo, and on the Indo-Chinese mainland, collecting produce by barter with the natives, to whom they are not unfrequently related by social, as well as by commercial ties. In this way much of the produce shipped from Penang to England and other foreign countries, passes through the hands of Chinese middle-men. Then again, the European merchant at almost all the Eastern ports finds it indispensable to have in his employment a Chinese comprador, or treasurer, who not only pays for produce, and receives and collects moneys on behalf of the firm, but is also responsible for the weight and purity of the silver in which payments have been made. Under him he has assistants called schroffs, trained to detect spurious coin, and who display in this matter a keenness of perception which is puzzling to a European ; for t...« less