| During the late Qing Dynasty,some gentle merchants in Guangdong,led by Wang Xian and Wu Yuzheng,felt the threat of Macao’s expanding boundaries,so they responded to the national proposal of "attaching importance to commerce and opening a commercial port" and spontaneously gathered capital to open a commercial port at the junction of San-Cheong and Cat-tai townships.They hoped to hit the Macao government through commercial competition and recovered national rights.In order to achieve the goal smoothly,these gentle merchants set up detailed regulations and put forward the idea of "opening up a free port".They smoothed out complicated approvals and calmed civil disputes step by step through collusion between government and business.However,due to social unrest,lack of funding,location problems and poor design,the project quickly ran into difficulties,and the owners were unable to solve the problems and were eventually forced to abandon the project.The purpose of this paper is to improve the historical description and evaluation of the opening of a commercial port in Heung-Chao during the late Qing Dynasty.In the traditional chronicle,Heung-Chao commercial port has been paid attention to for its two characteristics of "self-founded by merchants" and "free port".As a result,academic circles often believe that "Wang,Wu and others formally applied for opening a port" is the starting point of the event,and "Heung-Chao became a free port in 1911" is the end point.This situation makes it difficult for people to truly understand the origin and final outcome of the Heung-Chao commercial port,which is not conducive to explaining the Heung-Chao commercial port itself.In order to solve this dilemma,this paper tries to complete the time sequence of Heung-Chao commercial port,sort out the relationship between all parties in the event,and evaluate the actual effect of the commercial port. |
