The Sakoku Edicts and the Politics of Tokugawa Hegemony By Micha ...

Japan, as it provided the much sought-after access to the Chinese silk market—although, to be sure, that access was indirect.³⁰ The Ming dynasty, eager to keep the Dutch at arm's length, agreed that if they built a fort on Taiwan rather than on islands closer to the mainland, they could trade with Chinese merchants on the island. Although this agreement was informal and ad hoc, it proved tremendously valuable to the Dutch; they began to acquire large quantities of silk from Chinese merchants like Zheng Zhilong, the scion of a powerful merchant family based in Fujian province.³¹ Zheng Zhilong, or Nicholas Iquan (his baptismal name) as the Europeans knew him, agreed in 1629 that he would use the Dutch as middlemen in his trade with Japan.³² Even though this agreement was never fully honored, it proved a boon to Dutch trade in Japan, and from the 1630s, the Dutch factory in Hirado, later moved to Nagasaki, would consistently prove to be one of the most profitable Dutch East India Company (VOC) factories in all of Asia.

As a coda to the story of Dutch success, the English were never able to make their factory at Hirado profitable despite an initially warm welcome extended to John Saris, the commander of the first English ship to visit Japan. Saris, in a letter to the head of the East India Company, stated boldly that he had obtained “large privileges of the emperor for trade.”³³ Despite this initial optimism, the English were simply not able to sell enough merchandise in Japan to make their venture profitable. This is most likely not because of any great fault of the English merchants, although Richard Cocks certainly received the lion's share of the blame at the time, but was more likely because the English did not have any real access to Chinese silk. Barring silk and other Southeast Asian luxury goods such as sandalwood and deer skins, which the Dutch were much better positioned to obtain, the English could only offer English manufactured goods such as woolens—and as Cocks discovered almost immediately, there was almost no demand for this cloth. Indeed, Saris recorded in his journal that the Japanese could not help but notice that the English seemed to only wear silk, even though they were desperately peddling English broadcloth!³⁴ Therefore, after only ten years of failed business, the English closed up their factory and left Hirado,