Abstract
Matches were imported into China beginning in the second half of the nineteenth century, and by the late 1870s “copies” started to appear, side-by-side with other foreign investment in the treaty ports. Combining modern technology of the chemical industry and mechanization, matches went deeply into daily life, used in cooking, keeping warm, lighting, and to light cigarettes throughout the twentieth century. This Chinese “copying” of the “match culture ” in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries shows that the process of proliferation in manufacturing and distribution involved technology transfer , as well as international and inter-regional competition and cooperation. It also encountered state intervention and corporate manipulation. This chapter suggests that the “copying issue,” which allowed newcomers to enter the industry relatively easily, turned into the major obstacle to corporate growth.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
China Imperial Maritime Customs. Inspectorate General of Customs (1866, p. 5). The year 1865 was in fact the first year when both Takow and Taiwan-foo were formally open to foreign trade.
- 3.
See the advertisement of Bryant & May’s Safety Matches (NCH October 3, 1863). This advertisement continued to run at least until 1868 in the same paper.
- 4.
See, for example, NCH June 19, 1897. The unit of account for matches was still not standardized during the mid-nineteenth century and there is no further information on the quantity and size of a “case”.
- 5.
For the various businesses of the Major Brothers Company, see NCH December 22, 1893. On its general trading business, particularly on tea trade, see NCH January 22, 1889 (“Commercial Intelligence”).
- 6.
(NCH June 17, 1887). Interestingly, in 1884, Major Brothers were involved in another case of reprinting Chinese books, which were “stolen” from another Chinese person by the European firm’s “Chinese broker” (NCH October 29, 1884).
- 7.
- 8.
I do not know when the size of the matches that we see in the twentieth century was first standardized. I would suggest that it may have been “invented” around the early 1890s.
- 9.
For example, the Hong Sung Match company in Suzhou used “yellow phosphor” in its early period of manufacturing matches, see Shanghai Shehui Kexueyuan Jingji Yanjiusuo (1981, vol. 1, pp. 78, 322). In 1923, the Government of Jiangsu Province issued an order to prohibit the production and sale of the “dangerous matches,” see NCH December 1, 1923-12-1.
- 10.
Even on the eve of the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War, “yellow phosphorus” was still used in Sichuan, see Anonymous author (1936, p. 55).
- 11.
Besides the Chongqing case, various attempts were made at both provincial and national levels in the 1920s and 1930s to implement match monopoly by controlling the chemical materials (Chan 2006, pp. 99–123).
- 12.
- 13.
Even as late as the 1920s and 1930s, matches in the interior would still be considered as a luxury for the locals (Qingdaoshi Gongshang Xingzheng Guanliju Shiliaozu 1963, pp. 46–47).
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Chan, K.Y. (2017). Playing with “Alien Fire” (Yanghuo): Matches in Late Nineteenth-and Early Twentieth-Century China. In: Furuta, K., Grove, L. (eds) Imitation, Counterfeiting and the Quality of Goods in Modern Asian History. Studies in Economic History. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-3752-8_11
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