Acknowledgements

My interest in Chinese maritime trade was sparked in 1970 when my husband, who was posted to the Australian High Commission in Kuala Lumpur, returned home from a trip to Sarawak with a small parcel wrapped in newspaper and tied with pink plastic string. Inside was a small celadon saucer decorated with two raised fish at its centre that, according to the shopkeeper of the antique shop in Sibu, had ‘come from China hundreds of years ago’. Further research revealed that it did indeed date from the thirteenth or fourteenth century and was one of the thousands of Chinese ‘Song fish plates’ exported throughout maritime Southeast Asia at this time. Thanks to this plate, my interest expanded to include later categories of Chinese export porcelains, culminating with a fascination for those wares brought to Britain during the eighteenth century at the height of the chinoiserie period. A further interest in the Canton trade, the British East India Company and British society during the Georgian and Regency period was a natural progression.