“The Founding of the Nagasaki Tojin Yashiki in 1689 in the Light of the Early Tokugawa Foreign Policy”

In the long history of the Chinese diaspora, Japan occupies a prominent position, since for centuries the archipelago was the privileged partner of the Chinese sea-merchants. In light of the historical intercourse between China and Japan, Sino-Japanese maritime commerce and sea-trade constitute the economic base on which relations between the two countries were founded. An uninterrupted flux of trade carried out by Chinese and Japanese merchants, adventurers, and pirates has connected the whole of the Southern and Far Eastern seas for centuries. Therefore, ever since ancient times, Chinese migrants had reached the Japanese shores, and over the centuries, settled down, giving birth to many tōjin communities -the tōjin machi 唐人街-, scattered all over the entire archipelago, especially in Kyūshū. The Tokugawa bakufu chose to pursue a defensive foreign policy and issued severe ordinances to protect its finances and its integrity: as we know, it was the so-called “sakoku–kaikin” 鎖国 - 海禁 policy. In 1635, the Tokugawa bakufu had already restricted the arrival of Chinese ships to the sole port of Nagasaki and had imposed stricter control over the Chinese settlers in Nagasaki. From that moment onwards, the tōjin coming to Japan were implicitly compelled to enter the Japanese archipelago only via Nagasaki, where they were gradually made to live apart from the Japanese people and to reside altogether in a separate quarter. These impositions were the preconditions to the very founding of the Chinese quarter as a delimited and closed area. The Chinese Empire, on its side, saw the decline of the Ming 明 dynasty, completely lost control over the sea-coast trade and overseas activities, suffered threats on the Northern frontiers from the Mongols and the Manchu, and entered the long transition from the Ming (1368-1644) to the Qing 清 dynasty (1644-1911): along the 17th Century, many Chinese refugees moved to Japan to escape the disorders in China and to avoid being subjugated by the Manchu, attempting to raise the attention of the Japanese intellectuals and to obtain concrete support by the Tokugawa bakufu. When the civil war was settled, and the Qing empire was pacified, the lifting of the ban on the China seas by the Emperor Kangxi, in 1684, opened up an innovative age for the Chinese empire and the Chinese maritime activities, yet, at the same time, it led to a sort of invasion of tōsen in the port of Nagasaki. The turning point, in fact, came in 1689, with the foundation of the Nagasaki Tōjin Yashiki 長崎唐人屋敷: the Tokugawa bakufu imposed the construction of the Chinese quarter as a delimited and closed area, where all the Overseas Chinese were obliged to gather and reside. This decision can, in itself, be partly considered as one of the longest-lasting consequences of the strong process of centralisation achieved by the Tokugawa authorities, but also the Edo bakufu's unavoidable answer to the enormous flux of Chinese ships entering Nagasaki.