Trepang and wangkang; The China trade of eighteenth-century Makassar c.1720s-1840s

Abstract

The sources are unanimous: trepang are repulsive.1 Alfred Russel Wallace (1869:329), in one of the kinder descriptions, likened them to 'sausages which have been rolled in mud and then thrown up the chimney', while John Crawfurd (1820,111:441) found that 'the trepang is an unseemly looking sub stance'. The more scientific dr. J.C. Koningsberger (1904) catalogued their habits when disturbed: evacuation of long tendrils of slime, or indeed the entire gut, culminating in some sub-species with the dissolution of the skin, leaving the animal a mere puddle of sludge. A relatively neutral account depicts trepang as being 'usually a span in length, round, dark brown on top, reddish underneath, covered in small warts, and with eight coarse feelers on the snout' (Tripang 1869:1124), while the Encyclopaedie van Nederlandsch-Indi? observed that they came in all sorts of colours (yellowish white, black, blueish, spotted, reddish) and sizes (from 5 cm to 2 meters long) (Encyclo paedie 1917-39, IV:437-40).2 But trepang (b?che-de-mer, sea-slugs, sea cucumbers) were not sought after for their looks, but for their very considerable commercial value. For these unprepossessing animals were a Chinese culinary delicacy, and in the course of the eighteenth century trepang became the major product the eastern archipelago offered in exchange for imports from Amoy (modern Xiamen) and Canton. Makassar was the Indonesian centre for this valuable trade, and the history of her economy in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century is closely linked to the fortunes of the trepang fleets. Moreover, since trepang were gathered or purchased along the coasts of many apparently isolated islands, the trade greatly intensified the commercial possibilities of outlying