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could help negotiate the intricacies of setting up a factory here for the East India
Company.
Andace is how Saris records his name, but the English who stayed on in Hirado
came tocall himAndreaDittis. Thelifeandtimes ofthismanhavebeenpreserved
for us thanks to the diary of the head of the Hirado factory, Richard Cocks. The
portion of the diary that has survived opens on 1 June 1615. Cocks's entry for that
daynamesnotonlyDittisbutalsohisbrother,CaptainWhaw,towhomCockssent
a gold bar as a christening gift for his youngest daughter. These are not obviously
Chinese names, but the Japanese historian Seiichi Iwao has unlocked their riddles.
Dittis is a Kyushu rendering of the Chinese name Li Dan (Di=Li, ttis=Dan), while
Andrea was a 'Christian' name that Portuguese traders gave him. Whah (he also
appears as Whowe) should properly be rendered Huayu: this is Li Dan's brother,
Li Huayu.
The Li brothers hailed from Quanzhou, one of the two main coastal cities of
Fujian province from which merchants and coolies sailed out into the trade net-
works of East Asia. As a young man Li Dan had gone to Manila, the base of Span-
ish trading operations in Asia, and amassed a fortune, or so Cocks gathered, but
he had been forced to leave in the wake of the great Spanish massacre of Chinese
there in 1603. Li fled to Japan, where he had lived for nine years before the Eng-
lish arrived. The brothers were older than Saris, who was about thirty-four when
he sailed into Hirado, and probably just a little older than Cocks, who had already
reached the then advanced age of forty-eight. (He was on this voyage late in life
because his own business back in England had failed.) As Li Huayu died in 1619
and Li Dan followed him in 1625, both of natural causes, we might suppose they
were on either side of fifty in 1613. They had put their nine years to good use in
Japan.Bythetimethe Clove sailedintoHirado,theLibrothershadinstalled them-
selvesasleadersofthetradingcommunityofseveralhundredChineselivingatthe
south end of Japan. Both had residences in Nagasaki, where the Portuguese had
openedtradeandwheretheDutchwouldenduponcetheTokugawaregimeclosed
the country, but Li Dan's main business was in Hirado, which also served as the
base for Dutch and English commerce at that time.
The goal of every trader in the China seas was to get access to China, not
somethingtheMingcourtwaspreparedtogive.TheofficialviewfromBeijingwas
that foreign trade could be conducted only as an adjunct of diplomacy. If foreign
envoys came to offer tribute to the emperor, they would be permitted to conduct
trade, and then only under official supervision. The court might relax the restric-
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