Ships from Philadelphia, New York, Boston, and Salem were the most active in the new China trade. The immediate difficulty which all traders faced was to find commodities to sell in China to offset American purchases in China that were mostly paid for in silver shipped from the Americas to China. Traders from these different American ports settled on different commodities and followed different routes to China to obtain these commodities. In general, all traders engaged in the serial trading of goods, buying and selling in all the ports they visited.

Traders from Philadelphia first sent their ships across the Atlantic Ocean to buy and sell goods in Europe. They then traded around Africa and across the Indian Ocean to China. Around 1810, Philadelphia merchants found a source of opium in Smyrna (Turkey) and they began to ship this commodity to China. However, they continued to ship other goods as well. Ships from New York seem to have engaged in a broad range of trade strategies available and in the mid-19th century, New York became the major port involved in the China trade.

By the 1830’s, trade routes were well established between the United States and China, and the names of ports in the Eastern hemisphere, once exotic and mysterious, were becoming increasingly familiar to Americans as places of importance to the United States’ economy.

Tea was the most important imported commodity Americans obtained from China through the end of the 19th century. Initially, American imports from China largely consisted of cloth (nankeen and silk) as well as tea. Tea became the dominant commodity, expanding from approximately 36% of the total imports from China in 1822 to 65% in 1860.

Textile imports declined during the 1830s. Silk imports declined although the reason is uncertain. As cotton textile manufacturing developed in the 1820s and the quality of domestic cloth rose and the cost decreased, the U.S. stopped importing nankeen and began to export cotton cloth to China. Machine-spun cloth did not have comparable quality to the homespun, hand-woven nankeen which the Chinese continued to prefer for work clothes. It was not until the middle to the end of the 19th century that western-manufac tured cloth provided the serviceability for a comparable price as did Chinese-produce d cloth. At that time western cloth began to be imported into China in increasing quantities. By the last quarter of the 19th century, cotton cloth and cotton yarn represented a significant portion of the total American exports to China.

Americans initially looked to ginseng as the commodity which would finance trade with China. This market quickly turned out to be very volatile. Furs also held promise, but this market also proved to be undependable. Without a commodity which consistently found a market in China, the Americans had to use specie (metal and coins) to finance the trade. Without a source of gold or silver, Americans had to obtain specie elsewhere. They did this by engaging in a triangular trade. Goods were shipped to Europe, between European ports, or to South America and sold for Mexican dollars. The specie was then shipped to China to purchase tea. By the 1830s, a significant amount of the trade was financed by credit extended by London banks through their representatives in China.

Some Americans also turned to opium as a commodity to finance the China trade. India produced the highest quality opium, but the British East India Company held a monopoly on opium production in India until 1831. Turkey produced opium of lesser quality and on a far smaller scale than India. Americans began shipping opium from Smyrna by 1805. Turkish opium only made up a small part of the total opium imported into China. Opium did not become an important commodity in American trade with China until the 1830s when it made up approximately 1/4 of the total that Americans sold in China. Opium imported by Americans never exceeded 10% of the total opium imported into China.

Despite all these attempts to find a commodity other than opium that could balance the cost of goods imported from China, Americans could not find one.

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