China

China is both a destination and a limit in Charles Duquet’s commercial imagination: he travels there seeking profit, encounters a trade system that restricts foreign access, and asks whether forests can truly renew themselves. The journey helps him move from furs toward timber, but the knowledge he gains also unsettles his assumption that forests are inexhaustible.

China as an aspiration and a market

Duquet’s interest in China grows out of his dissatisfaction with the fur trade. After watching beaver pelts flood the market, he recognizes the trade’s exposure to both scarcity and surplus: animals may disappear through overtrapping, disease, or other causes, while buyers can be overwhelmed by supply. He wants wealth that will endure for generations, not a fortune dependent on a fickle market. The forest appears to offer the alternative: a vast resource that can supply ship masts, building timber, and fuel, and that he believes will replace itself. He intends to keep trading furs long enough to build capital before shifting into timber.

China first enters this plan as a possible market for forest goods. Captain Deyon explains that foreign merchants face formidable barriers: access requires an official delegation and costly gifts to the emperor and officials, while Chinese buyers chiefly want silver rather than Western goods. The Dutch East India Company controls much of the regular trade, and an unaffiliated merchant cannot simply arrive and do business. Deyon advises Duquet to seek an independent captain willing to take him aboard. The difficulty does not extinguish Duquet’s ambition; it makes access to China part of the commercial problem he intends to solve.

The foreign-trade quarter

Duquet eventually reaches Guangzhou with Captain Verdwijnen. Before arriving, he learns that trade is administered through licenses: provisions, merchants, and translators must all be approved, ships face more than sixty fees and cargo inspections, and foreigners must remain within a designated Factory quarter rather than enter the city. The rules make clear that China is not an open frontier awaiting a newcomer’s initiative. Access is governed by established institutions and intermediaries.

From the deck, Duquet sees a long line of warehouses and storerooms, their flags giving the foreign quarter the appearance of a separate city. He steps ashore into an unfamiliar commercial world and settles in assigned buildings used by Dutch traders. Verdwijnen introduces him to Wuqua, his Hong merchant contact, through the routines of the foreign trading community. Duquet can conduct business there, but his experience of China remains bounded by the compound and the licensed relationships that structure exchange.

Forests seen and forests withheld

Duquet’s defining question emerges from that restricted position. He tells Wuqua that he has seen miniature gardens evoking forests and mountains, but wants to know about China’s actual forests. He claims that forests are everlasting because they replenish themselves, yet acknowledges that forests in France have diminished and that settlement is pushing the forest back in New France. He asks how far a forest can withdraw before it replenishes itself. The question connects his plans for profit to a concern he has already observed, even as he continues to believe that timber can provide lasting wealth.

Wuqua initially hesitates, apparently weighing whether Duquet’s interest extends to China’s woodlands. Later, he returns with an account drawn from an elderly scholar’s reading of Meng-tzu. People clear vegetation and cut trees to divide and cultivate land; they need food and fuel, so trees fall. Wuqua presents land division and agriculture as foundations of government and livelihood. He also complicates any simple measure of forest loss: people transplant bamboo, pine, oak, and trees valued for lacquer or oils, while cultivated land produces more food, money, and people. The account does not give Duquet the direct survey of Chinese forests he seeks. Instead, it places tree loss within a larger system in which population, subsistence, land use, and prosperity are connected.

Duquet’s question therefore receives no uncomplicated answer. Wuqua offers a perspective shaped by China’s agricultural needs and by the cultivation of useful trees, but does not tell him how far forests can retreat before recovering. The exchange leaves open the very issue Duquet would prefer to treat as settled: whether apparent abundance guarantees renewal. He has already noticed diminishing forests in France and retreating woodland around New France’s settlements; China adds a case in which land conversion and tree planting coexist, without resolving what that means for forests over time.

Trade networks and commercial ambition

China also teaches Duquet that access and profit depend on networks, not simply on the possession of goods. Verdwijnen describes the Dutch East India Company’s historic control of trade with India, China, and Japan, including restrictions on private merchants. He and his associates have formed a secret partnership to enter Asian commerce, sharing resources and sailing together; their current voyage is already their fourth. Verdwijnen is a captain rather than an owner in the arrangement and hopes eventually to buy a fluyt of his own. He doubts that a timber merchant’s cargo would fit that kind of vessel and recommends that Duquet consider trade with the Indies instead.

Duquet nevertheless keeps returning to forests as the center of his plan. During the voyage, Verdwijnen exchanges ceramics and silks in India for provisions and spices, including cloves and pepper, and acquires Patna opium for medicinal trade in Amsterdam. Duquet observes this three-corner route and asks whether a similar circuit could work for lumber. Verdwijnen sees other opportunities, including rising demand for opium in China, but Duquet’s attention remains fixed on timber. The contrast reveals both his persistence and the limits of his vision: he studies shipping routes and changing markets, yet continually measures them by whether they can serve his projected forest business.

His trade is not limited to timber. In Amsterdam, Duquet meets Benton Dred-Peacock, a well-connected colonial Englishman with intimate business dealings with royal mast contractor Jonathan Bridger. Their conversation gives Duquet an account of disputes over colonial trade and forest regulation: colonists resent taxes and restrictions imposed by the Royal Board of Trade and the Acts of Trade and Navigation, including rules governing mast trees and naval stores. Dred-Peacock describes Bridger as a figure whose influence might be managed through careful negotiation. The encounter shows Duquet learning to treat political regulation as part of the timber market rather than as an obstacle separate from commerce.

On a later visit, Duquet brings scented cedar and balsam and pieces of figured maple to Citron, who has connections to cabinetmakers and points out that these woods could find buyers locally as well as in China. Duquet sells two boxes of scented woods, but the fur and growing opium profits make the hazardous China journey worthwhile. He regards it as his last such trip: his partnership with the Trépagny brothers is ending, and he is wealthy enough to redirect his attention toward a forest empire. China thus serves not only as a market he has reached, but as one stage in a broader effort to turn commercial access into permanent ownership and wealth.

A route into family and legacy

The China connection also affects Duquet’s family ambitions. In Amsterdam, he decides that Cornelia, the daughter of Piet Roos, should become his wife. Piet is wary of him, but another adviser argues that Duquet is impulsive and can be managed through business terms, and that the alliance could be useful because Piet has ships in the China-Japan trade while Duquet has money and commercial ambition. The proposed marriage is discussed in the same practical language as trade: access, leverage, and the future value of family ties.

In 1713, Duquet and Cornelia adopt Jan and Nicolaus, both nine years old, and begin their schooling and instruction in manners. Later that year Cornelia gives birth to their son Outger, named for Verdwijnen. Duquet then conceives another plan: to take a poor but promising boy from the streets to New France, where he can learn about its forests. He writes to Cornelia and Piet about Bernard, an eleven-year-old he has brought to New France, and says he intends to take him to Amsterdam on a later journey so that he can meet his family and receive schooling. The sequence places the forests Duquet hopes to exploit alongside the family and heirs through whom he hopes to make his name endure.

The novel’s later history repeatedly traces the consequences of the commercial world Duquet enters. His descendants travel to China and Japan; at Nicolaus Duke’s house, sandalwood from Duquet’s earlier trade is recalled as part of the family’s accumulated wealth. The foreign voyage has become a domestic inheritance, its rare wood a material reminder of distant commerce. Yet the wider history of timber makes the promise of endless supply increasingly uneasy. In New Zealand, logging enterprises cut kahikatea and kauri, move from one timber stand to another, and leave waste and burned forest behind. Later, the Duke and Breitsprecher company sends its best pine to Sydney and considers a partnership in the kauri trade. The global markets that Duquet imagined do expand, but the forests supplying them do not remain an abstract, self-renewing resource. China’s unanswered question about forest retreat stands at the beginning of that long tension between commercial permanence and ecological loss.