Hirado, Japan

History

Hirado has been a port of call for ships between the East Asian mainland and Japan since the Nara period. During the Kamakura and Muromachi periods, the local Matsuura clan held the rights to trade with Korea and with Song-dynasty China. During the Sengoku and early Edo periods, Hirado's role as a center of foreign trade increased, especially vis-à-vis Ming-dynasty China and the Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie or VOC). The Portuguese arrived in Japan in 1543; after the Battle of Fukuda Bay in 1561 the Portuguese stayed for a few more years until they settled in the city of Nagasaki in 1571. The English and Dutch initially reached Japan at the beginning of the 17th century. The first step in the profitable Dutch-Japanese trading relationship was the Shōgun's grant of a trading pass (handelspas) in 1609. In 1613, the British ship Clove arrived in Japan and its Captain John Saris was able to gain the shogunate's permission to establish in Hirado a commercial house of the British East India Company. However, the company soon came to consider this outpost to be unprofitable, especially due to their inability to obtain Japanese raw silk for import to China. Therefore, the British closed their factory in 1623, voluntarily leaving the Dutch as the sole European presence.

From the History section of Hirado, Nagasaki on Wikipedia, under CC BY-SA 4.0.