author
William C. Hunter
1812–1891
A young American merchant who spent decades in Canton, he left behind vivid firsthand accounts of life in China before the treaty-port era fully changed it. His books are still valued for the everyday detail they preserve about trade, customs, and foreign residents in nineteenth-century Guangzhou.
1 Audiobook
The 'Fan Kwae' at Canton Before Treaty Days 1825-1844
by William C. Hunter
About the author
Born in Kentucky in 1812, William C. Hunter was an American merchant and writer whose life became closely tied to China. As a boy, he went out to the China trade and later worked in Canton, including with the trading firm Russell & Co. He lived in China for many years and witnessed major changes in the old foreign trading world there.
Hunter is best remembered for books such as The 'Fan Kwae' at Canton Before Treaty Days, 1825-1844 and Bits of Old China. Drawing on personal memory, he wrote about merchants, daily routines, local customs, and the uneasy relationship between Chinese authorities and foreign traders before and around the Opium War period.
What makes his work endure is its sense of immediacy. Rather than writing as a distant historian, he described a world he had known himself, which gives his pages a lively, observant quality for readers interested in China, trade, and cross-cultural encounters in the nineteenth century.