Chinese ships also visited Nagasaki for trading during the Edo Era, yet the soy sauce exports were scarcely recorded and it is impossible to know the details.
However, there are records of soy sauce exported by Chinese ships in the Chinese and Western Freight Log, the Batavia Castle Diary and the Nagasaki Trading Firm Journal. It is noted in the Batavia Castle Diary that 20 barrels of soy sauce were shipped from Japan to Batavia on a Chinese ship on March 31, 1669, and this is the earliest record of soy sauce export. Some Chinese ships carried freights between Nagasaki and ports in China, while others carried freights between Batavia and Nagasaki.
This is why Chinese ships had freight names according to their destination or stopover ports.
Table 1 shows the records for the 26 years from 1804 to 1829 found in the Nagasaki Trading Firm Diary. In both tables, only the number of barrels is shown because neither the size nor the capacity of the barrels exported by Chinese ships is known.
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