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Opinion | Can Hong Kong reclaim its role as Asia’s gateway to the Americas?
An oft-quoted aphorism goes, “History does not repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” One can hardly think of a better example of history rhyming than the recently inaugurated Chinese-funded Chancay port on Peru’s Pacific coast.
The new era of Chinese-Latin American commercial relations it heralds is a modern reincarnation of the “Silver Way”, a trading relationship between Asia and Spanish America that endured for two and half centuries from the 1560s.
Arguably the most important conduit for trade and finance in the early modern period, the Silver Way’s legacy persisted for decades after the last Manila galleon docked in 1815. The traces remain to this day, even in Hong Kong, if one knows where to look.
The trade was fuelled by silver from what were then the Spanish viceroyalties of Peru and New Spain – which encompassed Mexico, Central America and even parts of the United States. That silver underpinned Chinese money supply and by the early 18th century became China’s first standardised currency.
The 19th-century replacement from newly independent Mexico circulated so widely in East Asia that many of Hong Kong’s earliest companies were capitalised in “dollars Mex”.
The Hong Kong dollar, the Chinese yuan (yuan meaning “round”, coins as opposed to taels), the Japanese yen – and, of course, the US dollar itself – are all direct descendants of this monetary ancestor. Hong Kong, meanwhile, took the place of Manila as East Asia’s key entrepot.
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