Trepang and wangkang; The China trade of eighteenth-century Makassar c.1720s-1840s

Abstract

Trepang and wangkangThe China trade of eighteenth-century Makassar c. 1720s-1840sThe sources are unanimous: trepang.arerepulsive. 1Alfred Russel Wallace (1869:329), in one of the kinder descriptions, likened them to 'sausages which have been rolled in mud and then thrown up the chimney', while John Crawfurd (1820,111:441) found that 'the trepang is an unseemly looking substance'.The more scientific dr.J.C. Koningsberger (1904) catalogued their habits when disturbed: evacuation of long tendrils of slime, or indeed the entire gut, culminating in some sub-species with thedissolution of the skin, leaving the animal a mere puddle of sludge.A relatively neutral account depicts trepang as being 'usually a span in length, round, dark brown on top, reddish underneath, covered in small warts, and with eight coarse feelers on the snout' (Tripang 1869:1124), while the Encyclopaedie van Nederlandsch-Indië

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