1. Bookkeeping as a window into efficiencies of early modern trade : Europeans, Americans and others in China compared, 1700-1842 / Paul A. Van Dyke -- 2. A question of character : the romance of early Sino-American commerce in the journals of Major Samuel Shaw, the first American consul at Canton (1847) / Kendall Johnson -- 3. China of the American imagination : the influence of trade on US portrayals of China, 1820 to 1850 / John R. Haddad -- 4. Russell and Company and the imperialism of Anglo-American free trade / Sibing He -- 5. Chopsticks or cutlery? : how Canton Hong merchants entertained foreign guests in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries / May-bo Ching -- 6. Representing Macao in 1837 : the unpublished peripatetic diary of Caroline Hyde Butler (Laing) / Rogerio Miguel Puga -- 7. The face of diplomacy in nineteenth-century China : Qiying's portrait gifts / Yeewan Koon -- 8. To make a way : telling a story of US-China union through the letters of Henry Adams and John Hay / Paul A. Bove -- 9. The flow of the traders' goddess : Tianhou in nineteenth- and twentieth-century America / Khun Eng Kuah-Pearce and Yedan Huang -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index.