This book details the life of American merchants and missionaries who lived at Canton, the only port in the Celestial Empire open to foreigners in the sixty years after the Revolution before America developed a China policy. While in China, these Americans lived isolated from Chinese society and in sybaritic, albeit celibate luxury. Nevertheless, they often made fortunes in a few years and returned home to become important figures in the rapidly developing United States.

The work covers the exotic life at the Canton factories, the institutions of the community, its development of informal policies for dealing with emergencies and with the Chinese, the guild of merchants with whom foreigners dealt, and the Chinese bureaucracy that regulated and observed their lives in China. Opium smuggling receives especial emphasis, since it provided the economic base of the community and affected the traders' views of China and the Chinese.

Also included are short histories of the resident American firms, sketches of the lives and personalities of a number of American China traders, and a comparative study of the trade, organization, and "culture" of these firms. This part of the study breaks entirely new ground and is necessary for an understanding of the formation of later American policy. Finally, the book examines the first American diplomatic mission to China in 1843.