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Another factor that made it possible for Parsis to operate successfully in Guangzhou was their relative freedom from many of the taboos and dietary restrictions that made socializing with foreigners difficult for orthodox Hindus and Muslims. Indeed, dietary prejudices may have long played an important, though largely unnoticed, role in creating harriers between Indians and Chinese people. Even though certain “Indian Chinese dishes are very popular in India today, some aspects of Chinese cuisine still evoke extreme aversion, especially among the upper-caste, often vegetarian, diplomats and bureaucrats who dominate India’s policymaking circles. The writer Pallavi Aiyar has even suggested that the antipathy that many Indians feel towards China stems from the idea that they eat everything”

Attitudes of that kind would certainly have created insuperable barriers in Guangzhou’s Foreign Enclave, where socializing over shared meals was essential to the conduct of business. Such meals would almost always have included meat, which in itself would have served to exclude conservative Hindu merchants, many of whom were vegetarian: for them even to enter a house where beef was served meant losing caste. Similar prohibitions would have applied to Muslim merchants in relation to pork, alcohol and many other items that were greatly relished by Westerners and Chinese alike.

Parsis, by contrast, were not subject to any such dietary restrictions and were able to participate wholeheartedly in the Foreign Enclave’s rituals of commensality, such as the lavish feasts that were regularly thrown by British and American merchants, and the multi-course, hours-long banquets that the Cohong merchants liked to host at their country estates. Many Parsi traders were great hosts themselves: [T]he Parsees are the most remarkable of any of the races in Canton, wrote an American traveller. “They give feasts, and drink wine, and cheer vociferously, and are a jolly set.”” As a result many Parsis were able to develop close partnerships with leading Chinese merchants. Sir Jamsetjee Jejeebhoy, for example, had a very good rapport with the most important of the Cohong merchants, Wu Bingjian (known as Howqua to foreigners), who was, at the time, possibly the richest man in the world.

Excerpted from Pages 148 to 149 of Smoke And Ashes: A Journey Through Hidden Histories by Amitav Ghosh