The Chinese trade had meanwhile gone on increasing “to that degree”—we quote again from Kämpfer—“as to make the suspicious and circumspect Japanese extremely jealous of them. In the years 1683 and 1684 there arrived at Nagasaki, in each year, at least two hundred junks, every junk with not less than fifty people on board, making for each year more than ten thousand Chinese visitors.” Nor was it trade alone that drew the Chinese thither. In China, the women, except those of servile condition, are kept in perfect seclusion. No man sees even the woman he is to marry till she has actually become his wife; and courtesanship is strictly forbidden and punished. The case, as we have seen, is widely different in Japan, and numerous young and wealthy Chinese were attracted to Nagasaki, “purely for their pleasure,” as Kämpfer observes, “and to spend some part of their money with Japanese wenches, which proved very beneficial to that town,”—truly a very mercantile view of the matter! “Not only did this increasing number of Chinese visitors excite jealousy, but what still more aroused the suspicion of the Japanese was, that the Jesuits, having gained the favor of the then reigning monarch of China, (the celebrated Kanghi), with the liberty of preaching and propagating their religion in all parts of the empire, some tracts and books, which the Jesuit fathers had found the means to print in China, in Chinese characters, were brought over to Japan among other Chinese books, and sold privately, which made the Japanese apprehensive that by this means the Catholic religion, which had been exterminated with so much trouble and the loss of so many thousand persons, might be revived again in the country.” And they even suspected that the importers of these books, if not actual converts, were at least favorers of the Catholic doctrine. These reasons combined to produce, in 1684, at the same time with the restrictions placed upon the Dutch, an edict, by which the Chinese were limited to an annual importation, double the value of that allowed the Dutch; namely, six hundred thousand taels, equivalent to eight hundred and forty thousand dollars, the annual number of junks not to exceed seventy, of which a specific number was assigned to each province and colony, and each to bring not more than thirty persons. Chinese books were, at the same time, subjected to a censorship, two censors being appointed, one for theological, the other for historical and scientific works, none to be imported without their approval.