Regarding the Adam Smith quote, a comment on the history forum Hitorum indicates that it’s misleading as a characterization of Chinese poverty,
Adam Smith did not even visit china, so he had no idea about the social fabric of canton, or the reason why those people in canton were poor and living in boats.
Those boat people were not ethnic chinese. They were the tanka, aboriginal natives of southern china pushed to the sea by chinese colonization. They were by law and by tradition segregated and banned from living on land and marrying chinese. They were forced by law to live in boats, and earn money through prostitution to foreigners, heavily discriminated against and despised by normal chinese people, forced into poverty by their ethnicity like gypsies in europe...
This is an excellent example of why hearsay and second hand accounts are unreliable.
Regarding the Adam Smith quote, a comment on the history forum Hitorum indicates that it’s misleading as a characterization of Chinese poverty,