both scholarship and journalism. Like many bright young merchants of his day, he adopted the free-trade ideology espoused by Adam Smith in Wealth of Nations. In 1827 Matheson founded the first English-language newspaper in China, the Canton Register, a broadsheet that printed local shipping news, tabulated opium prices, and editorialized against the tyranny of the EIC. That same year, after the death of his original partner, a Spaniard, Xavier Yrissari, he informed his Chinese customers that henceforth the overall management of the business would be undertaken by William Jardine.
