The Foundation Of Western Shanghai
THE FOUNDATION OF WESTERN SHANGHAI
ADDRESS BY THE HONOURABLE J J SPIGELMAN AC
CHIEF JUSTICE OF NEW SOUTH WALES
TO THE ASIAN ARTS SOCIETY OF AUSTRALIA
SYDNEY, 26 MAY 2007
As soon as the formal treaty ending the first Opium war was signed at Nanjing in August 1842, the opium traders dispatched their floating opium warehouses to Wusong at the mouth of the Huangpu River. The treaty, which opened five ports, including Shanghai, to trade, failed to even mention the ostensible cause of the recent hostilities. Opium remained illegal and, therefore, unmentionable.
The British plenipotentiary, Sir Henry Pottinger, proclaimed that no trade was to be permitted at any of the new ports until the final details of access had been established by further negotiations. Captain Charles Hope, the British naval commander in charge of the squadron based at Zhoushan Island, south of the Yangzi's mouth, made the mistake of reading this proclamation too literally.
A good naval man, Hope had an instinctive aversion to pirates and smugglers. His animosity was reinforced by the entrepreneurial drive with which many naval officers supplemented their income by capturing pirate vessels as prizes, a long standing incentive which has never received sufficient weight as an explanation of British naval supremacy. Under the Navigation Acts ships without licenses for their arms or without formal port clearances were liable to seizure.
Many British naval officers had made small fortunes from wartime prize money and, during the recent hostilities, officers in the Royal Navy contingent had cast covetous eyes over the opium fleet. In November 1842 James Matheson was warned about the officers' festering invigilation by Robert Thom, a former Jardine, Matheson employee, then acting as an interpreter for Pottinger. Thom wrote:
“I have been living on board men o`war and thus being thrown into the company of Naval officers the opium trade and the ships engaged in it have of course been discussed. I have heard only one opinion expressed, which is that these vessels are navigating expressly in the teeth of the Navigation Act. What I dread is that, when the admiral is at Macao stories may be circulated about piracy, murder, cutting off of tails etc. and the old gentleman may all of a sudden give orders to have all the opium vessels detained, and this would be a calamity indeed. Be good enough, my dear Mr Matheson, not to let the contents of this letter go further, as it may compromise me in a number of ways. Let me assure you that Naval men never miss any opportunity of making prize money when they can.” [1]
“Those opium gentlemen” Captain Hope later declared with a hint of sarcasm, “hitherto have been allowed to go along the coast without port clearance and no questions ever put to them. I never interfered as long as they confined their smuggling operations to the south. But when they went to the Yangzi and above all to Shanghai, I thought it high time to put a stop to such lawless proceedings – more especially as those vessels are manned and armed more like men of war than merchantmen and are well known to commit all kinds of irregularities and great excesses to promote their own selfish ends.” [2]
In April 1843, Captain Hope tried to stop the illegal trade at Wusong. When a Jardine, Matheson & Co steamer, The Vixen, called at Zhoushan with formal clearance for a permissible port, Hope “strongly suspected” that the ship was bound for Shanghai. He ordered The Vixen to stop.
Hope forced all British shipping to leave Wusong. He wrote to the Daotai of Shanghai offering British assistance to suppress any British involvement in the illegal traffic. Regrettably, there appears to be no record of the hilarity with which this earnest proclamation must have been received.
The Vixen hurried south with news of Hope’s action. It sped to Hong Kong, which had succeeded Lingding Island as the great toxic storehouse and as the new headquarters of Jardine Matheson & Co.
James Matheson, sole head in the East after Jardine's return home, immediately passed on The Vixen's report to Pottinger. Her Britannic Majesty's representative was suitably horrified. His proclamation, he vigorously insisted, “had no sort of reference to the opium trade”. How could it? The trade was illegal, not mentioned in the Treaty at all.
“It has never been recognised by me”. Pottinger pompously proclaimed, “nor will be so”.[3] Indeed at that moment he was still negotiating a tariff which would apply to all British imports – legal imports, of course. Illegal trade, like opium, could not be “recognised” by the exaction of a tariff.
As Captain Hope later explained: “I could not for a moment suppose that a British Minister would issue proclamations unless he intended to act on them”.[4] However, he had not understood that Pottinger's reference to 'no trade' meant 'no legal trade'. Hope was just a blunt naval man with an appreciation of cant quite inadequate for the specious diplomacy the circumstances required. The Admiral, based at Hong Kong, was prevailed upon to remove Hope from his command. The Vixen itself, was dispatched back to Zhoushan with that order.
Matheson instructed his opium commander at Wusong not to flaunt this “victory” over the Navy.
“Let every effort be made”, he added, “to please the mandarins, such as moving from one anchorage to another when they require it, and not approaching too near their towns. The opium trade is now so very unpopular in England, that we cannot be too cautious in keeping it as quiet and as much out of the public eye as possible.” [5]
Matheson was no stranger to hypocrisy. He once wrote to an associate in London that throughout his, then, twenty-one years in China, he had “never seen a native in the least bestialized by opium smoking”. [6] On another occasion he was quick to pass on an alleged remark by a senior mandarin that: “On the swampy banks of the Yangzi and other large rivers, they would all die of fever and ague, if they had not opium to smoke.” [7]
Notwithstanding Matheson's best efforts, the British public still failed to appreciate the positive public health benefits of opium addiction, even on the “swampy banks” of the Yangzi. It was obvious that the official British presence in Shanghai could not have any role in the opium trade, the core of the new commercial relationship.* * * * * * In a bland proclamation, and without fanfare, the first British consul, Captain George Balfour, formally declared Shanghai open to British trade on 17 November 1843. Amongst paternalistic warnings about the various systems of weights and measures used in Shanghai, he detailed the precise harbour location along the Huangpu River. Conspicuously, it stopped just short of the opium receiving ships' anchorage at Wusong. [8]
Balfour had been transported from Hong Kong to Zhoushan on The Vixen itself. There, however, he had had sufficient delicacy to change to a less obviously compromised vessel and arrived in Shanghai on a small Royal Navy steamer.
A 34 year old officer in the Madras artillery, Balfour had been in Shanghai the year before with the military expedition. As the war progressed he had graduated from purely military tasks. Pottinger selected him to serve as a financial administrator, dealing with captured public property, handling the ransom payable under the Treaty of Nanjing and its dispersal to Britain, India and to the private British firms owed debts by Guangzhou merchants. He was to have a long career as a military administrator in India and Britain: a vocation which would lead to a knighthood, a general's rank and a seat in the House of Commons.
Administrative talents such as Balfour hard already displayed, were devoid of that mock glory which caused wet dreams in British boarding schools for decades to come. Nevertheless, his prosaic skills were the cement of Empire. Balfour was a pragmatist. Perfect for a trading outpost.
James Matheson wrote to Alexander Dallas who was then supervising the coastal opium traffic from Zhoushan and was deputed to be the first Jardine Matheson & Co representative in Shanghai: “Captain Balfour, the consul for Shanghai and Mr Thom, the consul for Ningbo, are particular friends of ours, and will give our vessels as little trouble as they can, but it will be advisable to keep entirely out of sight of these ports .... You will of course oblige Captain Balfour or Mr Thom by cashing their bills or otherwise.”[9]
Balfour was conscious of the limited career opportunities available in the new consular service. Like the ingratiating leak Robert Thom – who had warned Matheson about the Royal Navy – he was an intruder into a diplomatic corps, jealously and frequently nepotistically protected by the Foreign Office. Balfour was determined to perform his task expeditiously, expediently and without controversy, before returning to a more clearly organised career path in India. He understood that his principal job on behalf of British commercial interests was to stay out of the way of the opium trade.
Shortly after his arrival, Balfour received an official complaint from the Daotai about the opium ships, which had already sold 8000 cases in the year before the formal opening. [10] With that studied, earnest insouciance, familiar in the late twentieth century to United States drug investigators dealing with Central and South American government officials, Balfour disclaimed any ability to act unless a regulation was clearly breached: “These vessels must be at sea outside the port and cannot yet have entered”, he told the Daotai, ingenuously. “This certainly is not disobedience of the regulations.” [11] He promised to act if they were disobeyed.
In February 1844 he did intervene, ordering the British navy to detain the barque Maingay and the brig Amelia. Speculative ventures of Singapore and Calcutta traders, the two ships had disposed of opium at Wusong and then entered the harbour limits to pick up 'legal' goods like tea and silk. Balfour confiscated the opium and imposed fines for irregular papers, false manifests and breaking bulk without permission.
Balfour's intervention, not coincidentally, served the commercial interests of the two dominant British firms, the Scottish dominated Jardine, Matheson & Co and the English Dent, Beale & Co. The complete separation of the legal from the smuggling trade reinforced their duopolistic control of about 90 percent of the lucrative opium trade. The duopoly was frequently manifested by actual collusion on prices, including predatory price cutting against rival Europeans and Chinese who had acquired opium supplies elsewhere, even from Jardine's and Dent's in Hong Kong, indeed perhaps especially in such cases. The cost of a rival to enter the lower Yangzi market was substantially raised by the necessity to operate two separate fleets without any economy from backloading Chinese exports on the same ships as carried opium to Wusong.
Balfour reported to Pottinger in Hong Kong on his dealings with the Amelia and Maingay:
“So long as the parties who are at present employed in the traffic in opium have almost the entire monopoly along the coast, I do not anticipate many cases occurring difficult of management. But I do certainly expect most serious evils to arise from other parties engaging in the traffic and not having the same inducement to carry on the traffic free from collision with the Chinese authorities.” [12]
Jardine's and Dent's served their receiving ships off Wusong with a military style fleet of coastal clippers: the totally disciplined seamanship was reflected in the gleaming burnished copperwork, the precisely coiled brass-capped ropes, the neatly furled sails, the spotless, daily-scrubbed decks and the polished brass cannons. Sometimes the armament and discipline was unavailing. In 1849, for example, seven opium clippers disappeared in calm seas; captured by one of the two well organised pirate fleets that operated off the China coast. [13]
* * * * * * Unlike opium, the legal trade required a permanent settlement with full official protection. It was immediately evident to Balfour, and all the other British whose indulgent standards of accommodation were set in Anglo-India, that nothing suitable was available within the existing cluttered Shanghai urban area.
Nevertheless, Balfour was determined to ensure that the British community was not forced into a separate foreign compound like that at pre-war Guangzhou, then called Canton. He insisted that accommodation be found for him in the existing city. The Daotai insisted that nothing was available. However, a Guangzhou merchant called Yao, no doubt hoping for privileged access to the Western traders along the lines of the old Canton Cohong, offered Balfour free accommodation. With ingratitude bordering on the rude, Balfour objected to being exposed to the stream of visitors to whom the enterprising Yao had sold tickets so that they could observe the “white devils” eat, drink, wash, dress and sleep. [14]
For the Chinese mandarins, it was entirely appropriate that people from the same native place should congregate together. The existence of separate settlements for British, American and French traders and missionaries was a traditional mechanism of control.
Shanghai had already had a number of native place associations in long established guilds called huiguan, where persons from the same province or city would live together, eat their own cuisine, pray to their own gods and settle their own disputes. When, later, the doctrines of extra-territoriality, whereby Westerners administered their own laws in the International Settlement, was denounced as a form of colonialism, the long tradition of “using barbarians to control barbarians” was overlooked.
Balfour, described in the official reports to Beijing as “submissive” and “tremblingly obeying” [15] negotiated a zone for British settlement on an expanse of riverfront, undeveloped save for a few mud docks and timber yards, between the entry of a turbid canal, called the Yangjinbang, just north of the city, and another canal just below the hundred yard wide Wusong River which entered the Huangpu just as it takes a 90 degree right turn on its way to Wusong and the Yangzi.
The first denominated area, within which British traders were permitted to negotiate with Chinese owners for the purchase of their land – to be held under lease in perpetuity – extended back a few hundred yards, over about 43 acres of cotton fields and rice paddies dotted with conical tombs and the occasional hamlet. It was soon extended to 138 acres and then 470 acres, roughly rectangular, three quarters of a mile long and about a mile deep, bordered on the east by the Huangpu, the west and south by canals, and on the north by the Wusong River, later called Soochow (Suzhou) Creek by Western residents. These were defensible water boundaries, carefully selected for a community aware of the possibility of Chinese retaliation for their recent military humiliation. It was plainly enough room for a modest community of transient merchants and steadfast missionaries. It would soon prove too small.
Jardine's won the initial juggling for status. Alexander Dallas persuaded Balfour to grant the land Jardine acquired, situated at the northernmost section of the original area, the self-important title deed for Lot Number One. The Dent's representative, Thomas Beale, sought a reasonable distance from his archrival, at about the middle of the riverfront strip at Lot Number 8, for which, in symbolic compensation, the consul issued Title Deed Number 1.* * * * * * A number of British and American trading houses, long established at Guangzhou, with Jardine's and Dent's the largest because of their dominance of the opium trade, quickly set up branches in Shanghai, the most far flung outpost of the British mercantile diaspora.
Their business of commission agency was a relatively new commercial form. Traditionally merchants in international trade had acted as principal, buying goods and transporting them across the seas. Now the functions were split. Credit was centralised in London merchant banks who discounted bills of exchange. Shipping joint venturers leased ships by charter party. British wholesalers placed orders with local agencies to make purchases on their behalf. Manufacturers or traders from India and Britain dispatched goods on consignment.
The capital of these overseas business associates, called 'constituents', who bore most of the risk, was combined with the entrepreneurial skill of a local agency house, with the latter retaining the right to trade on its own account. The system was integrated by a series of contracts, commercial alliances and interlocking partnerships: an inverted pyramid of specialisation which, in those times of slow communications, eventually all depended on the man on the spot at places like Shanghai. His company demanded, and received, a profit incentive, usually by means of a formal partnership.
Alexander Dallas, distinguished Gold Medalist from the Inverness Academy, was brought to China as a personal protégé of James Matheson and became the first non-family partner of Jardine, Matheson & Co. A keen, shrewd, energetic trader, he built up the firm's key profit centre at Shanghai over the next decade, before he was forced to leave the East by recurrent bouts of fever. After recuperating in Scotland, he launched a second career, in what any Scot would regard as a more congenial climate: as a Director of the Hudson's Bay Company, eventually becoming the first Governor of the Territory that became Manitoba.
Thomas Beale, his competitor, grew up with the China trade. His father had been a partner in the predecessor firm of Jardine, Matheson and Co. at Guangzhou before the war, until he went bankrupt speculating in opium. Never able to trade himself out of his difficulties, the elder Thomas Beale had created at his Macao home a magnificently eccentric garden and aviary replete with peacocks, exotic pheasants and a bird of paradise. His son negotiated a partnership with the firm which traded in Shanghai under the name Dent, Beale & Co. Like his father, Thomas Beale would die in the East, he on the verge of returning to England with his fortune.
It is noteworthy that visitors with some pretension to a life of the mind – a visiting botanist, a touring correspondent for The Times – gravitated to the sumptuous Shanghai hospitality of Thomas Beale. Men of power, like navy officers or diplomatic plenipotentiaries, called first on Jardine's.
In addition to opium, the Shanghai trade focused on tea and silk, commodities which fluctuated in price considerably depending on seasonal production conditions, stock levels and the vagaries of demand in distant markets.
Beale and Dallas, like their commercial rivals, shared an unremitting, overwhelming need for information – to know when to buy and when to sell, when to hoard and when to clear stocks, when to raise and when to lower prices. Four month old news of oversupply in the London market had to be balanced against the latest sketchy anecdotes about production conditions in the silk and tea districts. The regular, swift, express delivery of commercial intelligence by the opium fleet gave Dallas and Beale a strategic commercial advantage.
At first incoming news was rushed down from Wusong by swift opium cutters, 50 foot sloops shallow of draught, flat bottomed with centre boards, designed to negotiate the shifting sandbanks and ensure maximum time to act. Later, each new opium consignment to Wusong reverberated in the theatrical arrival at the riverfront trading establishments of a dispatch rider who galloped the twelve miles from Wusong to deliver the latest mail from Hong Kong – an event of local excitement for the isolated outpost:
“The boys who rode the pony express came yelling and shouting at headlong speed throwing off their letter bags at the door of the houses to which they were addressed."[16]
By that time, Jardine's and Dent's met the boats before they reached Wusong and carried their mail overland a day or two early, rushed with private enterprise courier urgency. Information was the life force of a trading house and for the first decade of Western Shanghai, it was hoarded by the opium dealers.
A third significant participant in the opium trade was the American firm Russell & Co, a major contributor to a number of Boston Brahmin family fortunes, long established at Guangzhou. It obtained its opium from Turkey outside the British sphere in influence. It joined Jardine Matheson and Dent, Beale on the Shanghai waterfront. Originally, the Chinese had agreed to the establishment of a separate American settlement at Hongkew north of the point where the Wusong enters the Huangpu. However, the American firms preferred the British location and set up there, although they insisted, to the annoyance of Balfour and his successor, in flying the stars and stripes. For much of the first decade the principal of Russell & Co in Shanghai also held appointment as the US Consul in Shanghai. This official position was actively deployed in the firm’s commercial interests.
The American traders found they did not need a separate settlement. However, the Land Regulations, drafted by Balfour and promulgated by the Daotai as a Chinese regulations, envisaged land being allotted by the British Consul. At first, the Americans accepted that. Eventually, they sought allotment by the American Consul and, when the British accepted the idea, the Settlement, in effect, became internationalised.
When Louis Charles Nicholas Maximillian de Montigny arrived in Shanghai in January 1848 to establish the French consulate, there was only one French resident in what was then referred to as the British Settlement. Refusing to live under the British flag, Montigny moved into a Chinese house located on a Catholic mission property near the Old City – a dilapidated building, but more consonant with the dignity of France than even the hint of subjection to perfidious Albion. [17]
Without reference to his superiors – who in any event were preoccupied with the revolutionary developments in Paris leading to the collapse of constitutional monarchy and the emergence of the Second Republic – Montigny took the occasion of the arrival of a second French citizen, a wine merchant appropriately called Remi, to demand the allocation of a separate area between the Old City and the Yangjinbang, the canal north of the city, where the British Settlement commenced.
The Chinese authorities agreed to the creation of a French Concession in March 1849. The Concession had a narrow riverfront access just north of the crammed suburb beyond the walls of the Old City and stretched back for about two hundred yards over an area that consisted largely of undeveloped mud flats.
“A large and absurdly disproportionate tract”, Balfour’s successor Alcock fulminated. “The national vanity of the French leading them to an absurd and useless acquisition.”[18] In their vigorous, haughty, patriotic swagger, Alcock and Montigny had much in common.
Montigny built a consulate in his Concession but, by 1853 had attracted only one other foreigner: a Parisian watchmaker. [19] The major French presence in Shanghai was on the other side of the walled city: at Xujiahui, there was a small Catholic village. This was the site of the tomb of Shanghai's most illustrious son, Xu Guangqi, also acclaimed by a ceremonial stone arch within the walled city in front of the magistrates yamen. [20] Xu had risen to the most senior positions at Beijing in the early seventeenth century at the end of the Ming dynasty. He was the most powerful Christian in Chinese history. He had worked with the extraordinary Jesuit missionaries, who had returned to establish a Jesuit outpost in Xu’s ancestral home.* * * * * * The vulturine opium receiving ships remained at Wusong, just beyond the deliberately blinkered jurisdiction of the representatives of Her Brittanic Majesty. This separation of form from substance would characterise the century long Western presence in Shanghai.
Business was relatively easy as the pusher of a drug of addiction. Building up a network of suppliers of tea and silk or finding purchasers for British manufacturers, were much harder tasks.
Impermanence was the major cultural barrier to trade. It was obvious that men like Dallas and Beale came to Shanghai with the sole object of making enough money to retire home as wealthy men. They frequently proclaimed such an intention. The ensnaring mesh of mutual interdependence and reciprocal obligation that characterised all aspects of Chinese society, including commerce, allowed only a restricted role for the arms length, ad hoc contractual exchange of convenience, which the Western traders brought in their intellectual luggage as a norm of mercantile conduct.
The sense of family duty of a Chinese merchant, with obligations owed both to future generations and to the past, made him reject such desultory commercial coupling, except in a furtive cash on delivery business like opium. Driven by addiction and lubricated by greed, that trade required no cultural interaction above the level of a grunt.
Trade in the other major commodities, tea and silk, required forward orders, advances and deposits, reliance on samples, risks in transport or storage and, perhaps most significantly, such trade involved credit. All this required trust.
In Anglo-American commerce the degree of trust demanded by commercial relationships was produced by the law of contract, enforceable in independent courts. For a Chinese trader, in a society proudly governed by the rule of men not the rule of law, trust depended on family and clan loyalty.
There were no independent courts and judges looked down on merchants in accordance with the traditional Confucian formula: zhong nong bing shang – respect agriculture, despise trade. Law was not enforced to confirm the terms of commercial bargains. Law was enforced with a view to restoring social harmony, with primary emphasis on matters of status not contract, in accordance with the official Confucian ideology.
Part of the success of Dent's and Jardine's can be attributed to the fact that they most closely approached a Chinese model: a family succession based solely on merit – sons in the case of Dent's, nephews in the case of Jardine's; a suggestion of extended clan kinship – family ties linked the China coast agency houses to their Indian associates and to London based merchant banks; a clear preference in employment and business alliances on provincial loyalties, as distinctive as the Chinese provincial divisions – English in the case of Dent's and Scottish for Jardine's. Such conduct indicated an understanding of social obligation. For Chinese merchants this offered the prospect of a stable, long term, mutually beneficial and low risk relationship.
At the outset, in the l840's, there was no confidence on the Chinese side that the intruders, who had attained their position by violence, were capable of honourable conduct. No doubt, many long established Chinese merchants in Shanghai regarded the Western traders as little better than pirates, with reason, in the case of the opium trade. On the other hand, the Western traders could not be assured that their contractual rights would be strictly enforced.
Two great trading traditions – maritime China and Anglo-America – had been forcibly brought together by British arms. Each was faced with unusual commercial risks, risks which inhibited exchange. In short, there was a market for risk arbitrage. The way in which the free market created a new mechanism to ensure efficient exchange, was an affirmation of the dominant Western belief in free trade. However, the fact that Chinese totally dominated this essential business, was a manifestation of Chinese cultural resilience. The men who provided the service – the new mechanism to facilitate exchange – were called 'compradors'.
No Chinese tea or silk merchant would sell directly to a Western trading house. Each house had to appoint one or more Chinese to act as its agent and intermediary with local traders. To other Chinese the compradors accepted responsibility for the conduct of their Western associates. Similarly, to the Western traders, they accepted complete responsibility for the actions of other Chinese merchants, guaranteeing that they would perform their contractual obligations. In the Western manner, these duties were formalised by written third party guarantee agreements backed, not infrequently, with cash performance bonds.
The comprador prospered as a risk broker because all the transactions, both physical and monetary, passed through his hands. He kept as much as he could get away with. He could take his cut by way of commission on particular commodities or by marginal differences in rates of exchange amongst the range of currencies involved in the trade. Perhaps most significant, however, was the comprador’s intermediary role in the classic form of compensation for risk: the price of money.
Traditional rates of interest in China were in the 40-80 percent per annum range: a clear manifestation of the insecurity of commerce in a hostile socio-political system and, in itself, a significant explanation of its economic stagnation. These rates were about ten times the rates of interest prevalent in contemporary Western commerce, where capital was relatively secure. A comprador entrusted with Western capital for deployment by way of advances on final payment or, as increasingly occurred, by way of formal deposit with Chinese banks controlled by him, had an enormous margin in which to profitably manoeuvre.
Dallas of Jardine' s, Beale of Dent's, Griswold of Russell’s and other traders, called on their firm's established contacts in the Guangzhou area for individuals who could perform this crucial intermediary role. Although their Cantonese dialect was quite different to the Wu dialect of the Shanghai region, the written form was the same. Irrespective of provincial differences, they shared the same culture and Guangzhou merchants already had a presence in Shanghai, with an established provincial guild structure, from their participation in the prewar domestic coastal trade at the port. Nevertheless, the migration from the southern coastal provinces of Guangdong and Fujien, was of a different order of magnitude, in both size and aggression, than anything in the past. Chinese Shanghai was to be transformed into a uniquely multi-provincial city. One historian described the Cantonese as “the real shock troops of the British invasion”. [21]
The compradors' primary task was to establish fruitful relationships with Chinese suppliers of tea, silk and the export miscellany of Chinese porcelain, embroidery, furniture and artifacts to which the Western traders applied the demeaning collective “muck and truck”, an insult which, no doubt, found its origin in the status anxieties of practical men supplying artistic appetites which they did not share and, indeed, found difficult to understand. A secondary, and more exacting, task was to obtain sales agents for Western manufactures, which the Chinese population at large regarded with either bemused suspicion or atavistic hostility.
The adjoining lower Yangzi provinces of Jiangsu and Zhejiang were the centre of Chinese sericulture: the location of the most productive mulberry trees, from which finely shredded leaves were fed to silk worms in the homes of thousands of peasants, who sold the fragile cocoons to specialist reelers who, in turn, supplied weaving workshops in the towns and cities. The major silk market remained domestic. Indeed, from the mid eighteenth century overseas supply was rationed because of the impact foreign purchasers had had on raw silk prices. Each of the officially permitted foreign traders at Guangzhou had been allowed a fixed quota.
The pre-war trade through Guangzhou naturally shifted to Shanghai, located next to the production hub. In 1845 the pre-war level of about 12,000 bales of raw silk exports was re-established, but it was already equally divided between Guangzhou and Shanghai. In 1846 15,000 bales left Shanghai and only 3,500 left Guangzhou. The next year the numbers were 21,000 against only 1,000 bales. Thereafter Shanghai remained the dominant export point.
Shanghai had similar advantages as a location for tea exports, but it was much longer before it was able to assert itself. The pre-war tea exports of about 50 million pounds per annum doubled by 1852, in which year Shanghai finally surpassed Guangzhou as the largest export port. It was much closer to the tea producing regions of the adjoining provinces and more conveniently located, by reason of formidable mountain and river barriers, to the particularly productive region of Fujien province, known to Westerners as the Bohea hills. Nevertheless the power of the vested interests in the convoluted inland route was able to resist the natural forces of efficiency.
A small army of boatmen and porters had operated from the southern tributaries of the Yangzi and the Bohea hills, south and west to the mountain range that barred access to Guangdong province, over which another army of porters carried the tea to the rivers that flowed into the bay of Guangzhou. Hundreds of thousand of coolies and boatmen relied on this route for their livelihood. Hundred of merchants had established an interlocking network of commercial relationships between the hillside tea growers and the foreign merchants in Guangzhou. The similar interests in the silk trade were of a much smaller scale. The full force of Confucian inertia was arraigned against the profit oriented drive of the Western trading tradition, of particular urgency, in the case of tea, because delay in transportation had significant adverse effects on the quality of the product. Fresher tea was favoured and, accordingly, commanded a premium on the London market. Competitive pressures amongst the Western traders made them anxious to shift tea delivery to the speedier and cheaper route via Shanghai.
Gradually, over the continual interference of mandarins in the tea producing districts and transport routes, the locational benefits of Shanghai established its ascendancy as a port. The inertia of entrenched expectations was slowly overcome by the demands of economic efficiency.
Flotillas of round-rooved sampan lighters brought the tea out to the clippers, anchored fore and aft in the Huangpu River parallel to the shoreline. Tea was so light a cargo that each ship required considerable ballast. First a base of more than 100 tons of lumpy kentledge – scrap iron from English foundries – then bricks brought out from England in the absence of any bulk products which found a Chinese market both firmly covered with half inch boards; then 150-250 tons of clean, dry, non-porous, shingles – beach pebbles – jammed for stability into every crevice between the square tea chests and the curve of the hull. A protective layer of chests full of old tea lay immediately on top of the ballast.
Hundreds of skilled Chinese stevedores packed the ballast and tea tightly – to maximise the load and to prevent shifting during the voyage, the trim of the ship being vital to its speed. They hammered the full size chests into place, cramming smaller spaces with half chests, filling every cubic inch with perfect rows of paper and lead lined, wooden tea chests which, generally, engulfed a block of matting-covered silk bales in the driest centre of the hold.
The Western trading outpost at Shanghai grew into a village oriented around the port. At the height of the tea exporting season, two or three ships would depart per week, each laden with thousands of tea chests and hundreds of bales of silk, dropping down on the tide under sail to Wusong, with local pilots plotting a course through the beaconless, shifting silt banks. The river harbour felt the creak of timber, the strain of ropes and the smell of pitch – all more gentle than the brown, ferrous rust dominance and petroleum stench of a twentieth century port. Traffic difficulties in berthing and collisions emerged almost immediately.
Ships chandlers and general stores sprung up on the banks, serving the rotating fleet with coal tar, varnish, copper nails, rope of various thicknesses, mooring swivels, sail thimbles, turpentine, blocks, boots, pots and, according to the advertisements in the North China Herald which began publication in late 1850, sherry, port, claret, Jamaican rum, hock, French olives, wine vinegar, sardines, herrings, anchovy paste, Italian macaroni and tripe.
Particularly important were the repair yards and dry docks. Sailing ships required constant attention. Each was composed of thousands of pieces of small timber secured together with carpentry and fastenings, with miles of rope in rigging, hundreds of yards of pitch-sealed caulking forced between the planks – all needing regular replacement, bottoms sheathed in decaying copper to prevent shipworm infestation, decks kept moist to prevent planks shrinking, hundreds of blocks needing oiling.
After buffeting by wind and sea there was always wood which split, rotted or tore away, sails which stretched and split, rope that frayed, joints that leaked, to say nothing of hulls pierced on rocks and lost masts. Fixed on the run with such materials as could be carried, final repairs were made in port and replacement stores acquired.
The mid-nineteenth century witnessed an explosion of international trade; driven by spectacular increases in the productivity of shipping – first in sail and then in steam transportation. The port of Shanghai grew with this trade.* * * * * * On 1 January 1850, epicentre of a dramatic century, the 200 year old British Navigation Acts were formally repealed. The Acts had prohibited imports to England except on ships owned by Britons or by nationals of the country of origin of the goods. The Chinese had not been in a position to take advantage of the exception in favour of their own ships; their junks did not venture into the open seas.
ln 1433, the very year in which Prince Henry the Navigator dispatched the first 20 metre long Portuguese caravel with instructions to travel into the Atlantic beyond the limits of the known world at Cape Bojador, a peninsula on the West African coast 300 kilometres south of the Canaries, Admiral Zheng He had returned from the last of his seven voyages around the Indian Ocean.
Over a thirty year period hundreds of junks, the largest 135 metres long and displacing 1500 tons – easily the largest vessels of their time – had travelled to India, the Arabian peninsula and West Africa to trade and exact tribute for the Emperors of the new Ming Dynasty. However the Ming court, succumbing to cultural chauvinism, destroyed Zheng's fleet on his return and permanently interred the world's foremost technology of ocean travel.
Nineteenth century Westerners, who believed passionately in the unidirectional inevitability of “progress”, would not have understood, having forgotten the fragility manifest in their own cultural experience of the decline of Rome, when technologies such as concrete, water reticulation, kiln-fired bricks, glassmaking and bronze working were 'lost' in most of Europe for centuries.
The protective Navigation Acts, originally designed to destroy the seventeenth century Dutch naval dominance, had created a substantial British merchant marine. lt was not, however, as globally dominant as it was to become, after the reinvigorating blast of competition that began at mid-century.
The first effect of lifting the protective barriers was the loss of custom to an aggressive competitor who did not suffer from the complacent lassitude which such barriers inevitably cause. In the China tea trade, with British consumers prepared to pay a premium for freshness, American ship designers and sailors immediately established their superiority.
As that acute observer of America, the French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville, had reported only a few years before: “The Americans show a sort of heroism in their trading.” He added:
“The European sailor navigates with prudence; he sets sail only when the weather is favorable; if an unforeseen accident befalls him, he puts into port; at night he furls a portion of his canvas; and when the whitening billows intimate the vicinity of land, he checks his course and takes an observation of the sun. The American neglects these precautions and braves these dangers. He weighs anchor before the tempest is over; by night and by day he spreads his sails to the wind; such damage as his vessel may have sustained from the storm, he repairs as he goes along; and when he at last approaches the end of his voyages, he darts onwards to the shore as if he has already described a port. The Americans are often shipwrecked, but no trader crosses the sea so rapidly. And as they perform the same distance in a shorter time, they can perform it at a cheaper rate.”[22]
As de Tocqueville intuited, the future did not belong to the sclerotic aristocracy, nor to the traders who sought wealth only to imitate it.
Shanghai, which had just become the world's greatest tea export harbour, received the full force of the frenetic presence of American sailing captains and their crews, bound for both America and England. Speed was dominant. This was the age of the clipper.
The early steamship, dependent on scattered coaling stations and, wasting most of its cargo capacity on carrying its own fuel, could not compete with the sailing ship for long-haul voyages of bulky commodities. Because of the rapid technological improvements in sailing vessels in mid-century, it would not be able to do so for decades.
Despite the early development of opium clippers in Indian and English shipbuilding yards, the British ship designers failed to fully adapt to the new need for speed. Their design habits had not changed from the years of the Napoleonic Wars, when the compulsory convoys had sailed by the speed of the slowest vessel.
Ship design was still dominated by the distortion of a taxation system in which tonnage rates, port and light dues were all determined by a system of measuring ship size based, until 1854, on convenience rather than accuracy. Only length and breadth were actually measured, with depth assumed to be half the breadth. A fixed formula was applied to compute "tonnage" of cargo carrying capacity. Taxes were avoided by maximising actual capacity, without increasing 'measured' tonnage. Bluff, full lines, with deep, narrow, bulbous, kettle-bottomed, unstable hulls, were the result – unseaworthy, inefficient and slow. The traditional form of the old style East Indiamen had waddled across the seas.
Notwithstanding similar “tonnage” measurements, American ship designers, driven by a competitive requirement for speed, had developed the lines of the blockade-running Baltimore privateers into full size three masted ships. In accelerating sequence through each custom built ship, the features of the clipper emerged from the dockyards of New York and Boston, and later from Aberdeen and London: longer, lower, slimmer, streamlined hulls; ever sharper bows designed to cut through water rather than push it aside; taller raked-back masts, reaching as high as a fourteen story building, and then higher; additional layers of sail, revolutionising the traditional configuration of the three-masted ship – with its three large square sails on each mast – by doubling the sails on the lower and top masts, adding triangular sails to the bowsprit and behind the masts, and one, then two, levels of sail on a fourth and fifth yard at the top; then pushing out wooden yards to the sides, beyond the normal rigging, to spread even more canvas and maximise the use of the wind in a cloudy cumulus of sail.
The American sails were made of heavy cotton duck, designed for maximum efficiency by remaining as taut as possible, their presence in harbour standing out, snowy white against the greyish, baggy British sails of loosely-woven flax canvas, which stretched and changed shape when wet.
Yankee clipper captains, driving their crews unmercifully, were also the first to take advantage of the new wind and current charts, produced from the late forties at the Washington D.C. offices of the U.S. Navy's Depot of Charts and Instruments. These charts laboriously and meticulously compiled, for the first time, the reports of tens of thousands of log books: itemising precise wind and current patterns at different times of year; locating the best routes for a month, even a particular week; identifying the narrowest points of the calm belts known as "the doldrums" and directing traffic to them as if to mountain passes. This information base exploded to about one million catalogued observations by 1854, with every American ship lodging the standard form questionnaire now issued by the Navy.
As one clipper captain wrote to the head of the Depot ,the pioneer oceonographer Matthew Fontaine Maury, who never rose above lieutenant: "Until I took up your work, I had been traversing the ocean blindfolded." [23]
Graceful, svelte, rakish vessels with fine, precise lines – for any seafarer still a thing of beauty – technical progress with an exceptional sense of enchanting design. Not just in the lines but in the intricately carved figureheads and gingerbread work and the craftsmanship of the brasswork in bells, gangway stanchions, belaying pins, skylights, capstan heads, compasses, binnacles, lamps, signal guns, cask hoops, hinges, ventilators, winches and the surround of the vertical, spoked steering wheels. Environmentally benign in their use of renewable energy, the construction and, even more, the captaincy of the clippers evoked a spirit of competition that was propelled as much by a sense of sporting achievement as by commercial avidity.
In mid 1850 a new 1000 ton clipper, The Oriental, sped from New York to Hong Kong in a record shattering 81 days. The premier American trading house in China, Russell and Co., immediately chartered her to take tea to London at double the usual freight rate. On 4 December 1850, she arrived after 97 days, about half the time of similar voyages only a decade before. For this voyage alone, she had earned about US$48,000 in freight. Her total cost of construction had only been US$70,000.
The British public thronged at the West India Dock to inspect her towering, extraordinary, unprecedented design. They reacted with excitement and apprehension, like the American reaction to Sputnik over a century later. The Times editorialised gravely, if paternalistically:
"We must run a race with our gigantic and unshackled rival. We must set our long practical skill, our steady industry and our dogged determination, against his youth ingenuity and ardor. It is a father who runs a race with his son.” [24]
The Admiralty obtained permission to take off The Oriental's lines in dock.
For the next tea season The Oriental was brought to Shanghai, to collect the premium early crop. Leaving Wusong on 15 July 1851 she reached London 128 days later on 20 November. There, no doubt, her crew learned of the triumph of American seamanship and ship design on 22 August that year when, in answer to a challenge of the Royal Yacht Squadron for the contemporaneous Great Exhibition celebrating the new technology of the industrial revolution, a New York yacht, The America, with her radical design of a long, hollow bow and her taut sails, had beaten all British contenders in a race around the Isle of Wight. The 100 guinea silver trophy, to become known as "The America's Cup" was to remain at the New York Yacht Squadron for more than century, until won by an Australian yacht with an equally revolutionary winged keel.
The sporting dimension of the China trade, like the concurrent gold rush clipper voyages around Cape Horn to California, was widely publicised although, in the United States, only until the mid-fifties during the years of clear Yankee triumph. Typical was the 100 dollar bet made by the captains of two of the early English clippers – notably smaller than the 1000 ton American ships – the 672 ton ship Joseph Fletcher and the 478 ton Wild Flower, which left Shanghai together in January 1853. The bet and result was reported as far away as Auckland, New Zealand. [25] Earlier that season the owners of the newest American clipper, Nightingale, had failed to find anyone prepared to take up their $10,000 challenge in a race from Shanghai to London. [26]
A competitive spirit animated the China coast for decades, as tea clippers raced each other to London, Liverpool and New York, sometimes arriving only hours apart after a voyage of three months. After the American Civil War began, when the Yankees left, the rivalry continued between British firms and captains.
The Chinese participation in international trade remained reluctant, unconvinced of its benefits, dictated in part by opportunity and in part by fear. The British `haughtily brandished the threat of violence, which had opened the port in the first place. Their principal weapon was naval superiority.
In August 1844 Balfour had threatened to close the consulate, stop the legal trade and dispatch the fastest British ship, which happened to be The Vixen, to Zhoushan for more troops, unless he received an apology for a minor slight. It was given.
The Shanghai authorities would have particular cause to remember the incident of March 1848, when the Royal Navy blockaded the Huangpu.* * * * * * In 1848, for the first time since the Grand Canal silted up in 1824, the central Beijing authorities transported part of the annual grain tribute by sea. An armada of Shanghai based junks was ready to deliver the rice with an efficiency that the ossified bureaucracy and entrenched interests of the inland route could never match: it took only one month instead of, at least, three and each sea junk had several times the carrying capacity of a canal junk.
The decision had been made two years before, after the 1845 tribute was disrupted by floods at one point and unusually low water levels at another. One of the three adjoining prefectures of Jiangsu province nominated for this experiment in liberated trade was Songjiang, immediately to the west of Shanghai. Through the dense cobweb of waterways south of the Yangzi, the tribute was carried to Shanghai where white rice was respectfully packed in bags and ordinary rice was poured into holds.
Typically, nothing was done to re-employ those who depended on the traditional route. A report from Shanghai in March 1848 described the scene:
“A part of the emperor's grain is to be carried this year in sea going junks around the promontory of Shandong; consequently those men who navigate the canal junks, to the number of 15,000 more or less – all from Shandong – have been thrown out of employment and are now adrift, prowling about like savage blood hounds. They are in the north what the Guangzhou and Fujien pirates are at the south.” [27]
At about midday on 8 March, a group of these Shandong canal boat operators set upon three British missionaries busily distributing Christian tracts in the small walled town of Qingpu, thirty miles due west of Shanghai. From the meticulous blow by blow descriptions of the three reverend gentlemen – Lockhart, Medhurst and Muirhead – printed and widely disseminated amongst the foreign community, it is clear that an unruly gang had got out of hand and, in their frustration, turned on foreigners to vent their spleen, as so many such gangs in America, Europe or China have always done. There were no reports of broken bones but, amongst the numerous bruises, the major wound was British pride.
Rutherford Alcock, who had succeeded Balfour as British consul about 18 months before, demanded immediate amends.
In a circular of 13 March, addressed portentously “To Her Britannic Majesty's Subjects at Shanghai”, Alcock proclaimed:
“The refusal of the Chinese authorities to afford redress for the murderous assault upon three British subjects by the seizure of the chief offenders, leaves H.M.'s consul no alternative but to adopt extreme measures, or permit the security of his countrymen and the interests of the nation, to be seriously compromised. Every amicable means therefore having failed, H.M.'s consul has given His Excellency the Daotai, 48 hours, from this day at noon, to produce ten of the Ringleaders in the attack; failing which, such other steps will be taken as may appear expedient to compel the reparation required. Security to life and property, and the best interests of the commerce of western nations generally, with Shanghai are at stake; and if no redress be obtained for so brutal and unprovoked an outrage upon peaceable foreigners, all the great advantages hitherto enjoyed at this port may be lost.” [28]
The absence of any reference to religion is striking. Alcock, a true son of the Enlightenment, reserved his zeal for the practical matters of this world. It was commerce, not religion, which he regarded as: “The true herald of civilization, the human agency appointed under a Divine dispensation to work out man's emancipation from the thralldom and evils of a savage isolation.” [29]
When presented with what he regarded as prevarication by the Daotai, Alcock resolved to act on his own authority. The Minister Plenipotentiary in Hong Kong was a six day journey away. Alcock's sense of urgency arose less from delay – even in England a period of one week for the apprehension of criminal suspects would not seem unreasonable – but from the imminent departure of the 1100 sea junks laden with the rice tribute. Alcock instructed British traders to stop paying customs duties and ordered the 16 gun brig HMS Childers to moor across the river downstream from the junk anchorage.
Without any authorisation in the Treaty of Nanjing – or the subsequent parallel treaties negotiated by France and the USA, whose resident Shanghai consuls backed up Alcock – British, French and American naval men-of-war routinely called at Shanghai without official permission, as if a port opened only for trade were on the high seas. The treaties only contemplated such forces as might be required to preserve order amongst the foreign community – using barbarians to control barbarians. Nothing in Western international law permitted the practice that had developed. It was disdainfully assumed that the show of force was essential to retain what had been won by force. This naval intrusion would not leave Shanghai until driven out, and fully replaced, by the Japanese in 1941.
Gunboat diplomacy was invented by Louis XIV in 1684 when he forced a humiliating apology from the Republic of Genoa for a slight to France. Alcock's mentor, Lord Palmerston, had elevated it to an art form: dispatching the Royal Navy to demand apology from lesser powers for insults to the British flag or injury to British subjects – wounded honor issuing challenges to intercontinental duels.
Alcock had served as a surgeon in a British foreign legion, patriotic mercenaries privately engaged in breach of the British Foreign Enlistment Acts, to assist the professedly “liberal”, pro-British, and therefore Palmerston supported, family factions in the ongoing dynastic struggles of Portugal and Spain. When a paralytic condition of his hands forced Alcock to give up medical practice in England, the Foreign Office, like any honourable sponsor of covert operations, looked after him, eventually appointing him consul to open the new treaty port of Fuzhou, from which he was promoted to Shanghai.
From the outset he established a tenaciously fatuous norm for proper relationships: receiving calls in a cocked hat, silver laced coat with gold buttons, silver striped trousers and a full display of his Spanish and Portuguese decorations. [30] There is no record of how his Chinese callers reacted to the Order of the Tower and the Sword, the Cross of the Order of Charles III or the Cross of Isabella the Catholic. [31] Regrettably, the Chinese could not appreciate the irony of the invocation of such majesty in support of Protestant missionaries.
Alcock, one of the few British representatives who did not scatter Christian commentary through his correspondence like punctuation, was actually skeptical of the missionary effort. With five Protestant churches and a Roman Catholic cathedral, he scornfully observed:
“The spiritual wants of the Chinese population seemed to have been anticipated for a long period ahead, far in excess, indeed of all probable demand. I apprehend mischief if missionary zeal outran discretion.” [32]
Even by 1853, after 11 years of divinely inspired effort, there were only 22 Chinese Protestant converts in Shanghai. [33]
It was unlikely that Alcock's headstrong action would be countermanded by the nervous diplomats in Hong Kong or the Foreign Office. The Qingpu incident had given the mildly eccentric Alcock an opportunity to prove a secular point.
The three victims were representatives of the London Missionary Society, one of six different Protestant groups – two British and four American – with a base in Shanghai. They were not the first Europeans to be assaulted, or even killed, in the region. However, they invoked more sympathy than injury to a trader or sailor.
Although their earnest, unremitting proselytising infuriated its generally courteous targets, the missionaries were making a positive humanitarian contribution from their four acre compound about four hundred yards back from the riverfront at the southern end of the Settlement area. Dr William Lockhart and Reverend Walter Medhurst had been the first to arrive, with Balfour, at the end of 1843. Since then Lockhart had selflessly conducted a hospital for the Chinese. Muirhead, who arrived in August 1847, had set up a school.
The Governor General in Nanjing, Li Hsing-yuan, who had spent the previous year clearing up pirates on the Jiangsu coast in preparation for the use of the sea route for the tribute, and who would take personal responsibility for any delay in the grain fleet, intervened immediately. Ten culprits – precisely the round number demanded by Alcock by way of an adequate sample of a mob – were duly delivered. Some of them were actually recognised by the recuperating missionaries as their assailants. HMS Childers allowed the grain fleet to sail.
By proclamation not addressed to British “Subjects at Shanghai”, like his first notice, but – reflecting affinity forged in triumph over adversity – "To the British Community at Shanghai" Alcock announced:
“They will be exposed every day in the public thoroughfares, as a warning to all who are in like manner evil disposed.”
The ten were paraded for a month in the traditional portable pillories, called cangues, outside the Chinese Customs House on the riverfront quay in the British Settlement.
In his use of the passive voice and the third person, Alcock's redolent smugness is overpowering a century and a half later:
“Security to Life and Property, which for a moment seemed endangered, it is hoped, is now more firmly established than before the outrage; and with prudence and forbearance, such as his countrymen have already manifested, and which he fully counts upon whenever their excursions may lead them to a distance from Shanghai, H.M.'s Consul is sanguine that they will no longer be exposed to dangers or molestation from those whom impunity might otherwise have emboldened.” [34]
A few days later, a public meeting in the Settlement carried a resolution praising Alcock's “energetic and decided policy with the Chinese authorities”. It was long to be remembered in Shanghai as a model for how to treat the Chinese.
Needless to say, the Foreign Secretary, Lord Palmerston, also approved. Indeed Palmerston only had occasion to chastise Alcock for his prolix, grandiloquent dispatches – a pet hate of the "Foreign Secretary's, whose legendary caustic remarks on handwriting, grammar, spelling, composition and, most vituperatively, the use of Gallicism's, manifested his exuberant determination to assiduously control the finest detail. “Alcock”, Palmerston once cuttingly remarked, “seemed to have a good deal of spare time on his hands to be enabled to swell out into such long detail matter which might have been comprised in a much smaller space”. [35]
* * * * * * Within a decade of the Opium War, a row of distinctive Western structures lined the Huangpu River. Set back 30 metres at the Daotai's insistence – to preserve a towing track for grain barges – each trading house occupied a two or three acre, white walled compound.
Along half a mile of muddy riverfront, the swampy, low-lying, tidal-encroached, ditch-dissected, alluvial silt ground had been drained, levelled, filled and raised. Wooden piles had been driven down, to form a crude embankment against the 12 feet of tidal movement and to elevate buildings over the usual ground level of 5 to 10 feet above the water table. Each mercantile firm filled in the area in front of its compound, and the towing track took on the appearance of a road, negotiable, when muddy, only in knee boots. An Indian word for embankment – Bund – was applied to the towing track turned road, and stuck.
Spontaneously, in the absence of directive municipal regulation – except the compulsory set-back – the unswerving track of the river was emulated in a distinct building line, a parade of two storey edifices, erected without professional assistance in a style called “compradoric”.
The construction of the embankment and of roads and wharves required a degree of co-operation. The growing foreign community established a Committee on Roads and Jetties, dominated by the major trading houses, which domination continued as this Committee grew into the Shanghai Municipal Council.
Each trading house built, facing the river for prominence and prestige, a spacious combined office-residence, bedrooms upstairs, with thick walls of sun dried brick – later structures used kiln-fired British bricks brought in ballast – stuccoed to give the impression of stone, with open arcades of Portuguese-influenced Roman arches, or a Venetian loggia or the verandah of Anglo-India. Behind, through lawns and gardens were warehouses, called “godowns”, servants quarters and stables. The larger firms had separate godowns for tea, silk and cotton and a detached annex for the junior staff – sometimes above a godown – a single kitchen serving both the ‘junior mess’ and the ‘senior mess’ in the main building, where the partners lived.
There was, a sense of elegance in the refined, simple lines that characterised the entire row, bereft of the exuberant, emphatic, assertive, ornament that constituted the latest British architectural fashion, which expressed its detestation of Palladianism and neoclassicism – London's Regent Street then being regarded as abhorrent – calling it the product of a disdained “shopocracy”. The impermanence of Western architectural taste – oscillating between simplicity and ornamental exuberance – must have bemused Chinese observers who had long accepted that both approaches were valid and could co-exist.
The sense of scale of the compradoric style harks back to Portugal, from which the first Western adventurers had come to China, building on the waterfronts of Macao and Guangzhou, without the grotesqueries of the Spanish or Dutch. The commercial decision-makers who transported this style to Shanghai were visually conservative and out of touch with the latest fashions in London. These were practical buildings, custom built for their functions, not designed to proclaim the importance of their occupants.
Such pictures of this period as survive suggest an ungainly amateur quality to many of the buildings; as if designed from memory by a person without understanding of scale or any appreciation of the interconnections of architectural elements. A number of buildings give the impression of thoughtless scaling up – buildings swollen with pride – size bursting the design interconnections that made the model so appealing to the merchant who did the rough sketch for his Chinese builder to copy, like a suit. No doubt it was he who insisted on the ubiquitous verandah, widespread in the heat of Anglo-India and appropriate at Guangzhou but inappropriate in the Shanghai climate.
Observers contrasted the neat, symmetrical European aesthetic with the expression in physical form of incomprehensible Chinese values. As early as Christmas 1847, a pompously pious British visitor was able to draw invidious contrasts:
“I emerged from the central and densely populated streets of the city and found myself among gardens and orchards approaching the western walls. On the one side, beyond the walls westward, the rich plains stretch away farther than the eye can reach; and on the other, you have first the gardens and orchards and country seats and temples, and then the dense city and suburbs, and next the forest of masts marking the course of the river, and also away in the distance northward you have a glimpse of some of the foreign residents. A contrast, Oh what a contrast. The European houses of Shanghai, together with the new Church, which have just sprung up on the consular grounds are fair specimens of what, in their kind, is everywhere to be seen in Christendom. From these residences my walk carried me through the whole eastern suburb, nearly every foot of which is covered by shops and warehouses and other buildings. What a contrast between these and those I had just left. The buildings are so ill constructed, dark and uncleanly, the streets so narrow and so filled with riffraff, rubbish, gamblers, beggars etc. that a jaunt on foot or in a sedan, through these streets is usually anything but agreeable, except one desires to witness the miseries and the degradation of his species – here also, how fallen.” [36]
In the centre of the riverfront array of buildings, next to the simple, elegant lines of the two storey, wood columned, verandah enclosed Dent, Beale & Co establishment, set in a luxuriant garden, was a single element of appealing discord. There, with its colourful tiled rooves, curving upturned corner eaves, capped with a square cupola bringing light down to the central area – its elaborate red ornamentation standing out against the straight-lined white stucco of the Western buildings – was the Imperial Customs House, which had moved out of the Old City in 1848, closer to the action.
In 1851, Jardine, Matheson & Co replaced their first ungainly structure at the northern end of the row, with the precursor of a new generation: two storeys on a high basement, with two symmetrical wings around a large skylit entrance hall, its bulk modulated by shuttered fenestration, a glassed-in verandah with a balustrade and a low pitched hipped roof. The harbinger of the future was in the monumental staircase sweeping up to a large colonnaded porch topped with a balcony. The formal Western column, symbol of the Roman Imperium, had arrived in Shanghai. Fittingly, it appeared, not at the British consulate, under construction next door in the same year, but as the imposing grand entrance of a trading house. The meaning conveyed by the Western buildings was beginning to change. The design, and especially the colonnade, proclaimed the power and wealth of the occupants.
“Fine finished buildings”, a visiting correspondent for The Times breathlessly reported in the late fifties. “Some columned like Grecian temples, some square and massive like Italian palaces.” [37]
Not all visitors found the place appealing, Garnett Wolseley, the youngest lieutenant-colonel in the British Army – later Field Marshall, Commander in Chief and Viscount – described the houses along the riverfront quay as “more like palaces than anything else”, yet he found Shanghai “a dreadful station”:
“Nothing but a desire to grow rich could induce me to reside there; one racket court, no club, a stifling hot room surrounded by bookshelves, called by the inhabitants a library, a dismal looking race course enclosed by deep and unwholesome looking ditches, are the places of public amusement.” [38]
He had the point in his opening remark: the inhabitants, without exception, had the “desire to grow rich”. No one came to Shanghai to read books.
The lack of commitment to civic virtue was obvious. As one local put it: “It is easier to get $5000 in Shanghai than a well attended public meeting.” [39] It was exemplified by the Anglican Trinity Church, skimpily built by private subscription on land donated by Thomas Beale at the rear of Dent's compound. The roof fell in within two years and its replacement, which opened in May 1851, was abandoned, dilapidated, a decade later. In the French area, the Roman Catholic Cathedral, which was blessed on Palm Sunday 20 March 1853, was built to last.
The first social institution, after the cemetery, created in the British Settlement was a riding circuit, to become the race track – subsequently moved westwards twice, at enormous profit, during real estate booms – a physical metaphor for the Western enclave, supplying quick, transient thrills, just like an opium fix.
Within the trading house compounds – “hongs” as they were called – a boarding school atmosphere prevailed. A group of young bachelors worked, lived and dined together in a junior-mess system dominated by a predictable daily and seasonal routine, in which the job was all encompassing and neighbouring peers were direct daily competitors.
In the early fifties there were few shops or private houses, no police, no harbour master, no wharves, no lighthouses, no buoys, no vehicles save coolie-carried sedan chairs, no street lighting, no water system, no sewerage, no roads other than mud strips, no bridges over the encircling creeks. This was a trading outpost in which seasonal frenzy, associated with the annual tea and silk crops, was interspersed with frontier boredom.
The “season” lasted for some two and a half months of frenetic activity, from mid May to late July beginning with the silk buying period – through the dramatic temperature fluctuations of late spring and the “plum rain” season of early summer – ending when the first, highest quality teas of the new crop were ready to ship. The whole staff worked twelve to fifteen hours a day, seven days a week purchasing, packing and transporting the new season's tea and silk. The crucial quality testing was done by silk experts, called “grubs” in the local argot – mock derision of the delicate silk worm – and highly paid tea tasters of acute gustatory abilities, called, with onomatopaeic emphasis, “expectorators”, which is what they did much of the time.
At other times, office hours were short. The lassitude and prickly insecurities of village life become pre-eminent through the sweltering heat of high summer, the thunderstorms and strong winds of autumn and the cold, dry, clear winter, with its prevalent north east winds from Inner Mongolia and the few days of snow brought by cold waves from the north.
There was rough exercise for the young clerks – both they and the tempestuous Mongolian ponies they raced were called “griffins”, like their peers in India – and food was consumed in ridiculous over-indulgence. One visiting doctor reported in disbelief:
“They begin dinner with rich soup, and a glass of sherry; then one or two side dishes with champagne; then some beef, mutton or fowls and bacon, with more champagne or beer; then rice and curry or ham; afterwards game; then pudding, pastry, jelly custard or blancmange, and more champagne; then cheese and salad, bread and butter and a glass of port wine; then in many cases, oranges, figs, raisins, and walnut with two or three glasses of claret.” [40]
Health problems were blamed on the weather.
The baronial establishments with their hot and cold running table boys, enabled the lower middle class bachelor community to ape the culinary rituals of the British upper classes. As The Times special correspondent reported:
“It is half past one o'clock, tiffin time at Shanghai. You have made your calls on arriving here, and your cards have been duly returned, so you are free to go and come at tiffin time in all their hospitable hongs. No lack of good dishes or pleasant iced drinks at a Shanghai tiffin. We may enter boldly. There is no chance of finding people making shifts with small commons in China. There is this great charm in European society at all the ports. Everybody is able, and is, indeed, obliged to have a lordly indifference to expense. They cannot control it and they must let it go. There is no struggling or contriving to keep up appearances. The profits are large and the expenditure is great – laisser aller. Tiffin however is a bad habit.” [41]
The overwhelming preoccupation, nevertheless, was planning for that one fantastic gambler’s coup, that would enable them to replicate this life style at home. In the early fifties, before the first real estate boom, making money depended on zero-sum marketplace manipulation: one person’s gain from advance intelligence was another's loss. Every person in the Settlement was a rival in the great race to retire home with enough wealth to justify the deprivation of this isolation – wealth to ostentatiously brandish before friends and relatives establishing that one had left, not because one couldn't make it at home, but because the rewards were so much greater abroad. The longer the absence, the greater the fortune required.
In the Old City, for those adventurous enough to venture into it and absorb the chary, bewildered stares, and throughout the surrounding region, where at first they were only permitted to travel on one day trips, foreigners did not carry money. They paid by way of signing scraps of paper called “chits”, discharged by their firm and accepted without hesitation by Chinese shopkeepers and peasants. For decades, Shanghai was a cashless society before electronics.
The young trading house clerks were forbidden to marry by the taipan, or “head of house”, himself usually married and only in his thirties. Opportunities were few. Even in 1850, just before the first major population jump, when the official Western population of the British settlement had slowly grown to 210, only 17 were women, wives of diplomats, missionaries and taipans. Formal liaison with a Chinese woman was tantamount to resignation.
The actual numbers of men was of course much greater than the full time residents. Their numbers were swollen by visitors from the opium receiving ships and the omni-present seafaring population of a significant port. There was no shortage of women for their purposes.
Shore leave for this distinctive, international nautical community, with its unique argot and customs quite alien to landsmen, was a binge of sex and alcohol, compensatory oblivion for the deprivation and hazards of a life filled with violence – the sudden dangers of wind and sea, the merciless flogging of ship's captains, the brawling with universally armed, salt-toughened seamen, the clandestine doping by vulpine crimps, whose activities became more frenetic as sailors throughout the world deserted for the gold rushes to California and Australia and, with improving living standards at home, replacements became scarce for the poorly paid, insecure, dangerous occupation of seafaring.
As the senior American diplomat reported in early 1853, a permanent band of desperadoes had emerged in Shanghai:
“There are now in this port at least one hundred and fifty sailors ashore, men of all nations who go into the Chinese city and drink and riot and brawl, daily and nightly. They presume to defy all law, because they have tried jail and find that they cannot be confined by it. They have no money from which to collect a fine. The United States having assumed jurisdiction over their own citizens in China are expressly bound to compel them to keep the peace, and this cannot be done as long as there is no place to confine the delinquents in, except a loathsome hole inhabited by the foulest lepers, and in itself so weak that a man of American energies can kick his way out in a few minutes.” [42]
Two Western communities emerged: a respectable section, clustering around the merchant-adventurers turned merchant-entrepreneurs, and a marginal coterie of deserters, drifters, soldiers of fortune, smugglers, outlaws and pirates, the scum of the sea, so desperate and notorious that the word “shanghai” would replace the word “crimping” to describe the macabre specialisation of nautical kidnapping.
Both groups were attracted by the same condition: an absence of government authority. Both were in transit, sharing a common attitude to service in Shanghai: a place to make money in, and leave – one by trading in commodities the other by trading in violence and fear.
The universal sense of transience, to which the handful of missionaries provided the only exception, established a dominant amoral ethic. All personal relations were crassly functional. Nothing mattered but money.
“When you get to Shanghai”, Jardine, Matheson trainees were solemnly told in London, before their departure, “Remember to keep the Sabbath – and anything else you can get your hands on”.
End Notes
1. John King Fairbank Trade and Diplomacy on the China Coast Stanford University Press: Stanford 1964.
2. Ibid p139.
3. Ibid p141.
4. Ibid p138.
5. Ibid p141n.
6. Maggie Keswick (ed) The Thistle and the Jade Octopus London 1982 p71.
7. Fairbank 1964 op cit p140n.
8. Chinese Repository vol 12 (Dec 1843) pp630-631.
9. Fairbank 1964 op cit p170.
10. Ibid p229.
11. Ibid p229.
12. Ibid p230.
13. Basil Lubbock The Opium Clippers 1933 pp310-311.
14. Linda Cooke Johnson Shanghai: From Market Town to Treaty Port 1074-1858 Stanford Uni P. Stanford Calif 1995 p 187.
15. Johnson p1177.
16. J W Macclellan The Story of Shanghai Nth China Herald, Shanghai1889 p32.
17. See Jean Fredet Quand La Chine S’ Ouvrait: Charles de Montigny, Consul de France Societé de L’Histoire des Colonies Francaises, Paris, 1953.
18. Alexander Michie The Englishman in China Vol I Paragon NY 1966 (Reprint of 1900 ed) p435.
19. Scarth 1860 p198.
20. Chinese Repository vol 17 September 1848 p477.
21. Fairbank 1904 op cit p21.
22. Alexis De Tecqueville Democracy in America 1945 ed vol 1 pp441-442.
23. A B C Whipple The Clipper Ships Time Life Books, Amsterdam,1980 p45.
24. Arthur H Clark The Clipper Ship Era Putnam, NY 1910 p97.
25. David R Macgregor The Tea Clipper: Their History and Development 1833-1875 Conway Maritime Press, London, 1983 p47.
26. Lubbock op cit 1984 p81.
27. Chinese Repository vol 17 March 1848 p151.
28. Chinese Repository vol 17 August 1848 pp403-404.
29. Fairbank 1964op cit p173.
30. P D Coates The China Consuls: British Consular Officers 1843-1943 Oxford Uni P Oxford 1988 p33.
31. Michie 1916 op cit p22.
32. Coates op cit p57.
33. Broomhall vol 2 1982 p121.
34. Chinese Repository vol 17 August 1848 pp410-411.
35. Coates 1988 op cit p134. Other diplomats fell the full force of Palmerston’s scorn: “If Mr Hamilton would let his substantives and adjectives go single instead of sending them forth by twos and threes at a time, his dispatches would be clearer and easier to read.” Webster 1934 p140.
36. Chinese Repository vol 17 September 1848 p469.
37. George Wingrove Cooke, China and lower Bengal: being “The Times” correspondent from China in the years 1857-58 Routledge, Warne, & Routledge: London 1861.
38. Gerald Sandford Graham The China Station: War and Diplomacy 1830-1860 Clarendon Press: Oxford 1978.
39. Hugh Lang Shanghai Considered Socially: a lecture by H Lang American Presbyterian Mission Press: Shanghai 2nd ed 1875.
40. Fairbank 1964 supra pp160-161.
41. Cooke 1859 p220.
42. Tyler Dennet Americans in Eastern Asia Macmillan, NY 1922 pp188-189.
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