China's Foreign Places: The Foreign Presence in China in the Treaty Port Era, 1840-1943 by Robert Nield
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Who, except for perhaps collectors of postage stamps, today gives a second thought to—or has even heard of—Amoy, Chefoo or Kiautschou? These places, and a great many others, had at one time enough foreign presence—consulates, for example—to warrant enough attention from postal authorities to merit overprints if not actual stamps of their own. Of course, the fact that these pieces of paper were issues by European rather than Chinese authorities is itself an indication of the peculiarity of the situation.
Robert Nield has listed and described more than 100 such places: treaty ports, colonies, leased territories, etc. While, with the important exception of Hong Kong, the slate has largely been wiped clean, both historically and physically, Nield points out in his introduction to China’s Foreign Places that
History matters in modern China. Not only is the past a different country, it is also replete with unfinished business... The themes interwoven over the 101 years of the treaty ports’ existence are complex, volatile and continue to colour China’s relationship with the world.
The bulk of Nield’s new book is given over to a set of encyclopedic descriptions and histories of these places from Aigun to Yunnan-Fu: not quite A-Z, but in alphabetical order nonetheless. This structure allows for completeness and makes the volume an excellent and, one imagines, unmatched reference—at the expense of narrative. The dozens of stories are told in parallel; themes are discerned by repetition.
It is a necessary trade-off, one that stamp collectors will understand for Nield has filled every space in this particular album. Hong Kong, Shanghai and Macau of course appear, but so do Aigun, which in practice became Heihe, the Manchurian city across from Blagoveshchensk; Antung (Dandong) and Tatungkow (Dadonggou) along the Yalu, where for some reason the United States saw fit to put a consulate; Dalny (Dalian), originally a Russian outpost; Newchwang (Yingkou), where the British Consul had to live in a mud temple; Weihaiwei (Weihai), often known as “the other Hong Kong”; and Tientsin, which had not just the normal British and French concessions, but a complete who’s who of pre-WWI imperialism with German, American, Japanese, Russian, and even American, Italian, Belgian and Austro-Hungarian concessions.
Nield tells the stories of each place’s founding, its raison d'être (or, as in several cases, the lack thereof), the business undertaken, quality of various facilities (ditto) and its evolution under domestic and geopolitical pressure. He has, in particular, an eye for the telling anecdote and the wry aside. For example, in Weihaiwei
A rule was added in 1908 whereby ‘the putting green and tees are closed when the Negative Signal for Tennis is hoisted’; if the weather was unsuitable for playing tennis then neither could they play golf. It is hard to imagine the sort of community that would raise a signal warning against playing tennis.
Or, in the entry for Newchwang:
Its name in Chinese, ‘Cow Village’, should have raised doubts, but the British planners decided this was the place to establish a treaty port so Newchwang was inserted in their 1858 Tientsin (Tianjin) Treaty... A subsequent expedition to Newchwang found it devoid of commercial importance and almost unpopulated. To make it appear that the terms of the treaty were being honoured, the British selected Yingkou as the treaty port, renamed it Newchwang, and carried on. I propose to do the same.
Nield actually visited most if not all of the places he writes about. Only rarely do his personal observations intrude but they do in the much-maligned Newchwang:
An 1867 guide to the treaty ports describes Newchwang as ‘dreary in the extreme [with] no advantages to correct this feeling subsequently’. I had the same impression when I visited 145 years later.
Encyclopedic the volume may be, but the entries are anything but dry.
Nield’s lengthy introduction is similarly excellent: a concise overview of the history of the period combined with pithy observations:
The Western powers tended to believe that trading was as natural a human function as breathing and assumed the right to trade with whomsoever they pleased. China did not share this view.
And:
Of the five open ports, ... two (Foochow and Ningpo) were so disappointing that Britain tried exchanging them for somewhere better, like unsuitable birthday gifts.
He even covers Russia:
When necessary, Russia presented itself to China as a fellow Asiatic nation, distinct from the individualistic Western powers, and empathetic to the Asian way of thinking. Whether or not the Chinese were deceived, they lost more land to Russia than to any other power.
The Russians, in addition, managed to keep it. “It is puzzling,” writes Nield
that China should have felt the cession of Hong Kong and Kowloon so deeply over the decades, yet complained so little about the loss of almost two million square kilometres of territory to Russia.
There is much in these pages that today seems puzzling. One is the profusion of British and other consular officials in far-flung places where national residents would number in the low double digits, if that: the British Government was exceedingly hands-on in those days. “Bunds” of foreign-style buildings would be thrown up, it seems, wherever there were a dozen or more foreigners. The Hong Kong & Shanghai Bank would issue banknotes, as it still does in Hong Kong, in places like Chefoo.
Most eyebrow-raising is the ubiquity of foreign companies, some of which such as Swire and HSBC are still with us, in remote outposts and the common role of these companies in intra-Chinese business: British ships were, for example, often used to transport goods between Chinese clients. Hong Kong companies, to say nothing of entirely foreign ones, rarely have anything approaching such a footprint in China today, and the idea of non-Chinese firms dominating a domestic service seems unthinkable. No wonder China was annoyed and engages in what is now seen as protectionist behavior.
Slightly chauvinistically, Nield places the end of the era in 1943, when Britain surrendered its extraterritorial rights. The Italians (somehow) managed to hang on in Tientsin until 1947, and the Russians—by then, the Soviets—weren’t entirely evicted until the 1950s.
Finally, in this era of the e-book, it’s a pleasure to note that China’s Foreign Places is a handsome volume. Care was taken over the layout, and the production values are high. It deserves a place on the shelves of both personal and formal libraries—as well as those of stamp collectors who wonder where all those damn places really were.