Home » Feature » Art and Culture
Open port ushers in change
Print Edition
On November 8, 1843, George Balfour (1809-1894), the first consul general of the United Kingdom to Shanghai, arrived to find housing for British officials. A merchant surnamed Yao provided a 52-room mansion in today’s Huangpu District.
On November 17, according to the Treaty of Nanking, Shanghai opened its port for foreign trade. In the next 170 years, foreigners, their culture, products, ideas and influences played roles in the city’s development from a little-known county in mudflats to the Paris of the East in the 1930s, and today’s cosmopolitan metropolis.
When foreigners first arrived, locals were scared of but also curious about Balfour and his associates — the yellow-haired, blue-eyed and big-nose laowai (sometimes known as yang gui zi or foreign devils).
They came in groups to observe how the foreigners brushed their teeth, combed their hair, washed their hands, ate, drank, talked and slept. Even when the consul general ordered the building closed and forbade visitors, they found ways to peek inside.
In the 1930s, the city’s population grew to 3 million and included nearly 60,000 foreigners from more than 50 countries in a range of fields, including trade, banking, sales, medicine, architecture, journalism, education, among others. There was a host of colorful characters, adventurers and spies.
Shanghai was one of five British treaty ports opened on China’s mainland after the First Opium War, when Hong Kong was ceded to the UK. They included Guangzhou, Ningbo, Fuzhou and Xiamen. Eventually there would be 80 such ports in China for different nationalities, all resulting from what are known as the unequal treaties. Ports were also forced open in Japan, South Korea and China’s Taiwan.
“You can imagine how Chinese people at the time thought about these outsiders. They were a whole different specie from a whole different world,” says Lu Qiguo, a historian from the Shanghai Municipal Archives.
Today, after 170 years, if a group of foreigners walks along the Bund and speaks Chinese, they won’t draw much attention for locals. Many cross-culture married couples live in Shanghai. The city is filled with international schools for expatriate children. There are a number of churches in the city and Shanghai Disneyland is scheduled to open in 2015.
Local Shanghainese are known to welcome different, new and innovative ideas and products. Kai yang hun, a local idiom literally meaning eat foreign meat, refers to trying something new.
When the port first opened, the biggest import was opium from India, which represented more than half of all imports. Merchants were overjoyed to be able to sell opium and other products to one-third of the world’s population through Shanghai.
In December 1843, only a month after the port was opened, seven cargo ships arrived, heavily laden with numerous products and consumer goods. The big traders were Holliday Wise & Co, Gibb Livingstone & Co, Dent & Co and Jardine Matheson & Co.
In 1847, 16,500 crates of opium entered through Shanghai port. They were followed by other products but many of them were stacked in warehouses and trade dropped only three years after the port was open.
At first, foreign merchants couldn’t figure out what could be sold to hardworking and frugal Chinese whose living standards and values were so different from their own.
One company in Sheffield, England, shipped all their stock of knives and forks to Shanghai, not knowing that Chinese eat with chopsticks.
A piano company in London envisioned a bright future selling pianos to Chinese women, since they expected half of the 400 million Chinese at the time were women, and at least one out of 200 could play or learn to play the instrument.
But they soon got up to speed by importing mass-produced textiles that were tougher and cheaper than Chinese hand-woven fabric. By 1853, trade figure in Shanghai exceeded that of Guangzhou, a treaty port that had opened much earlier than Shanghai.
Early diplomats, merchants and others also brought with them a very different kind of culture, values and technology, originally to make their own lives more comfortable. Western technology essentially made Shanghai the most modern in China at the time.
Before 1843, residents mostly used water from rivers and wells and often boiled it to kill bacteria that could cause serious disease. Foreigners were not used to boiling their water, however, and in 1875 a British merchant built a tap water factory in today’s Yangpu District. It was the first in China. The factory and others like it in the same area provided many jobs for locals and refugees who fled from Zhejiang and Jiangsu provinces to escape the Taiping Rebellion (1850-64).
The suburban area was soon filled with factory workers and gradually became a famous industrial sector in the city.
Early expatriates also brought gas lamps and electric street lamps. The first gas lamp was lit on Nanjing Road in 1865, only six years after it was invented.
Surprisingly, rickshaws, invented by Japanese, were also introduced first to Shanghai by foreigners. A French merchant bought a dozen rickshaws from Japan and started the first rickshaw company in Shanghai in 1873.
By the early 1920s, rickshaws are seen everywhere in big Chinese cities like Beijing and Tianjin. In the 1850s, wagons were introduced and in 1908, the first tram ran a regular route from Jing’an Temple to the Bund.
Archive historian Lu Qi observes, “The treaty and the forced opening of the ports are considered the start of a shameful period for China. But it is also fair to say the foreigners and what they brought to the city laid the foundation for its urban planning, its status as a financial center and fashion hub, its important role for cultural exchange and its residents’ famous reputation for embracing different ideas.”
- About Us
- |
- Terms of Use
- |
-
RSS - |
- Privacy Policy
- |
- Contact Us
- |
- Shanghai Call Center: 962288
- |
- Tip-off hotline: 52920043
- 沪ICP证：沪ICP备05050403号-1
- |
- 互联网新闻信息服务许可证：31120180004
- |
- 网络视听许可证：0909346
- |
- 广播电视节目制作许可证：沪字第354号
- |
- 增值电信业务经营许可证：沪B2-20120012
Copyright © 1999- Shanghai Daily. All rights reserved.Preferably viewed with Internet Explorer 8 or newer browsers.
