On the Road to a Modern City: New Transportation Technology and Urban Transformation of Tianjin, 1860-1937 a Dissertation Submi
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ON THE ROAD TO A MODERN CITY: NEW TRANSPORTATION TECHNOLOGY AND URBAN TRANSFORMATION OF TIANJIN, 1860-1937 A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Kan Li IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Liping Wang, Ann Waltner June 2020 © Kan Li 2020 Abstract After the northern Chinese city of Tianjin was opened as a treaty port in 1860, the steamship, railroad, and electric tramway were introduced into the city in rapid succession. The adoption of modern transportation technologies enabled Tianjin to occupy a crucial position in the emerging national and global transport and trade networks, Tianjin thus became one of a few cities that made the transition from a traditional commercial city on the Grand Canal to a modern seaport and railroad hub. Instead of taking a city’s modernity for granted, this dissertation examines how the physical forms of modernity came into being in Tianjin by connecting these processes to the adoption of new technologies and the building of national and international networks of transportation. Studying Tianjin from this angle, this dissertation sheds light on why, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a select few cities thrived even as China as a whole was struggling economically and politically. While fundamentally transforming Tianjin’s status, these new transport technologies also led to unintended consequences, which revealed the contingencies in modernization and the complexity of the Chinese modernity. In order to make the port of Tianjin a high-capacity, reliable harbor for large steamships, the river connecting Tianjin with the sea was drastically reshaped during the first two decades of the twentieth century. These efforts, however, created environmental problems that eventually harmed the sustainability of the port. In the construction of the railroads connecting Tianjin with critical resources, the Qing officials demonstrated their ability in employing western capital and professionals while curtailing western intervention in the railroad planning. Officials and local elites dominated the urban planning of Tianjin, trying to divert the benefit of the railroads toward the Chinese administered parts of the city. At the turn of the twentieth century, a i system of electric tramways was forced upon Tianjin mainly to display the superiority of western civilization and technology. Bearing the mark of imperialism and being far ahead of the actual demand for mass transportation, the tramway system met with enormous resistance. The protests to the tramway often utilized the modern media and the discourses of nationalism and sovereignty. Modernity means that even actions of anti- modernization had to speak the language of the modern. ii Table of Contents List of Figures ..................................................................................................................... v List of Measures and Units ................................................................................................ vi Introduction ......................................................................................................................... 1 Modernization and Modernity ......................................................................................... 3 Technology and Public Works ........................................................................................ 9 Infrastructure and Urbanization .................................................................................... 15 Organization of Chapters .............................................................................................. 23 CHAPTER I From Canal City to Seaport .......................................................................... 1 A Port on the Grand Canal .............................................................................................. 2 The Advent of the Steamship and Its Challenge to the Shipping Conditions ............... 12 Engineering the Hai River ............................................................................................. 31 The Prospects of Tianjin Remaining a Seaport ............................................................. 46 CHAPTER Ⅱ The Railroads and the Growth of Tianjin ................................................. 66 Becoming the First City Connected to the Railroad ..................................................... 68 Connecting Tianjin with the Capital ............................................................................. 93 Connecting Tianjin with the Economic Center ........................................................... 103 CHAPTER III Tramway: Politics of Technology and Urban Space .............................. 123 Fear of the Unknown: Initial Reactions to the Tramway ............................................ 124 iii Defining the Relationship between a New Technology and Urban Lives .................. 143 Difficulties of Expanding the Tramway System ......................................................... 156 Chinese Efforts to Recover the Right of Managing the Tramways ............................ 178 CHAPTER IV Mobility and Tianjin’s Modernity .......................................................... 190 Mobility of Goods: Raw Cotton and Cotton Products ................................................ 192 Mobility of Information: The Making of a National Newspaper ................................ 212 Mobility of Talents and Capital: A Banker’s Experience ........................................... 228 Conclusion ...................................................................................................................... 242 Bibliography ................................................................................................................... 248 iv List of Figures Figure 1 Ten Beauties Parading Lanterns, Tianjin, ca. 1915 .............................................. 2 Figure 2 Foreign Concessions of Tianjin .......................................................................... 18 Figure 3 The cuttings on the Hai River ............................................................................. 42 Figure 4 The dike break on the Chaobai River ................................................................. 47 Figure 5 The Dagu Bar new channe ................................................................................. 54 Figure 6 A map of Tianjin dated 1899 .............................................................................. 66 Figure 7 Tianjin-Kaiping line ........................................................................................... 90 Figure 8 Locations of the three railway stations in Tianjin ............................................ 118 Figure 9 The original plan of tramway in the agreement signed in 1904 ...................... 131 Figure 10 Tramway system in 1908 ............................................................................... 165 Figure 11 Proposed line from Beidaguan to the West Station in 1911 ........................... 169 Figure 12 Proposed line connecting Dahutong with the Central Station in 1917 ........... 179 Figure 13 The Green Line and Flower Line added in the 1920s .................................... 186 Figure 14 Production areas of cotton in Zhili ................................................................. 196 Figure 15 The structure of the cotton market in Tianjin ................................................. 199 v List of Measures and Units Shi is a unit of volume when it was used to measure grain. 1 shi can be converted roughly to 60 kilograms in weight in the nineteenth century. 1 mu = 0.1647 acre 1 dan = 50 kg Tael is a unit of weight unit for silver ingot currency used in imperial China, 1 tael = 1.3 ounce of silver. vi Introduction In a New Year woodblock print created in Yangliuqing, a town near Tianjin, around 1915 (Figure 1), the traditional theme “lantern parade” was presented alongside new elements of the time.1 The print entitled “Ten Beauties Parading Lanterns” depicts ten women dressed in Han and Manchu feminine garments or cross-dressed in police and military uniforms or gentlemen’s robes. They hold lanterns manifesting various objects that can be divided into two categories: the first category being traditional festive images such as fish, lotus, and cabbage; the second category being novelties from the west. Among the objects of the second category, save for a foreign language book, each of the other six lanterns showcases one new kind of transportation: the steamship, locomotive, rickshaw, steam powered carriage, automobile, and hot air balloon. Unlike the well-established auspicious meanings of fish, lotus, and cabbage in popular culture,2 the implications of the images of transportations are open to interpretation. However, the fact that these images were incorporated into such a traditional art form points toward the impact that new transportation technologies had on the urban society of Tianjin. 1 Chinese wood block print collections of the Royal Ontario Museum, reproduced from James A. Flath, “The Chinese Railroad View: Transportation Themes in Popular Print, 1873-1915,” Cultural Critique 58, no. 1 (2004): 184. 2 These images are rebuses that were common knowledge among the Chinese. Fish stands for surplus, lotus for integrity and lasting prosperity, and cabbage for wealth. 1 Figure 1 Ten Beauties Parading Lanterns, Tianjin, ca. 1915 By the 1910s, steamships, electric tramways, trains, and railroads had