A Customs Officer in the Treaty Port World: R.F.C
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Picturing China 1870-1950 A Customs officer in the treaty port world: R.F.C. Hedgeland’s photographs istrative services, such as the Indian Civil Service. But China held many attractions for a young Englishman in the late 19th century. In the popu- lar British imagination, China spoke of adventure and the exotic yet also, increasingly, of professional opportu- nities. Over the century of its existence, almost 11,000 European and American staff from over 22 countries travelled to China to join the Customs, or else were recruited in China itself. They worked alongside over 11,000 Chinese employ- ees. Hedgeland’s Customs career was longer and more successful than those of most of his colleagues – he stayed for 32 years, retiring in 1930, having attained the senior rank of Commis- sioner – yet it was undistinguished by any spectacular achievements. What is unusual about Hedgeland is that from the moment he set foot on Chinese soil in 1898 until his retirement 32 years later, he documented his entire career with photographs. Tennis matches and tea parties It is difficult to identify who actually took the photographs in Hedgeland’s collection. Some were undoubtedly taken by Hedgeland himself - he occa- sionally expressed an interest in pho- tography in his letters - yet he also seems to have collected photographs from other amateur photographers in the Customs staff and occasion- ally purchased them from professional photographers. After he returned to Britain in 1930, Hedgeland’s collection was compiled into three albums, now (fig. 10) housed in the library of the School of Catherine Ladds business, and the Customs’ contribu- Oriental and African Studies, London. tion to the development of China’s There are no images of momentous he Chinese Maritime Customs foreign relations. Yet photographs, events in China’s modern history or of TService was a foreign-run and in particular the photographic collec- turning points in the history of Sino- internationally-staffed institution, tion of a British Customs man, R.F.C. foreign relations in this collection. As whose responsibilities grew far beyond Hedgeland, offer us an alternative view, was typical of photographic souvenirs its initial purpose of administering the and sometimes a clearer picture, of the taken home to Britain from China, duties on foreign trade, to encompass Customs world of work and the Sino- a couple of gruesome shots of execu- lighting the China coast, harbour main- foreign environment it operated in. tions are included, but Hedgeland’s tenance, publishing reports on count- taste was on the whole more mundane. less China-related topics, and even Reginald Follett Codrington Hedge- He preferred instead to record bunds, representing China at international land was born in Exeter, Devon on 18 offices, colleagues, tennis matches and exhibitions. Written records about the December 1874. After being educated tea parties. The value of this collection, work and workforce of the Customs at St Paul’s School, London, and Pem- then, lies in what it can tell us about the between 1854 and 1949 are plentiful. broke College, Oxford, he joined the different milieus in which the Customs Over 52,000 such files are housed in Indoor Staff, the prestigious adminis- Service operated, and, moreover, what it the Second Historical Archive of China, trative branch of the Customs in 1897. was like to work for this organisation. Nanjing, alone. The reports and corre- China and the Customs was a some- spondence lodged in the archive tell us what unorthodox choice; one might By the time that Hedgeland retired in a great deal about the Service’s guiding have expected Hedgeland to join one of 1930, there were Customs offices in principles and ideologies, its everyday the more established imperial admin- almost 50 ports, stretching from the (fig. 11) Picturing China 1870-1950 7 A Customs officer in the treaty port world: R.F.C. Hedgeland’s photographs (fig. 12) commercial entrepôts of the eastern On returning from home leave in 1913, seaboard to China’s furthest inland Hedgeland spent much of the remain- reaches. Within his first eight years of der of his career consigned to isolated employment in the Customs, Hedge- inland ports, with the exception of year- land had served in sub-tropical Hainan long stints in charge of the Shantou (1898-99) in the south, Nanjing (1899- (1925-26) and Canton (1926-27) offices. 1903) on the Yangzi River, and the One such port was Nanning, a posting north-eastern port of Tianjin (1903-06). viewed with trepidation in Customs There then followed a move back to the circles. First opened to foreign trade in south, first with a posting in the Portu- 1907, attempts to turn Nanning into a guese colony of Macau (1906-09) and trading centre ultimately foundered. then in British Hong Kong (1909-11), Nanning’s many failings as a treaty before he embarked on his first home port, and the failure of the Customs to leave (1911-13). The variety of profes- effectively assert its control over trade sional, social, commercial and envi- in the area, are all too evident in Hedge- ronmental conditions which Customs land’s photographs of the crumbling employees were required to acclimatise bund, buildings submerged under 30 to during their careers is immediately feet of water during the record floods visible on a browse through Hedge- of 1913, and mountains of confiscated land’s albums. The white suits, pith hel- opium. Furthermore, although a couple mets and palm trees, which feature in of prominent foreign firms, the Asiatic snapshots of jaunts around Hainan and Petroleum Corporation and British Macao, contrast sharply with his pho- American Tobacco, set up shop in Nan- tographs of the snow-covered streets of ning, the resident foreign community Tianjin’s British concession. Whilst the was tiny. ‘There is practically no soci- written record offers us a partial view ety at Nanning, and there is no amuse- of these diverse environments, Hedge- ment here that one does not make for land’s albums, which juxtapose shots of oneself’, Hedgeland lamented in 1917.1 the colonial grandeur of buildings on Ever-resourceful, he gamely attempted the Peak in Hong Kong with uninspir- to develop the social life of the port, ing snaps of the Nanning bund, more and even harboured dreams of turn- directly convey a sense of just how far ing Nanning into a ‘summer resort’ the Customs, and the foreign presence for foreigners in the south.2 However, more generally, reached into China. his photographs of the makeshift golf (fig. 13) Notes 1 Customs Service Archive, Second Historical Archive of China, Nanjing, (hereafter CSA), 679(1) 32517, ‘Nanning Semi-Official, 1913-20,’ semi-official no. 106, Hedgeland to I.G. Aglen, 30 August 1917. 2 CSA, 679(1) 32517, ‘Nanning Semi-Official, 1913-20,’ semi-official no. 89, Hedgeland to I.G. Aglen, 28 August 1915. 8 Picturing China 1870-1950 ‘clubhouse’ – ‘frolic-golf, but good fun’, as Hedgeland described it3 – show that Nanning’s social offerings were far removed from the cabarets and race meetings of Shanghai. His pho- tographic record of life in Nanning (fig. 11), and in other remote postings such as Aihun (now Heihe City) on the Amur River, where he served between 1921 and 1926, illuminate an aspect of the foreign presence in China which is often overshadowed by the more glam- orous story of foreign Shanghai. These images of cheerless landscapes, rickety Customs offices, and sparsely attended social gatherings in small port China, show how Customs employees, and those who worked for other foreign-run firms or organisations in China, often led monotonous and somewhat lonely lives in a series of dreary backwaters.4 The gaps in photograph collections, and what the photographer chooses not to record, are also significant. In Hedgeland’s collection the absence of photographs documenting the tumul- tuous political events of the early dec- ades of 20th century China suggests (fig. 14) much about his mentality, and that of portrait of the Chinese clerks at Tianjin his fellow Customs officers. For the in 1905, awkwardly assembled before most part Hedgeland was stationed in the camera and clad in changpao robes, quiet ports, yet he was on the scene dur- (fig. 10) and a portrait of Hedgeland ing the anti-British strike and boycott and fellow Customs Assistant P.P.P.M. of 1925 in Shantou and was Commis- Kremèr attired in Western tweed suits sioner in Canton (1926-27) during an and wielding walking sticks (fig.12). important phase in the Guomindang’s The divisions which cross-hatched the rise to power. Yet, whereas Hedgeland’s Customs staff (figs. 14, 12), however, letters to the Inspectorate General dili- were not only based on race. Take, for gently reported on political events in example, Hedgeland’s formally posed the area, his photographs betray a lack photographs of the Customs staff at the of personal curiosity in China’s politics. various ports he served in. The besuited Although they made much of their posi- foreign Indoor employees clustered in tion as ‘servants of the dragon throne’, the centre were more or less indistin- the majority of the foreign staff, with guishable in appearance from London a handful of exceptions, exhibited little office workers. Yet the rows of Outdoor more than a cursory interest in China’s Staff and Marine Department employ- development as a nation.5 ees, the branches which performed the ‘outdoor’ and manual work of the Routine work and occasional Customs, were clearly distinguished by dramas their uniforms – brass-buttoned jack- Hedgeland fastidiously collected photo- ets and naval-style caps for the Outdoor graphs of the various offices he worked staff and Marine officers, and sailor in and the people he worked with, Chi- suits emblazoned with the Customs nese and foreign.