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The British and the Chinese Treaty Ports' THE BRITISH AND THE CHINESE TREATY PORTS Robert Bickers s quiet began to descend on battlefields in city were ruled by the British, Germans, Japanese, Europe and in Asia at the end of the French, Russians, Italians, Belgians, Austria- Second World War, one of the largest Hungary, while an American concession had been Aperiods of mass movements of people in human laid out and then handed over to the British. Side by history commenced. The victorious allies began to side, each had its own form of governance, laid out demobilise their own armies, and to start to ship roads, dug sewers, organised a police force, created back from still-occupied territory millions of and enhanced public spaces with administration enemy combatants. Civilian refugees began to buildings designed to showcase national styles, move back home; others found themselves in erected statues, and named the streets in its own temporary camps. Much of this process was languages. The Rue de France led into Victoria voluntary, but there were extensive involuntary Road, then Woodrow Wilson; Vittorio Emanuelle migrations. Ethnic Germans living beyond the led into Petrograd; from Yamaguchi you could turn borders of the rump state now occupied by the off into Rue de Takou, which became Taku Road. Allied powers were expelled. The dissolution of the Japanese empire saw the deportation of The world came to Chinese cities. A Chinese hundreds of thousands of settlers and colonial resident of Tianjin might, in the course of a single officials back to the home islands. These are walk, pass along a route that traversed Japanese, familiar episodes, but hidden amongst them also is French, British and German territory, and laws, the story of the winding up of a sophisticated passing a Vietnamese or a Sikh policeman, as well network of communities and institutions that as a Japanese and German one. At Shanghai, a formed part of the network of Allied colonial French concession was formally a part of the interests: the treaty ports of China. These are French Empire, and its administration answered to victors who lost, amongst them the British in the Governor-General of Indo-China. A much China, including those who called themselves larger ‘International Settlement’ evolved a more Shanghailanders and Tientsinites. independently-minded zone, with its own annually- elected council (in which elections a British In this article I will sketch out the history of this majority was routinely reinforced), and governed group and the world they developed and lived in, the heart of what evolved into China’s most and provide some thoughts about researching its important commercial, educational, financial, records, including some that can be accessed industrial and political centre. A Chinese rickshaw through ‘China Families’, a new platform I run at needed three licences to navigate the entire city, the University of Bristol. 1 Between 1843 and 1943, one for each foreign zone, and one for Chinese- in cities along the Chinese coast and the Yangzi controlled territory. Meanwhile at Hong Kong, and river, the British and other powers established in Qingdao, and in Taiwan, foreign-run colonies port cities opened by treaty with the Qing Empire, alienated Chinese territory in perpetuity, while 99- scores of ‘concessions’ and ‘settlements’. Some year leases were taken by the Japanese at Dalian, Chinese cities housed just one or two of these the British in the Kowloon New Territories and at concessions, but others hosted a number of different Weihaiwei, and the French at Guangzhouwan. neighbourhoods that were administered by foreign powers. The great northern city of Tianjin, the The treaty ports were knitted together by shipping gateway to the capital, Beijing, was the site at one networks, and by small fleets of river gunboats time of nine different concessions. Small parts of the backed up by foreign navies, army garrisons, and by 1 Genealogists’ Magazine networks of foreign consuls who from buildings on the new Soviet state renounced its privileges. Rue du Consulat or Consulate Road administered Established in 1927, the National Government of their charges, who were exempted as a result from the Guomindang - popularly known as the Chinese jurisdiction. Foreign courts, laws, and Nationalists, led by Chiang Kai-shek - operated to lawyers, oversaw the lives of most foreign nationals. check the operations of these administrations, and Memories, loyalties and rituals - Remembrance Day claw back control. In the revolution that brought it ceremonies held at their war memorials, for to power, two British concessions were seized in example, parades on Empire Day or the King’s January 1927, and were subsequently surrendered birthday, also generated a sense of particular local (at Wuhan - Hankow - and at Jiujiang - Kiukiang). identity. These were, as the Chinese noted, states In the years immediately after the revolution, a few within a state, their political impact far outweighing more concessions were returned (including the practical advantages many of them gave their Chinkiang, Amoy, and the leased territory at owners. After all, a Briton could pace around the Weihaiwei on the tip of Shandong province). tiny concession at Xiamen (Amoy) in barely twenty British Municipal Concessions on the Yangzi minutes, walking slowly. which had on a modest scale all the appearance of town government in England, were abolished. Few If our Briton grew tired of such a circumscribed of these were missed by the diplomats - the British round, he, or she, could decamp to the treaty port had quickly labelled Weihaiwei ‘Where-are-we?’, equivalents of India’s Hill Stations, to the highland or ‘Why-oh-Why?’ But they were able to retain resorts at Kuling (pun intended), close to Jiujiang, or after retrocession its use as a summer home for the Monkanshan (Moganshan), accessible from Royal Navy’s China Station. Shanghai; or to the beach resort at Peitaho (Beidaihe), or Chinwangtao, or to Tsingtao. China There is something potentially absurd about coast residents often vacationed in Japan. Both elements of this world, with seeming grand Kuling, and Chefoo (Yantai), on Shandong colonial designs made concrete in a few roads laid province’s north coast, were homes to boarding out on marshy territory that usually housed a small schools for foreign children. Chefoo’s largely served and unwilling subject population. There was the families of the China Inland Mission. (School nothing absurd about the politics of opposition to registers are held in the School of Oriental & African this system, which grew to take a central role in the Studies). Boarding school days for 70 children in great nationalist upsurge in mid-20th century 1935 were enlivened by the piracy of the ship taking China, and which still shapes its nationalism today. them north from Shanghai back to Chefoo. This was The Japanese invasion of China that unfolded after not a catch the pirates had expected, nor one they the seizure in 1931 of the Northeastern provinces wanted. The pirates were not as piratical as some of known as Manchuria prompted in response a the children thought they ought to have been, fourteen-year war of resistance that was eventually according to press reports. (All the children survived folded into the Second World War. But there was unharmed, though one guard did not). Chinese also nothing absurd about the functional role these bandits and pirates were very much to liking of little bits of Britain or France played in the global foreign writers and journalists in the 1920s and networks of trade, information, communications, 1930s, forming, along with Chinese warlords, a and the movements of people and transfer of gallery of villains who were the subject of hit movies personnel, that characterised the wider empires and such as ‘Shanghai Express’, or ‘The Bitter Tea of extent of British and French power. The treaty port General Yen’, but most people encountered neither. network was actually abolished twice: the Japanese This foreign degradation of the sovereignty of the occupation authorities in China abolished those Qing Empire survived the dynasty’s deposition in they had seized and handed them to the Chinese 1911 and the establishment of a Republic of China. collaborationist governments from 1 August 1943; The reach and character of the foreign presence the British and Americans had also surrendered was constantly changing nonetheless - when China their treaty privileges in February that year. entered the First World War on the Allied side, it Nobody asked the Britons and Americans who seized German and Austria-Hungarian assets and lived in Shanghai, Tianjin, or Wuhan what they 2 Genealogists’ Magazine British treaty ports in China, 1927. 3 Genealogists’ Magazine thought about this, and they were shortly in China; consulate records at Shanghai list another afterwards interned. After the end of the conflict 2,000 men and women who died intestate. (Some the abolition of this network, with the exceptions of cemetery lists survive, but these are fragmentary). the British Crown Colony at Hong Kong, and The tangled business of the living - disputes, law Portuguese-administered Macao, was confirmed. cases, divorces, property ownership, can be traced in British policemen, Public Works Department consular and court documents. A vibrant press inspectors, municipal gardeners, nurses, teachers, quickly developed, with the first English-language surveyors and architects, found that they had lost newspaper being printed in Shanghai in 1850, their jobs and, it turned out, their pensions. quickly joined by titles in Wuhan, Fuzhou, Tianjin, Beijing, and in the Manchurian cities. Some of these are lost altogether, but others survive almost in their entirety. They record the treaty port British at play, at work, at meetings of Lodges and Recreation Clubs, on the sports field and at the races, at school plays, and on vacation. (There you can find young Peggy Hookham, later Margot Fonteyn, who learned to dance in Tianjin and in Shanghai.) Annual resident and business directories were published, and more ephemeral travellers can be glimpsed in the passenger lists regularly published in the press.
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