What was everyday life like for foreigners in the treaty ports of China and Japan? The residents of the treaty portsâlocal and foreign, in the trading concessions of China and Japanâexperienced vastly different realities in similar material conditions. How can we understand the routines and feelings of the residents whose material life was conditioned by extraterritorial regulations and life within the liminal worlds of the treaty ports? The careful study of everyday life is often overshadowed by the special status given to treaty ports as sites of power and contestation and symbols of modernity in scholarship and as the subject of nostalgia in popular culture. This volume moves âbeyond the Bundâ and presents a more intimate view of the treaty ports as they were experienced by foreign communities.
The Treaty Ports: An Overview
The treaty ports of China and Japan are the remnants of a bygone era, of what some scholars could argue as evidence of the âGreat Divergenceâ that took place where Asia was âleft behindâ by Europe and was then forcibly brought into contact with foreign traders, diplomats and, importantly, gunboats in the long nineteenth century.1 China was âone of a handful of existing polities that escaped wholesale incorporation into one empire or anotherâ. But, as evidenced in the treaty ports, its territorial integrity and sovereignty was âdegraded nonethelessâ.2 Following Qing defeats in the Opium Wars , the Treaty of Nanjing forced the Chinese to open a number of ports to British trade and residence; other foreign powers quickly followed suit, seeking similar privileges.3 The initial ports of Shanghai, Ningbo, Fuzhou , Xiamen (Amoy ) and Guangdong soon flourished and the treaty port system grew to become a vast system of ports and outports on the China coast, also stretching inland along waterways and at the frontiers of Qing, and later Republican China.4 As Robert Bickers observes, âSo as a Chinese man or woman, you could take a walk in Tianjin as recently as 16 March 1917 from the north-east gate of the port city, and traverse a French, a British and then a German concessionâ.5 This same walk could lead one past the Belgian, Russian, Italian and Austro-Hungarian districts. This description captures something of the complex world of the treaty ports where China played host to numerous foreigners who existed in a world that was physically in China and, yet, often perceived themselves as âset apartâ by cultural difference, a separation reinforced through institutional and legal privilege.
The case of Japan was not dissimilar; despite a policy of isolation, the Japanese were aware of the European powersâ expansion into Asia, and from the 1790s onwards, a âsteady stream of Western ships began to enter Japanese watersâ.6 By 1853, matters came to a head when Commodore Perryâs squadron entered Edo Bay and threatened a forced opening of Japan.7 To avert a similar fate to that of China, the Tokugawa elite agreed to limited access at a number of ports. It was, however, not a challenge that the Japanese were in a strong position to face. We should remember that despite an appearance of a system to cope with the new arrivals (foreigners) Japan by 1853 was in âthe throes of a revolution in economic and social mattersâ.8 The Perry Convention , signed in 1854, was not very radical; it did not provide for foreign residence or trade, and access to ports was limited.9 By 1858, other powers not only sought similar conventions but merchants demanded access to trade markets and Japan signed treaties which responded to these demands. These âunequal treaties â reinforced European and American privilege and sounded the death knell for the Tokugawa, ushering in the Meiji era. In the Meiji era, Japan was âremadeâ, emerging as a modern, Asian power and one with imperial aspirations of its own. While the treaty port system in Japan did not have the large number of ports or the same longevity of the Chinese experience, there were many parallels in terms of foreign attitudes; traders who were present in China often also had interests in the Japanese ports, similar institutions were created (although never a customs service), and foreign enclaves and amenities (such as the almost mandatory race course) were created. These treaty ports remained sites of conflict but also of contact and accommodation. It is through our abiding interest in the exchanges that took place, at the material level of the everyday, that the focus of this volume comes together.
Indeed, it is only recently that scholars are re-examining the place of the treaty ports in larger narratives of imperial and colonial histories of Asia.10 The colonial relationship, and for the past three decades, the postcolonial interpretation of the power relationships at the treaty ports, often falls prey in historiography to dichotomies of power. The treaty ports of China and Japan are often examined as sites of cultural interaction and conflict. J.E. Hoareâs seminal study of the Japanese treaty ports, Japanâs Treaty Ports and Foreign Settlements: The Uninvited Guests, 1858â1899, provides an eloquent demonstration of the early development of the treaty port settlements in Japan. The case studies of Yokohama and Nagasaki are notably marked by examples of accommodation, but also they often highlight the conflict that emerged in the treaty port environâbe it over the legal status of foreigners or concerns over port infrastructure.11 Much of the historiography of treaty ports of China and Japan is coloured by power relationshipsâcolonial, postcolonial, informal empireâat the expense of the practicality, reality and even mundanity of the lives of the residents.12 This volume, then, merges these themes and dichotomies: nostalgia and reality, the everyday and the extraordinary, centre and periphery, local and foreign via case studies from China and Japan. And through this merger of themes come new interpretations of the material and lived experiences in East Asiaâs ports in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
By including both the Chinese and Japanese treaty ports in this volume, we ask our readers to explore the possible comparisons that can be made between the different treaty ports. As the broader body of scholarship on the Asian port city argues, ports can never be seen in isolationâthey are always part of larger, interconnected maritime networks. Flows between ports were part and parcel of shaping the Asian maritime world.13 Historiographically, China and Japan have been treated as separate case studies; East Asianists have tended to orient themselves to either a Sino-centric or Japanese-centric understanding of the treaty port phenomenon. This approach, we argue, while providing a strength in terms of specialisation and detail, denies a sense of the dialogue and interplay of experiences that were common across the treaty ports of East Asia more broadly.
Life in Everyday China and Japan approaches treaty port history with a commitment to interdisciplinarity. While all chapters work within the discipline of history, many contributors write with methodology and training from other disciplines. This interdisciplinarity informs how we study material culture and what we mean by sociality, materiality, symbolism, law, medicine, architecture, art and, of course, culture. The inclusiveness here encompasses a broad range of scholars, beyond the traditional gambit of treaty port historians of Chinese and Japanese history to also include scholars of maritime history, science and empire, urban development, economic history, museum studies and law. The richness and creativity that inform the volume and the rigour of its primary source materials give the study of treaty port history a new dimension. By moving âbeyond the Bund â (the iconic Shanghai waterfront being a symbolic and visual reminder of the treaty ports as contact zones ) and studying the history of everyday lives, this volume provides a new insight into cultural exchanges and materiality in the treaty ports. It lends a more nuanced understanding to the narrative of encounters between the East and the West in the treaty ports. And beyond this, the volume provides the potential for fresh approaches to thinking about the ordinary lives for residents (foreign and local) of the treaty ports.
It is perhaps not too surprising that a number of our contributors touched on the Chinese Maritime Customs Service , or close connections to it, to explore the treaty ports.14 This institution was intimately connected with the treaty port phenomenonâit served as a cornerstone of the treaty port systemâand forms a rich source of research materials for scholars; it serves as an entry point for considering the China coast on multiple levels, from political and economic to social and cultural. Other contributors, however, venture further afield with sources from legal cases, property titles , ephemera and curios. So, throughout the chapters, we have movement between formally produced materials from established institutions in the treaty port world, to items that were produced by now unknown artisans in a fleeting and transitory treaty port age. This range of sources and inspirations serves once again to point to the sheer diversity of sources and approaches available when approaching a study of the materiality of the treaty ports.
Treaty Ports as âSuidiâ
While there is a good body of scholarship on both the treaty ports of China and Japan, finding works that survey the historiography of treaty port scholarship is elusive. The most recent work in this regard is the 2016 edited volume by Robert Bickers and Isabella Jackson, Treaty Ports in Modern China. In the introduction to their volume, Bickers and Jackson outline how the Chinese treaty port has been studied but then also present the case for the commonal...