Trade and treaty

Treaty ports and concessions - the very names evoke some long-ago, far-away historical epoch. Yet these places are much nearer to us, in both time and place, than many of us imagine. Canton - alias modern, bustling Guangzhou - is the closest early treaty port to Hong Kong.

The China Coast: Trade and the First Treaty Ports by Robert Nield offers numerous insights - many unexpected - into the development of the first five treaty ports opened to the world after the first Anglo-Chinese war was concluded in 1842. The treaty port era only lasted for a century - foreign-held treaty rights in China were abrogated by a series of mutually agreed treaties in 1943, at the height of the Pacific war.

A retired partner at global accounts PriceWaterhouseCoopers, Nield has lived in Hong Kong for 30 years. He developed a deeper interest in the city and the region early on in his time here.

'When I came to Hong Kong in 1980,' Nield recounts, 'the statistic everyone quoted all the time was that Hong Kong was the 10th-largest trading economy in the world. Walking about in the city, it was more modern than tomorrow - at least on the surface. But somehow I thought there had to be more to the place than just that aspect, glittering though it was. I wondered how it was that this late-20th-century anachronism of a thoroughly British place on the south coast of China first came about.'

The process of wondering soon led to wanderings around China in search of answers. More answers led to further questions, and 'many years ago I went to Amoy, Shanghai and other places, and saw all these remnants of the European presence, and my interest in all this was piqued even further'.

An extensive bibliography covers a wide range of source materials - some of these are quite obscure and hard to find, even in reference libraries. As befits the current president of the Royal Asiatic Society branch in Hong Kong, Nield has made extensive use of research articles contained within its annually produced Journal.

But what exactly was a treaty port? 'There was a distinct hierarchy of foreign settlements in Qing and Republican China,' Nield says. 'These ranged from Hong Kong and Macau, the only two places that were actually owned by foreign powers. These were formally recognised as such by successive Chinese governments - whatever the political static about 'unequal treaties' and so on may suggest to the contrary today.