Book review: China's Foreign Places by Robert Nield - how the ports were won
With the last comprehensive account of China's treaty ports having been published nearly 150 years ago, Nield's book is a welcome update.
The last comprehensive book on China's treaty ports was published in 1867 by Mayers, Dennys and King. So the subject probably needed an update. Robert Nield's China's Foreign Places moves the subject on from his previous book, The China Coast (2010), a taster for what has become Nield's obsession.
In this book, Nield covers 70-plus places of foreign commerce. Not all were treaty ports, stemming from early, unfair agreements made with the British, French, Germans, Americans, Japanese and Russians, among 15 nations. Some were colonies, concessions or seaside resorts such as Beidaihe. But Nield keeps them all under one umbrella.
While officially in the mid-19th century the Qing dynasty mandarins were appalled to have foreigners on their soil, there were plenty of early, lucrative mercantile exchanges that largely made them worth putting up with.
Early treaty ports were largely horrible. Consuls general who didn't get the Paris or New York gigs were shipped off to coastal villages rife with pirates, plague and typhoons and comprising not much more than a shrimp paste outfit and a jetty, and told to create a treaty port. For the merchants, finding business was even more high-risk.