Emily Hahn - China Only Yesterday: 1850-1950: A Century of Change

EMILY HAHN

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China Only Yesterday

18501950: A Century of Change

Emily Hahn

Chapter One

William Hickey was a very young man when he stopped off in China in 1769, coming home after his first voyage to India, but even then he was a good observer. The amiable chatterbox he became in his old age gave a vivid picture in his memoirs of the peculiar life he shared in Canton with his compatriots for those few weeks. To be sure, it wasnt the true China that he saw. The factory district, i.e., the place of foreign factors, or traders, was a fringe of flat land squeezed in between the city wall and the river, and this site, with the row of long narrow buildings that nearly filled it, was the only mainland ground on which the Red Hairs were permitted to set foot. Now and then they went to some island for a picnic; the sailors from their ships, in fact, had to take shore leave on certain islands. But the city of Canton, and the ordinary land of China, must not be entered. The countrys rulers did not wish their people to be perverted by foreign devils. They trusted only a few merchants and a severely restricted number of domestic servants to have dealings with the dwellers in the factories. On one occasion the high-spirited Hickey broke the rules and went through a gate in the wall into the city. Children threw stones at him, and he was glad to get back to the East India Company territory where he lodged and had his meals with Company officers, ships captains, and supercargoes, as the business managers of imports and exports were called. The East India Company held the monopoly of foreign trade in China. Hickey made no mention of what must have been a strange sight to his inexperienced eyesthe great walls of the City of Rams, the teeming narrow streets, the gaily painted boards or silk banners that advertised a shops wares, and the pigtailed, shaven-pated men, clacking about the cobbled streets in clogs or moving softly in slippers.

He seems to have enjoyed his sojourn in the factory. He said that the Company people were hospitable and that he had luxurious spacious quarters. He saw their warehouses, and the studios where they kept workmen busy preparing the articles that were to be shipped back to Europe. The British and other Europeans bought tea from the Chinese, and silk, china, nankeen (a kind of cotton cloth), and sago. In return they sold woolen cloth and metal, pepper and other spices from the isles of the Indies, and light cotton cloth and opiumthough the East India Company never dealt in this commodityfrom India, making up the difference with silver bullion and coins, usually Spanish dollars. They seem to have been blas about the Chinese rarities they shipped home and sold so profitably, judging from one of William Hickeys anecdotes. He had made friends with a thirteen-year-old boy who was serving an apprenticeship in the factory.

Bob Pott passed most of his time in our rooms, generally coming before I was up of a morning. He breakfasted with us, and if he took it into his head that McClintock was too long at a meal, or drank too much tea, he without the least ceremony overset the table. The first time he practiced this, I was very angry at such a quantity of handsome china being thus mischievously demolished, and expressed my displeasure thereat, which only excited the mirth of young pickle. Why, zounds! said he, you surely forget where you are. I never suffer the servants to have the trouble of removing a tea equipage, always throwing the whole apparatus out of window or down stairs. They easily procure another batch from the stewards warehouse.

Hickey met and talked with only a very few Chinesebusiness acquaintances of his hostsand decided that he liked none of the race. He took for gospel all he was told by the other foreigners, and naturally embraced their prejudices. He marveled at Chinese superstition, retailing several extraordinary anecdotes to illustrate their stupidity and ineptness. Though he was ill-informed and unfair in his judgment he was not high-handed in his attitude: like his friends he seems to have thought of these strange natives as unpleasant but not exactly inferior. The foreigners didnt look down on the Chinese. After all, they were scarcely in a position to do so. The boot was on the other foot; Chinese did look down on Westerners, as they did on all non-Chinese except the Manchus who were their overlordsand no doubt some high scholar-officials dared to do even that, in their heart of hearts. In their estimation the Western traders were barbarians of low degree; they were traders, the lowest class of Chinese civilization, where mankind was divided into four main groupsscholars, then in descending quality farmers, workmen, and, last of all, merchants. That the Emperor and government made much profit from the taxes paid on barbarian trade had no softening effect whatever on their opinion of the barbarians. Of course the Chinese merchants who did the actual bartering were in favor of the traders, as far as they dared to show their feelings, but this was merely a question of like understanding like, and they were not the lawmakers.