Kiukiang City View
Posted: April 12th, 2010 | 1 Comment »You don’t see good views of the old treaty port of Kiukiang (now Jiujiang) that often. The port of Kiukiang was one treaty port that, in retrospect, the British rather wished they’d never gained control of. It was never to enjoy the high level of prosperity that Amoy (Xiamen) or Foochow (Fuzhou) did nor was it to rise as a great metropolis the way that Tientsin (Tianjin), and to a far greater extent, Shanghai did. However, Lord Elgin had been the man who’d decided that Kiukiang should become a treaty port in the wake of the Second Opium War and the “Unequal Treaties†forced upon the Chinese in 1861.
Kiukiang (the name literally means “nine riversâ€) was to be the only treaty port in Kiangsi (Jiangxi) province. Lord Elgin had selected it for the ostensibly sensible reason that it was situated in the north of the province along the banks of the Yangtze River and its proximity to the channels of internal communication through the Poyang Lake, the largest freshwater lake in China, which led to the green-tea-producing districts of Kiangsi and Anhui provinces. Unfortunately, Kiukiang stood above, rather than below, the outlet of the Poyang Lake, and this proved to be a decided drawback to its success as a commercial port.
Anyway here’s a view of the city (date unknown unfortunately).
Great photo.
As you probably know, Kiukiang was where Pearl Buck lived as a girl and her former house is now a museum.