Shanghai – First Impressions No.1 – Ernest O Hauser, 1842

The Foreign Devils Arrive – Ernest O. Hauser – 1842

Hauser (1910-97) was a writer of travel books and a regular contributor to The Saturday Evening Post, the New Yorker and other American publications. He was the author of Shanghai: City for Sale published in 1940. In 1941 Time magazine described him as a foreign correspondent who, ‘had not been content to meet the East over a Scotch & soda in Tokyo’s Imperial Hotel’ but had rather, ‘dug his way deep into the mysteries of the Oriental temperament.’ In 1953 Hauser was awarded a Christopher award presented to producers, directors and writers which ‘affirm the highest values of the human spirit.’

In his classic study of the history and development of Shanghai he re-imagines the arrival of the British ship, Nemesis, in Shanghai that came to first stake out Britain’s claim on Shanghai as a treaty port.

The Foreign Devils Arrive

On the dark and squally night of June 11, 1842, the British man-of-war Nemesis (1) (pictured above) slipped unnoticed into the mouth of the Yangtze River and dropped anchor near the Woosung forts, twelve miles below Shanghai.

The Nemesis was the first steamer ever to double the Cape of Good Hope. She had left Liverpool under secret orders, on a secret mission, and she carried two brand-new thirty-two pounders; she was the pride of the British flotilla that had crept up the Yangtze mouth that night and that was now assembled there below Shanghai, ready for action.

Action was taken in a few days swift, efficient, British action. The thirty-two pounders opened fire upon the forts, and the Chinese soldiers and mandarins were much impressed with British “cannon balls innumerable, flying in awful confusion through the heavenly expanse.” The Chinese war junks ran away as fast as their paddle wheels would move them, the Chinese garrison fled after a brief, heroic fight, and the Woosung forts were taken. “No one who witnessed the obstinacy and determination with which the Chinese defended themselves would refuse them full credit for personal bravery,” reported the victors. Their guns and bayonets, however, were better weapons than swords and spears. The way to Shanghai was free.

And this was how the West took the city of Shanghai.

Ernest O Hauser, Shanghai: City for Sale, (Harcourt, Brace & Co., New York)

1) Nemesis was actually the first armed iron ship anywhere – a paddle-gunboat built in 1839 at the John Laird yard Liverpool – but was not part of the Royal Navy but was owned by the Honourable East India Company and known as their ‘secret weapon’. Nemesis was last noted in Burmese waters in the early 1850s.