Fear swept Zhenjiang as British soldiers gathered outside the city walls in the summer of 1842. Already suspicious of foreigners, locals had also heard of the suffering the British inflicted two months earlier, in Zhapu. A wave of suicides and mercy killings ensued: rather than leave their families to the invaders, hundreds of women killed themselves and their children or died at the hands of male family members. British observers decried an “Asian culture” of ritual suicide. In reality, the event was sui generis—a tragic result of colliding local and global forces in nineteenth-century China.
Xin Zhang’s groundbreaking history examines the intense negotiations between local societies and global changes that created modern China. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, world-historic political, economic, and technological developments transformed the textures of everyday life in places like Zhenjiang, a midsize river town in China’s prosperous Lower Yangzi region. Drawing on rare primary sources, including handwritten diaries and other personal writings, Zhang offers a ground-level view of globalization in the city. We see civilians coping with the traumatic international encounters of the Opium War; Zhenjiang brokers bankrolling Shanghai’s ascendance as a cosmopolitan commercial hub; and merchants shipping goods to market, for the first time, on steamships.
Far from passive recipients, the Chinese leveraged, resisted, and made change for themselves. Indeed, The Global in the Local argues that globalization is inevitably refracted through local particularities.
My Crime & the City column for Crimereads bounces around all over the globe, but occasionally is a place that might particularly interest China Rhyming readers. This fortnight’s edition is on Lhasa and the mysteries of Tibet…Click here to read…
In case you’re not near a bookshop that is stocking my new China Revisited series of historical reprints on Hong Kong, Macao and Southern China, or like amazon, then they’re on bookstore.org too (supporting independent bookstores globally)…
James Zimmerman’s excellently research & fun Peking Expresstells the story in-depth of the Lincheng Outrage in 1923. I was happy to blurb….
In May 1923, when Shanghai publisher and reporter John Benjamin Powell bought a first-class ticket for the Peking Express, he pictured an idyllic overnight journey on a brand-new train of unprecedented luxury—exactly what the advertisements promised. Seeing his fellow passengers, including mysterious Italian lawyer Giuseppe Musso, a confidante of Mussolini and lawyer for the opium trade, and American heiress Lucy Aldrich, sister-in-law of John D. Rockefeller Jr., he knew it would be an unforgettable trip.
Charismatic bandit leader and populist rabble rouser Sun Mei-yao had also taken notice of the new train from Shanghai to Peking. On the night of Powell’s trip of a lifetime, Sun launched his plan to make a brazen political statement: he and a thousand fellow bandits descended on the train, capturing dozens of hostages.
Aided by local proxy authorities, the humiliated Peking government soon furiously gave chase. At the bandits’ mountain stronghold, a five-week siege began.
Brilliantly written, with new and original research, The Peking Express tells the incredible true story of a clash that shocked the world—becoming so celebrated it inspired several Hollywood movies—and set the course for China’s two-decade civil war.
The Athanaeum was published between 1828 and 1921 after which it was incorporated into its younger competitor, the Nation. The Athanaeum is also a private members club on Pall Mall founded around the same time. Here below a review of ETC Werner’s China of the Chinese from August 1919. As well as being reviewed in The Athanaeum, Werner was also a member of the Club (though I don’t think he could have visited more than a few times as he rarely furloughed to England and not at all (I think) after he retired around 1914. Still he was accepted and was proposed by no less a figure than the author Rider Haggard who he had known as a young man at Scoone’s crammer school for the Foreign Service on Garrick Street, near Covent Garden. Both enjoyed their studies, both had an early interest in spirtualism but then Haggard went into business in Africa (and eventually obviously novel writing) and Werner into the diplomatic service in China. Yet they obviously remained friends….
The review “BR” is none other than Bertrand Russell, who was of course fascinated by China and reading up on the subject in 1919 before departing to give his series of lectures there (and in Japan) in 1920 (where it is quite possible he would have met Werner – though I have no evidence they ever did meet) eventually writing his own book, The Problem of China, published in 1922.
Just how ‘liberating’ was the ‘liberation’? Jack Belden travelled to the newly ‘liberated’ villages of China as the Nationalists retreated and the Communists advanced in the late 1940s…a highly pivotal moment for China…click here to read…
