Immigrants in Shanghai before the Opium War

Although large-scale immigration into Shanghai did not take place until after the Opium War, sojourners lived and traded in Shanghai before the war, in sufficient numbers and of sufficient means to establish huiguan and gongsuo . At the time of the opening of the port, Shanghai's location at the mouth of the Yangzi had created a "mercantile emporium," bustling with domestic and overseas trade: "The vessels · which arrive at this port are... of Fuhkien and Canton. The vessels of the north come... from Kwantung, Liaotung, Tientsin, and... Shantung. From Fuhkien about three hundred come annually, but a greater part of them come from Hainan or Formosa, and some from Chusan and Ningbo, also from Manila, Bali and other ports .... About four hundred come from Canton,... from Macao, Singapore, Penang, Jolo, Sumatra, Siam and other parts."^[2] By the mid-nineteenth century this

[2] Chinese Repository , 1846, 467-69.

thriving coastal trade brought more than fifteen hundred vessels into Shanghai's port annually. Trade along the Yangzi River brought additionally more than five thousand vessels annually from inland ports. These boats did not go out to sea but distributed goods brought by the coastal trade from Shanghai into the interior.

The trade visible to the Europeans who arrived in the mid-nineteenth century reflected the commercial development of the Jiangnan area during the Qing dynasty. In the early Qing, the imperial government established the internal customs bureau for Jiangnan in the city of Shanghai to regulate the trade of locally produced cotton and cloth and the beans, sugar and cotton of the north-south coastal trade. The development of a commodity economy is evident from the fact that by the late seventeenth century most cultivated land around Shanghai had been transferred from rice to cotton or, secondarily, to bean cultivation. While the men in these districts farmed, the women wove, and families traded their cloth for money and rice.^[3]

The development of the domestic market is evident also from the establishment of numerous native-place trade associations in Shanghai during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Stone inscriptions, or stelae, found in the old sections of the city indicate the presence of at least twenty-six such associations in Shanghai before the Opium War.^[4] The earliest association recorded is the Guan-Shandong Gongsuo, established by boat owners of the neighboring northern bang of Guan-dong and Shandong.^[5] They established a burial ground in Shanghai during the Shunzhi reign (1654-61). Second was the Shangchuan Huiguan, established in 1715 by boat owners of Chongming Island, at the mouth of the Yangzi. These associations of shipping merchants, distinguished

[3] SBZX, 1; Du Li, "Yapian zhanzheng qian Shanghai hanghui xingzhi zhi shanbian" (Changes in the character of Shanghai trade associations before the Opium War), in Zhonghuo zibenzhuyi mengya wenti lunwenji (Compilation of papers concerning the sprouts of capitalism in China), ed. Nanjing daxue lishixi Ming-Qing shi yanjiushi (Nanjing, 1983) 142-43; Philip Huang, The Peasant Family and Rural Development in the Yangzi Delta , 1350-1988 (Stanford, Calif., 1990), 45; Linda Cooke Johnson, "The Decline of Soochow and the Rise of Shanghai: A Study in the Economic Morphology of Urban Change, 1756-1894" (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Santa Cruz, 1980), pp. 88-95.

[4] Du, "Yapian zhanzheng qian Shanghai hanghui," 146. Because it is based on surviving stelae, Du's figure is conservative. Important huiguan existed for which there are no remaining stelae (of seven huiguan mentioned in the records of the Small Sword Uprising, for example, three are not to be found in the stela collection).

[5] Guandong refers to the northeastern provinces (Dongbei ), to which many Shan-dong people migrated during the Qing. The establishment of this association in Shanghai suggests an early active trade with northern ports, supplying the lower Yangzi with soy foods and fertilizer.

by native place, were followed by associations of Shanghai cloth merchants and money dealers; Beijing goods and hat merchants; Fujian sugar and foreign-goods merchants; Fujian shipping merchants; Fujian longan and black-date merchants; Fujian paper and rope merchants; Shaoxing and Zhejiang bean and coal merchants; Ningbo merchants and bankers; Anhui tea merchants; Chaozhou sugar and tobacco merchants; northern goods merchants; Jiangxi merchants and ship owners; and Jiangxi tea merchants, among others.^[6]

Many associations established buildings with meeting halls and altars in the area of the Small East Gate, where the Chinese internal customs office was located, or in the east and west gardens of the Shanghai City God Temple in the north of the walled city (see Map 2). On their altars rested images of Tianhou, local gods, or patron gods of specific trades. The Ningbo, Guangdong and Fujian associations were especially powerful, so they are a focus of this chapter. By the early nineteenth century, Ningbo traders were in the ascendant, consolidating control over the ;Shanghai economy through two institutions, the Siming Gongsuo and the Shanghai Money Trade Guild (Shanghai qianye gongsuo ), outdistancing their Guangdong and Fujian rivals. This configuration of power was disrupted in the aftermath of the Opium War.^[7]