Chapter VI: The Foreigners—hankow and British Trade

Hankow or Hanmouth, Wu-Chang Fu, the capital of HUPEH, and Han Yang would be one city were they not bisected by the broad, rolling Yangtze, nearly a mile wide, and its great tributary the Han. Hankow and Han Yang are on the north bank, and Wu-Chang on the south. The “congeries of cities,” as the three have been aptly termed, is about 600 miles from Shanghai. Till 1863 Hankow was an open city, but the dread of an attack by northern banditti that year led the Government to enclose it with a stone wall, four miles in circuit and thirteen feet in height, raised by a brick parapet to eighteen feet.

Hankow considers that it has the finest bund in China, and I have no wish to dispute its assertion. In truth its length of 800 yards, its breadth of 80, its lofty and noble river wall and fine flights of stone stairs, ascending 40 feet from low water, its broad promenade and carriage-way and avenue of fine trees, with the “palatial” houses, very similar to those of Shanghai and Singapore, on the other side in large gardens and shaded by exotic trees, make it scarcely credible that the first authentic visit of Europeans to the city was that made by Lord Elgin in H.M.S. _Furious_ in 1858, and that the site for this stately British settlement was only chosen in 1861, the year in which the port was opened to foreign trade.

Among the principal buildings are the British and French Consulates, the residence of the Commissioner of Customs, and the Municipal Buildings. There is a Municipal Council charged with the same functions as that at Shanghai, and Sikh policemen make a goodly show. Dead levels are not attractive unless they are bounded by the living ocean, and the bund is dull and gives one the impression that the British settlement has “seen better days.”

The foreign community consists of the consuls and their staffs, the _employés_ of the Chinese Maritime Customs, a very few professional men, a large number of British and American missionaries, and the members of British and other European mercantile firms, Russians taking a very prominent position. The residents have carried their amusements with them, and amuse themselves on a small scale after the fashion of those at Shanghai. There is a popular club which welcomes passing visitors, and combines social attractions with a library, reading-room, and billiard-room, keeping in touch with the world by frequent telegrams. There is a creditable newspaper—the _Hankow Times_, which has papers on Chinese, social, and other subjects—an episcopal service, a hotel, a livery stable, and other necessaries of the British exile’s life. Kindness and cordial hospitality to strangers are not less characteristic of Hankow than of the less frequented ports.

The climate is not an agreeable one. The summers, lasting from May till the middle of September, are hot and damp, and severe cases of malarial and typhoid fever are not unusual. The atmosphere is thick and stagnant, and there are swarms of mosquitoes. Some of the men residents pass the hottest summer nights on the bund to get the little air stirring on the river, and the Chinese sleep on their roofs and in the streets. The autumn months are very pleasant, the mercury falls to the freezing point in January, and after light frosts there is a damp, raw period till warm weather sets in again.

Neither Hankow nor its neighbours have any special features of interest except their gigantic trade. The populations are not openly unfriendly; but Consul Carles, his wife, and I, although attended, had mud thrown at us at Han Yang.

The glory of Hankow, as well as its terror, is the magnificent Yangtze, nearly a mile wide even in winter, rolling majestically past the bund, lashed into a dangerous fury by storms, or careering buoyantly before breezes; in summer, an inland sea fifty feet deep. In July and early August Hankow is at its worst, and the rise of the river is watched with much anxiety. The bund is occasionally submerged, boats ply between houses and offices, the foundations of buildings are softened, exercise is suspended, gardens are destroyed, much business stands still, frail native houses are swept away—as many of those perched on piles were, with much loss of life, in the summer rise of 1898—and thousands are deprived of shelter and livelihood, and when the water falls widespread distress and a malarious film of mud are left behind. The appearance of the SZE CHUAN water, the red product of the “Red Basin” of Richthofen, indicates to the Chinese intelligence the approaching subsidence of the water, and points to a fact of some scientific interest. During the ordinary summer rise the whole region, viewed from Pagoda Hill, has the dismal aspect of a turbid, swirling inland sea, above which many villages with trees appear, built on mounds, probably of ancient construction.

Hankow is the most westerly port in which the Mexican dollar is actually current, and even in its back country copper _cash_ are preferred to either coined or uncoined silver. For western travel, over and above any amount of cash which the traveller can burden himself with, “sycee” silver is necessary, which can be obtained from the agency of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, as well as “good paper”—Chinese drafts on Chinese merchants of repute in the far west. Silver “shoes,” as the uncouth lumps of silver obtained from the banks are called, are worth about fifty taels, but the tael itself is not of fixed value, the Haikwan tael, in which the Customs and some other accounts are kept, varying from the Shanghai tael, and that again from the Hankow tael, and so on.

Nor is this all. The silver itself is unfortunately of variable quality. Hankow sycee is of 2½ per cent. higher “standard” than Shanghai sycee, and SZE CHUAN silver is of higher standard than that of Hankow, so that the traveller is subject to frequent losses on his bullion, besides suffering a good deal from delays and annoyances consequent on weighings and occasional testings, though the trained eye alone can usually detect the inferior “touch” of his silver. “Confusion worse confounded” describes the currency system, if “currency” is an applicable word, when once the simplicity of the Mexican dollar is left behind, and I ceased to be surprised at the employment of Chinese “shroffs” by foreign firms, for what but an Oriental intellect could unravel the mysteries of “touch,” the differences in the value of taels, the soundness and genuineness of _cash_, and the daily variations and entanglements of the exchanges?

In a treaty port which has been open for thirty-nine years, and which in 1898 had a net import trade of £3,422,669, and a net export trade of £4,643,048, and of which, so far as the import of foreign goods is concerned, the British share is one half, the stranger naturally expects to find British merchants piling up big fortunes, and the size and stateliness of the houses on the bund gives colour to this expectation.

But, in fact, while the British firms in Hankow are merely branches of houses in Shanghai, their Chinese rivals, who have driven them out of the import trade, are Hankow merchants with branches in Shanghai. There are about eleven of these big native firms which supply the Hankow market with British cotton goods, and which have risen on the ruins of British competitors. These wealthy firms, dealing wholesale, supply the up-country merchants and local shopkeepers, buying goods through their branches in Shanghai, which employ Chinese brokers speaking “pidgun” English to buy the particular goods they want from the foreign importers. They keep well up to date regarding Shanghai auction sales, of which they get catalogues in Chinese, and are quick to seize on every small advantage. The British merchant was shortsighted enough totally to neglect to open up direct business relations with the up-country merchants, and was content to deal entirely with the Hankow native importer, to whom he left all the advantages of local connection and knowledge.[18]

This unfortunate state of things does not seem likely to improve either in Hankow or elsewhere. Our methods of doing business are frank and open, and the Chinese merchants have become as well acquainted with foreign trade methods as are Europeans themselves, while of their customs in trade and their arrangements among themselves for conducting business we know scarcely anything, and have no organisations equivalent to those centred in the guilds. Whether it is too late to stem the tide which is gradually sweeping business out of foreign into native hands I know not, but though actual British trade may not suffer, the openings for young men in mercantile houses in China are diminishing yearly, unless capital, push, a preference for business over athletics, a working knowledge of the Chinese language and business methods, and a determination to succeed, should develop the trade and traffic of the Tungting lake, and turn to account the great possibilities for Lancashire trade in HUNAN, even though the ground lost in other directions can never be recovered.

As to the trade of Hankow, naturally an interesting subject, I shall make very few remarks, the first being that in the year 1898, 550,000 tons of British shipping entered the port, against 60,624 of all other nationalities, exclusive of the Chinese, Japan taking the lead among them with 32,099. Hankow has lost much of her once enormous tea trade, owing to deterioration in quality and the change of fashion in England.[19] Russian merchants now have the tea trade in their hands; they have factories for the production of “brick tea” at both Hankow and Kiu-kiang, while in 1898 five of the big steamers of the Russian Volunteer Fleet loaded tea direct for Odessa, and one steamer for St. Petersburg.

German and Austrian firms have started several albumen factories in Hankow, the best of the product being used in photography; the Japanese are now running two steamers a week between it and Shanghai, and will not improbably “cut in” ahead of others for the trade and traffic of the lake and inland rivers. Numbers of these alert traders have come up the Yangtze, and in their practical way are spreading themselves through the country, finding out the requirements and tastes of the people, and quietly pushing their trade in small articles, while Japan is also going ahead with her larger exports, the quantity of her cotton yarn imported into Hankow having risen from 150 cwt. in 1895 to 260,332 in 1898, displacing Indian yarn to a considerable extent. Japanese merchants, like the German, do not despise _littles_ in trade, and are content with small profits, and most of what is known as the “muck and truck” trade is in their hands, in extending which they will prove formidable competitors of each other. Nor ought the competition of Japan in the larger branches of trade to be ignored by us, for to extend her markets is an absolute necessity of her existence, and the markets of China are a fair field for her commercial ambition.

I cannot omit all mention of kerosene oil, the import of which increases “by leaps and bounds,” American taking the lead, and which is greatly diminishing the production of the native illuminating oils. This kerosene oil, imported from Russia, America, and Sumatra, to the quantity, in 1898, of 16,055,000 gallons, goes from Hankow through six provinces. It is one among the agents which are producing changes in the social life of China. I have seen the metamorphosis effected by it in the village life of the Highlands of Scotland and Korea, where the saucer of fish oil, with its smoky wick, and the dim, dull _andon_ have been replaced by the bright, cheerful “paraffin lamp,” a gathering point for the family, rendering industry and occupation possible. Chinese rooms are inconceivably dark, and smoking, sleeping, and gambling were the only possible modes of getting rid of the long winter evenings among the poorer classes till kerosene oil came upon the scene.

Hankow has eight regular guilds, which are banks and cash shops, rice and grain dealers, clothiers and mercers, grocers and oilmen, ironmasters, wholesale dealers in copper and metals, dealers in KIANGSI china, and wholesale druggists, Hankow having one of the largest and best drug markets in China. It would be well if we realised the extreme importance of these and similar trade organisations. We may talk of spheres of interest and influence, and make commercial treaties giving us the advantages of the “most favoured nation” clause; but till we understand the power of the guilds, and can cope with them on terms of equality, and are “up to Chinese methods of business,” we shall continue to see what we are now seeing at Hankow and elsewhere, which I have already alluded to. There is much that is admirable in these guilds, and their trades-unionism, combinations, and systems of terrorism are as perfect as any machinery of the same kind in England. In any matters affecting the joint interests of a trade, the members or their delegates meet and consult. The rules of guilds are both light and severe, and no infringement of them is permitted without a corresponding penalty; these penalties vary from a feast and a theatrical entertainment being inflicted on the guilty person to expulsion from the guild in a flagrant case, which means the commercial ruin of the offender.