Page:Twentieth Century Impressions of Hongkong, Shanghai, and other Treaty Ports of China.djvu/21



N the history of European Commerce there is no more interesting, and, in its influence on international events, no more important chapter than that which relates to the opening of the Chinese Empire to British trade. The long drawn out struggle which in its earliest stage culminated in the Treaty of Nanking was something more than a contest for the right to barter. It was a fight between two opposite, and to a very large extent antagonistic, systems of civilisation. On the one hand was the East, self-contained, self-absorbed, living its narrow life in beatific indifference to, if not positive ignorance of, the remainder of the world. What it did not know was not knowledge; those who were outside its pale were barbarians; its rulers were the rulers of all things mundane and of some things celestial. On the other side was the West, bustling, aggressive, sometimes arrogant, confident in itself and conscious of its power, infused with a spirit of progress which gained additional impetus as every new discovery of science furnished it with fresh weapons to use to batter down the wall which racial prejudice and exclusiveness had reared up against it. That one misunderstood the other—was indeed profoundly ignorant of the motives which were the mainsprings of the other's action—added intensity to the battle. To the official Chinese the efforts of the European to make his foothold good on the soil of China were an unwarrantable intrusion on the part of a visitor with many objectionable characteristics. As for the European, and especially the Britisher, he could see in the determined measures to keep him at arm's length—a suppliant and humble guest without the gate—only the bigoted manifestations of a diseased egotism added to a crass and virulent congenital dislike of the foreigner. And so the conflict went on until the door was violently forced from without and the breath of a new commercial life was breathed into China. Then the giant stirred, but it was only the stretching of the sleeper before the full awakening. Another half-century or more was to pass and China was to see in blacker outline the shadow of irretrievable disaster before the lessons of the West were received, and even then her acceptance was only partial and hesitating. It remained for the cataclysm of the Russo-Japanese War to drive home at last the moral taught, if China could only have realised it by the first European ship that visited her shores, that China was not the world and that if she would preserve her independence and her self-respect she must avail herself of the advantages of Western civilisation, not the least of which are those which pertain to an uninterrupted commerce.

When Albuquerque and his men descended, as Sir George Birdwood picturesquely puts it, "like a pack of hungry wolves" upon an astonished Eastern world, they found trade flowing in tranquil fashion in channels which had been used for ages. Vessels hugging the shore made their way from the Chinese coast to Singhapura or to some other port in the straits, from whence their cargoes were carried by Arab craft to India and Persia. Overland the rich fabrics and spices of the East were transmitted to the Levant for distribution to the more populous centres of Europe. The trade was a strictly Oriental one. An occasional European traveller, like Marco Polo, found his way into the interior of China and even over portions of the sea route; but it had not entered into the calculations of the most imaginative that from beyond the sea would come in great ships bodies of men of this strange white race whose existence was a mere shadowy myth to the great mass of the population. With wonder, therefore, not unmingled with awe, the strangers were received at the places at which they touched. In the case of the Chinese a feeling of superstitious dread tinged the lively apprehensions which the appearance of the Portuguese barques in the China Sea excited. From immemorial times had come down a tradition that the Chinese Empire would one day be conquered by a fair-haired grey-eyed race. The legend pointed to the advent of the conquerors in the north, but there was sufficient identity between the story and the actual facts of the mysterious appearance of the strangers from the beyond to give potency to fears which, perhaps, were never absent from the minds of the ruling classes of China owing to the enormous stretch of frontier and the difficulties of maintaining