Zheng Guanying, Merchant Reformer of Late Qing China and his Infl ...

faces the Yangtze River, the entire city was an enclave bound by the city wall. The same pattern can be found in the smaller Hanyang (also part of Wuhan), where a government office was established. Across the Yangtze River, the commercial center of Hankou had only one side blocked by the city wall, while the other side was fully open to the Yangtze and Han rivers. The map of Shanghai shows the same traits. The city wall surrounded the southern city that was administered by the Chinese Yamen, while the Western settlement in the northern part of the city was open to the Huangpu River and the ocean. Yet even within Shanghai's city wall, there were some subtle differences from a classical Chinese city. From the beginning, Shanghai was not a political center but rather a trading depot with administrative functions, and its urban planning did not follow the Chinese tradition of a symmetrical grid, like Beijing, Xi’an, and Chengdu. In these three cities, the well-designed urban layout and the building of a city wall showed the effective management of the city by the state, but commercial cities like Shanghai were more liberal organic cities.

The administration of Shanghai in the nineteenth century was a compromise between commercial interests and the political class. Previously, the Su-Song-Tai circuit intendant [Daotai] under the Jiangsu provincial governor superintended the Shanghai area. After 1731, the Daotai office moved from Taicang County to Shanghai and was renamed the Shanghai Daotai. In 1843, while Shanghai was opened to foreign trade, the Daotai was required to deal with foreign affairs and trade regulations. From 1850 to 1854, with the rise of new urban elite in Shanghai and the demand of expertise in foreign language and related experience, a former Cohong merchant also from Xiangshan, Wu Jianzhang, became the Shanghai Daotai (1850–1854). Wu was a comprador merchant with political ambitions and entered the bureaucracy by purchasing a degree.²⁹ He and his successor Wu Xu became “linkage men” between China and the West and the protectors of the interests of foreign business and compradors. The collaboration between the Shanghai Daotai and the Western power was manifest during the crisis of the Taiping Rebellion (1850–1864), one of the largest civil wars in world history. In 1853 the rebels took