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

Western powers. Because of Sino-Western trade, today's scholars call the decades from 1820 through 1880 China's commercial revolution, which came into full bloom by the 1860s.²³ The year of Zheng's birth saw the signing of the Nanjing treaty and Shanghai's first step from a domestic trading center to an international metropolis. During the 1850s, Western countries established about 200 trading institutions in Shanghai, double the amount existing in 1844.²⁴ In 1861 a total of 1,806 merchant ships berthed at Shanghai, and the number jumped to 3,400 in 1863.²⁵

With the expansion of Western settlement came spatial and social changes. Reformist thinker Wang Tao, Zheng Guanying's intellectual partner, commented about viewing Shanghai in his memoir: “Lights are on all day and all night.…nowadays the west of the Huangpu River is the commercial depot of the Westerners, where pavilions and towers look colorful and gorgeous.…when a newcomer views them from a boat, it is just like a picture.”²⁶ In reminiscences, Wang Tao depicted the scenery of Shanghai with admiration as well as poetic rhetoric: “Once getting on the Huangpu River, the atmosphere changes dramatically,” he wrote. “The water and fog look dark and blue and masts are crowded. There are only Westerners’ buildings on the Bund, whose lofty and brilliant pavilions extend beyond the clouds.”²⁷ Located around the central point between China's northern and southern parts and facing the Pacific Ocean, Shanghai was in a privileged position to borrow from the outside world and from different parts of China.

The spatial layout of the treaty ports differed from typical Chinese urban centers. John King Fairbank pointed out that “the foreign settlements were situated outside the Chinese walled cities on the banks of navigable rivers, the Yung and Whangpu, and some eighteen and twelve miles, respectively, from their mouths,” and that “Westerners in China followed a fixed pattern of settlement by living within the distance of 12–18 miles from the river port, and created a treaty port culture with shipyard, churches, clubs, consulates and horse race track court.”²⁸ The maps of Hankou and Shanghai in the late Qing period bear an amazing resemblance to each other. In both cities, the city wall surrounds the urban centers that are political and administration oriented. Although half of Wuchang (part of the Wuhan tri-city)