第2章 In the beginning

Liverpool's Anglo-Chinese community owed its existence to three things that were happening at around the same time. One was the long, slow and painful death of the Chinese Empire. Then the later warlordism made the life of people more and more difficult. some of them selected to work on foreign ships. The second was the invention by Alfred Holt, a Liverpool ship owner, of a marine steam engine far more efficient than anything else available up to that time. Many Holt`s ships appeared on the far east line and monopolized it. The third was the abolition in 1849 of the British Navigation Acts. The Navigation Acts which required that 75 percent of the crew of a British merchant vessel be British sailors. So Chinese would have more opportunity to work on British Ships.

The way was now open for increasing trade with China. What is more, it could now be carried out in efficient steam powered ships and those ships could be manned by cheap and efficient Chinese crews.

The background

Qianlong, the last great Chinese Emperor had been dead（died）for over 40 years when, in 1840, the British broke down the doors of the Middle Kingdom and took the island of Hong Kong. By then it had been half a century since the trade mission to China led by the Earl of Mc Cartney had been told by Qianlong 'We possess all things…and have no need of your country's manufactures.'[1]In effect, slamming the door in the face of not just the British but any other country that wished to trade with China. China's Self-sufficient natural economy has a strong resistance to foreign goods, in the early Sino-British trade, China was in long-term trade surplus position, so the British began to bring opium to China to offset the trade deficit. They had a ready supply of it from its Indian colony and began shipping it into China in ever-increasing quantities.

By the 1840s the rapid growth of the opium trade was inflicting significant damage on the Chinese Empire both economically and socially. Attempts by the Chinese Government to stifle the trade led to war with Britain. A war that the British won easily with their state of the art warships and military hardware.

The Chinese were humiliated and forced to sign the first of what, to this day, the Chinese Government call 'The Unequal Treaties'. Hong Kong was handed over to Britain and a series of other towns were opened to the victors as centres for trade. Among them Shanghai and Ningbo-places that, along with Hong Kong, would be of key importance for the formation of Liverpool's Anglo-Chinese community,[2]most of the Chinese building up the Anglo-Chinese community in the coming days would come from these ports.

By the 1860s the decay of the Chinese Empire had progressed to the point where it was being wracked by Taiping or Heavenly Peace Rebellion that was to cost tens of millions of lives. A civil war that was itself a by-product of the opening of China to the West. Christian missionaries now had access to China and its teeming population and soon began to make converts, particularly among the poor and the marginalised. The Hakka were just such a group. Originating in the north of China, these so-called 'guest people' had been living in the southern Province of Guangdong for centuries. The province of which Hong Kong had been a part before the British took the island.

One young Hakka man, Hong Xiuquan, had been exposed to the teachings of the missionaries now operating more or less freely in the Empire. After repeatedly failing in the examinations for the Imperial Civil Service he had what can only be described as a nervous breakdown. He became convinced that he was the Son of God, the brother of Christ.[3]Setting out to make converts amongst the oppressed Hakka, he was soon leading a rebellion against the Empire. This so-called Taiping or Heavenly Peace Rebellion would last for over a decade and devastate vast areas of Northern China. It would even lap at the very edges of what was by then the British run city of Shanghai. Not only did millions die in this conflict but millions more were left in what would be for us in the modern and affluent West a state of unimaginable poverty and desperation.

It was more or less at this point that Alfred Holt enters the story. His efficient new marine steam engine was a true technological breakthrough. Its invention meant that a vessel no longer had to carry so much coal that there was not enough space to load a profitable cargo. It meant that his ships could sail all the way around the world to China and do so at a price that undercut his rivals. This would help to make him a very rich man.[4]

But it was not just his new engine that gave Alfred Holt an advantage. The other key element in his simple but very effective formula for success was that he began to employ Chinese seamen. Cheaper by far than their British counterparts and far more reliable, they had been used by the British since at least the time of the Napoleonic Wars. Then they had been recruited to replace British seamen taken into the Royal Navy. And, as we shall see, that was to happen again in the twentieth century in both the First and Second World Wars.

For the British recruiting Chinese mariners made sense. They did not drink alcohol and become violent or utterly incapacitated as the British seamen did. Their diet made them immune from the scurvy that killed or debilitated most European crews on long voyages. The Chinese made good seamen and China had a long and proud maritime history. They had been travelling the world long before Europe was even aware that most of it existed.

In the fifteenth century the Chinese Emperor had sent out vast fleets to explore the world and demonstrate the power and wealth of China. Under the eunuch Admiral Zheng He the Chinese had, so some writers believe, discovered the Americas and Australia, sailed around the world and drawn the maps that Europeans were to use in the centuries ahead in their own 'discoveries'.[5]The Chinese seamen that Alfred Holt was to recruit were the heirs to a great tradition.

But in the poor and chaotic China of the mid-nineteenth century the power and might of centuries past was a long distant memory. The China that faced Alfred Holt was one that provided him with an almost unlimited supply of willing and desperate labour. From Hong Kong and surrounding Guangdong Province tough and strong young peasants had already been flooding out to the gold fields of California and Australia over the previous decade. They were working to build the American railroads and would be shipped out as virtual slave labour to South America and anywhere else that would take them. For almost the next 100 years they would provide Holt's Blue Funnel Line with its deckhands. The men who would work on deck in all weathers. The men that young Fred Bishop[6]would remember so well for their courage in the storm that so damaged his ship.

But Alfred Holt also had available to him skilled and experienced seamen. Recruiting in Shanghai he had access to the fishermen and the sons of fishermen who lived on the islands off the coast. Men familiar with the sea and its ways. Men who had learned their craft in small boats and for whom Alfred Holt's vessels would seem like floating palaces. Over time, as Shanghai became China's industrial centre, it would be the skilled tradesmen and engineers from the city and from Ningbo that would keep the Blue Funnel vessels sailing from the UK to Australia and the Far East.

注释

[1]Singer, A. 'The Lion and the Dragon', Barrie and Jenkins, London 1992, Appendix A Edict from the Emperor Qianlong to King George III, pp.180-182.

[2]Spence, J.D. 'The Search for Modern China', W. W. Norton and Company, London 1999, pp.160-162.

[3]Spence, J.D. 'God's Chinese Son: the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom of Hong Xiuquan', Harper Collins, London 1996 Foreword p. ix.

[4]Craggs, S and Lynn, I Loh 'A History of Liverpool's Chinese Community', Merseyside Community Relations Council, Liverpool, 1985, pp.1-2.

[5]Menzies, G. '1421: the Year China Discovered the World', Transworld Publishers, London, 2002, pp. 3-12.

[6]Fred Bishop was an old seaman who got in touch with Yvonne to tell her about this story.