With Guangzhou wreathed in atypical smog, today seemed as good a day as any to ensconce in the study, a quietly stewing kettle of wuyishan black tea to my side, and try to get back to the blog.

Following a few trips to some of the odder colonial ventures in early modern China – the concession at little Yichang far up the Yangtze; France’s lost Kouang-Tchéou-Wan 广州湾 colony in present Zhanjiang – the lived experiences of these remote imperial outputs has been occupying me. The sheer surreality of diplomats, missionaries and business folk setting up stall in isolated Chinese towns – where even today a foreign face elicits gawping and catcalls – with a full assemblage of familiar architecture, street names; shops, telegram offices; churches and cathedral. Who were these people? And as importantly, how must it have felt for the average Chinese laobaixing to hear of a remote treaty in their distant capital, leading to boatloads of foreign devils strutting along the quayside, content in their extraterritoriality?

And so I wanted to reflect a little bit on one of the weirder ports – little Wuzhou (梧州 – or Ngchow in Cantonese). As I don’t have access to much archival material, this is going to be mostly my own reflections and memories from my potter around late last year.

A life removed

So, our scene: Wuzhou now sits on the Guangxi-Guangdong border, deep into China’s hinterland at the head of the Xi River 西江 which flows down to Guangzhou and the Pearl River Delta. Now a sleepy inland city, it was once a veritable trade entrepôt – pre-1949, up to 80% of Guangxi’s trade poured through the city. As part of their growing encroachment into Qing-ruled China, in 1897 the British Empire opened a Consulate in Wuzhou to manage the growing British stake in this trade.

The first thing that strikes is how grim life must have been for the Consuls and their staff. Of the first batch of Consuls dispatched to China in the early 19th century, 1/3rd died in post – leading to the British to establish a Shanghai branch of the Office of Works in 1867, to launch an urgent campaign to build proper premises.

While Wuzhou benefited from this, its location cannot have made things easy. Late 19th century China was poor and rural. The nearest diplomatic posts lay over mountains to the south west (Beihai) or several days steamer to the east (Guangzhou). Conditions would have been tough. A Consul in Beihai earlier in the century was once awoken to find his bedding being carried out by a horde of dozens of enormous rats, invading the warmest house in the city. Summers in Guangxi are seething; and abutting the river, with wetlands around the city, conditions would likely have been malarial with little hope of good quality medical care. In flood, the main city would be submerged, residents using boats to access their homes via the second floor – and one suspects ruining sanitation for months.

The compound was equipped for some leisure – a tennis court, stables, a sheltered yard in the residence. And the British were not the only foreigners – aside from itinerant traders, further up the hill (still) stands an American missionary school.

Ships carrying victuals and supplies would have been frequent. And throughout its life, the Consulate would have seen Wuzhou’s development – now marked by dilapidated but beautiful colonnaded streets in the old city centre, the qilou 骑楼 architecture characterising south China and East Asian diaspora cities showing the former prosperity. But this was not a wild city of sin like Shanghai, or a leafy enclave like Guanzhou’s Shamian island or Xiamen’s Gulangyu. The community would have been small and – I would guess – inhabited by those who lacked the ability or ambition to head to more profitable and comfortable posts elsewhere in the country. Think less ‘exciting frontier’, and more the venal and tragi-comic colonial settlement of Katha, painted so well by Orwell in Burmese Days.

The sneer of cold command

Wuzhou is an unusual post in that the land was acquired by perpetual lease – whether intentionally or not, a signal of intent to the local population. The local museum still displays the boundary stone demarcating the entire hill which hosted the Consulate as British territory, forbidding locals to even set foot on their ancestral land. It’s not hard to imagine the insult and injustice felt.

Its location allowed the Consulate easy access to the river and wharves, while the residence was removed from the city to offer some protection from disease (and local strife). But as a result, the spatialisation of the Consulate – again, whether by design or accident – oozes superiority. It looms not only over a nearby Daoist temple, but also looks across the river – and down – on Wuzhou’s ancient temple complex to the Dragon Goddess 龙母, the local deity. At the same time, the Consulate’s relation to the old town of Wuzhou – sited on lower ground across the river – could have not been better designed for a garrison or fort. While not militarised, the omnipresent sight of the outpost, arbitrarily occupied by a foreign, cannot but have chafed.

Interactions and tensions

Throughout its existence, the Consulate was a source of local tension and a target of ire. A series of incidents – disputes over shipping and British citizens’ extraterritoriality (the right to be treated under British rather than local law), shootings by trigger-happy Sepoys – led to a febrile atmosphere. This was further inflamed by the wider context of China’s overthrow of the Qing, nationalist revolution, and growing rhetoric against foreigners. In 1926, on the first anniversary of the anti-imperialist May 30th movement (itself motivated colonial police in Shanghai shooting protestors), mass protests broke out in Wuzhou against the Consulate.

The entirety of the local staff resigned. With the post becoming increasingly unviable, in 1928 the British Consul-General in Guangzhou signed an agreement with Guangxi’s provincial chief to return the whole territory. A stele – now the source of much local pride – was erected next to the Consulate to mark the reclamation.

This background sets the tone for what dialogue and interaction there might have been between the foreign community and locals. With local staff and the need to actually do business, there must have been some degree of bilingualism – but I would imagine mostly mono-directional, with the local Consuls unlikely to take the time to learn Wuzhou’s Cantonese dialect, a supposition borne out by increasing misunderstandings and clashes. In Qing and then warlord China, there would have been little motivation to leave the compound’s relative safety to risk poor hygiene, brigands, and anti-imperial locals. And at risk of being uncharitable, the apathetics I envisage being posted here do not fit the mould of the Sinophile yearning to understand and form links with his (for they were all men) posting country.

Undoubtedly, the foreign presence brought prosperity to Wuzhou – the city’s extant architecture bears testament. But this would not equate to just distribution of the fruits – one imagines unfair monopolies between foreigners and local toadies (one again thinks of Orwell’s corpulent U Po Kyin), driving corruption and exploitation of the less fortunate. With no redress for abuses from the British or their local favourites, not to mention the lost dignity of the imperial imposition looming over their city, even the most tolerant British or Chinese would have struggled to find a venue for dialogue and interaction. The Consulate’s early demise would bear this out.

The end and legacy

It is difficult for an amateur like me to trace the impact of colonialism to today’s China, as one has to chart a course through the huge rupture 1949 and the Communist victory brought to the country. Even the longest lasting enclaves – Shanghai, Tianjin – were rapidly denuded of their foreign populations, with the private industry and cultural baggage they had brought rapidly collectivised and Sinicised. This is even more the case for a small outpost like Wuzhou, lasting only thirty years and never bringing more than a tiny minority population.

The experiences of those who’d lived there – on both sides of the imperial divide – still fascinates me, and I’d welcome any pointers to easily accessible archive material or accounts to challenge and hopefully overturn some of the above assumptions. For now – and as much as possible in China, where imperial submission and colonial humiliation still remains an intensely sensitive issue – I will try and chart a course that stays receptive to the cold reality of the unequal treaties and foreign adventuring, while still appreciating the remarkable architectural, social and cultural legacies that they left in their wake.