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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 November 2024
The 1850s and 1860s were a crucial era in the history of East Asia. The opening of treaty ports and advances in information and navigational technologies both generated new commercial opportunities and brought more people and commodities from Europe and America to East Asia. What were the consequences of these political and socioeconomic changes and the resultant spatial interconnections? I argue that spatial interconnections rendered centuries-old nonstate spaces in East Asia increasingly problematic, to the extent of creating international conflicts. To illustrate this, I reconstruct the mutual influence among places constructed by and shown in the lives of the shipwrecked American vessel Rover and its crew in East Asian waters. Their activities embodied how transpacific and East Asian communication and commerce, and the growing treaty port community in China, became entangled with how Taiwanese aborigines managed their interaction with the outside world. In this and similar borderland incidents, spatial interconnections between central and peripheral East Asia constructed by ordinary people crossing borders, and the problems arising from such interactions, led to the problematization of peripheries in the 1860s.
1 When contemporaries talked about the treaty port of Niuzhuang, they meant the port of Yingkou. Niuzhuang was the name used in the Treaty of Tianjin, although it was in fact an inland city. Yuxiang, Song and Qunyuan, Chen, “20 Shiji yilai dongbei chengshi de fazhan jiqi lishi zuoyong,” Dili yanjiu 24, no. 1 (January 2005): 89–97Google Scholar; Mayers, WM. Fred. and Dennys, N.B., The Treaty Ports of China and Japan, ed. Dennys, N.B. (London: Trübner, 1867), 538Google Scholar.
2 Robert Eskildsen offers a succinct introduction to the incident. Eskildsen, Robert, ed., Foreign Adventurers and the Aborigines of Southern Taiwan, 1867-1874: Western Sources Related to Japan's 1874 Expedition to Taiwan (Taipei: Institute of Taiwan History, Academia Sinica, 2005), 3–6Google Scholar.
3 According to James C. Scott's definition, “nonstate space . . . points to locations where, owing largely to geographical obstacles, the state has particular difficulty in establishing and maintaining its authority.” The term appropriately describes Langqiao's political conditions. Inhabiting such a nonstate space, Langqiao's residents were largely autonomous. Scott, James C., The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 13Google Scholar.
4 Davidson, James Wheeler, The Island of Formosa: Historical View from 1430 to 1900 (London: Macmillan, 1903), 115–22Google Scholar; Kanori, Inō, Taiwan wenhuazhi: Quanxin shendingban, ed. Taiwan, Guoshiguan wenxianguan (New Taipei: Dajia chuban, 2017), vol. 3: 406Google Scholar; Yen, Sophia Su-fei, Taiwan in China's Foreign Relations, 1836-1874 (Hamden, CT: Shoe String Press, 1965), 125–36Google Scholar; Carrington, George Williams, Foreigners in Formosa, 1841-1874 (San Francisco: Chinese Materials Center, 1977), 152–68Google Scholar; Chia-mu, Huang, Meiguo yu Taiwan: 1874 zhi 1895, 2nd ed. (Taipei: Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica, 1979), 201–23Google Scholar; David F. Long, “The Diplomat versus the Sailor: Armed Intervention in Taiwan, 1867,” in Naval History: The Seventh Symposium of the U.S. Naval Academy, ed. William B. Cogar and Patricia Sine (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1988), 107–16; Gordon, Leonard H. D., Confrontation over Taiwan: Nineteenth-Century China and the Powers (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007), 56–66Google Scholar; Tsai, Shih-shan Henry, Maritime Taiwan: Historical Encounters with the East and the West (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2009), 117–18Google Scholar.
5 Fix, Douglas L., “The Changing Contours of Lived Communities on the Hengchun Peninsula, 1850-1874,” in Guojia yu yuanzhumin: Yatai diqu zuqun lishi yanjiu, ed. Hong, Liwan (Taipei: Institute of Taiwan History, Academia Sinica, 2009), 233–82Google Scholar; Jirō, Hane, “Rōbāgō jiken no kaiketsu katei nitsuite,” Nippon Taiwan gatsukaihou, no. 10 (May 2008): 75–96Google Scholar; Barclay, Paul D., Outcasts of Empire: Japan's Rule on Taiwan's “Savage Border,” 1874-1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018), 56–65Google Scholar.
6 Eskildsen, Robert, Transforming Empire in Japan and East Asia: The Taiwan Expedition and the Birth of Japanese Imperialism (Singapore: Springer Singapore, 2019), 43–71Google Scholar. To be sure, the scholarship falling into the first two categories does not entirely ignore the local or international contexts. What differentiates the three categories are different research agendas. Furthermore, as always, efforts to categorize research will encounter borderline cases.
7 Fairbank, John K., “The Creation of the Treaty System,” in The Cambridge History of China, ed. Fairbank, John K., vol. 10 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 213–63Google Scholar; the treaty system refers to “the set of privileges secured by foreign powers in treaties negotiated with the Qing” in a series of military conflicts and diplomatic negotiations from 1842 onward. Foreigners were thus allowed to trade and reside in designated treaty ports. Bickers, Robert A. and Jackson, Isabella, “Law, Land and Power: Treaty Ports and Concessions in Modern China,” in Treaty Ports in Modern China: Law, Land and Power, ed. Bickers, Robert A. and Jackson, Isabella (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2016), 1CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hamashita, Takeshi, “Tribute and Treaties: Maritime Asia and Treaty Port Networks in the Era of Negotiation, 1800–1900,” in The Resurgence of East Asia: 500, 150 and 50 Year Perspectives, ed. Arrighi, Giovanni and Selden, Mark (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2003), 17–50Google Scholar; Fairbank, John K., Trade and Diplomacy on the China Coast: The Opening of the Treaty Ports, 1842-1854 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953)Google Scholar.
8 Hamashita, Takeshi, China, East Asia and the Global Economy: Regional and Historical Perspectives, ed. Grove, Linda and Selden, Mark (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2008), 106Google Scholar.
9 Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron emphasize the inter-imperial struggle of colonial borderlands. Adelman, Jeremy and Aron, Stephen, “From Borderlands to Borders: Empires, Nation-States, and the Peoples in Between in North American History,” The American Historical Review 104, no. 3 (June 1999): 815–16Google Scholar.
10 Benton, Lauren, A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 276–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
11 Barclay, Outcasts of Empire, 15.
12 Lauren Benton, “From International Law to Imperial Constitutions: The Problem of Quasi-Sovereignty, 1870-1900,” Law and History Review 26, no. 3 (Fall 2008): 602–3.
13 Eskildsen, Transforming Empire in Japan and East Asia, 30–38.
14 The tribute system is “a unified system characterized by region-wide tribute trade relations, with China at the center.” This system defines foreign relations and commercial interactions in East Asia and Southeast Asia in the early modern period. Hamashita, China, East Asia and the Global Economy, 12; John K. Fairbank and Ssu-yu Teng, “On the Ch'ing Tributary System,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 6, no. 2 (June 1941): 135–246; on segregation, see Joseph Fletcher, “The Heyday of the Ch'ing Order in Mongolia, Sinkiang and Tibet,” in The Cambridge History of China, ed. John K. Fairbank, vol. 10 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 351; James A. Millward, Beyond the Pass: Economy, Ethnicity, and Empire in Qing Central Asia, 1759-1864 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 202.
15 Barclay, Outcasts of Empire, 16–19; the quote is on page 19.
16 This approach, in the words of Tonio Andrade, a historian of global history, is global microhistory. Tonio Andrade, “A Chinese Farmer, Two African Boys, and a Warlord: Toward a Global Microhistory,” Journal of World History 21, no. 4 (December 2010): 573–91.
17 Researchers have shown the extensive networks that treaty-port residents boasted. See Douglas L. Fix, “The Global Entanglements of a Marginal Man in Treaty Port Xiamen,” in Treaty Ports in Modern China: Law, Land and Power, ed. Isabella Jackson and Robert Bickers (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2016), 158–78; Peter C. Perdue, “Interlopers, Rogues, or Cosmopolitans? Wu Jianzhang and Early Modern Commercial Networks on the China Coast,” Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review 1, no. 25 (December 2017): 63–83.
18 Eskildsen, Foreign Adventurers and the Aborigines of Southern Taiwan, 1867-1874, 69–77.
19 This situation resonates with other Qing frontiers, with populations connecting to the Qing empire to some extent but not fully incorporated. For examples in southwest China, see C. Patterson Giersch, Asian Borderlands: The Transformation of Qing China's Yunnan Frontier (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006); John E. Herman, Amid the Clouds and Mist: China's Colonization of Guizhou, 1200-1700 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).
20 For a full exploration of the boundary policy, see John Robert Shepherd, Statecraft and Political Economy on the Taiwan Frontier, 1600-1800 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993); Ka Chih-ming, Fantoujia: Qingdai Taiwan zuqun zhengzhi yu shufan diquan (Taipei: Institute of Sociology, Academia Sinica, 2001).
21 The letter was later published by The London and China Telegraph. London and China Telegraph, 27 May 1867; a copy of this letter was appended to the dispatch of Isaac J. Allen, American consul at Hong Kong, to Secretary of State William H. Seward. “Executive Documents No. 52 American Bark Rover,” in Executive Documents Printed by Order of the Senate for the Second Session of the Fortieth Congress of the United States of America, 1867-68, vol. 2 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1868), 9–11.
22 An alternative route was also mentioned in the Directory. James Horsburgh, The India Directory, 6th ed. (London: WM. H. Allen, 1852), vol. 2:532.
23 Pacific Mail Steamship Company, ed., A Sketch of the New Route to China and Japan (San Francisco: Turnbull & Smith, 1867), 95.
24 See also Douglas Fix's excellent article on the production of hydrographic knowledge of Taiwanese waters. Douglas L. Fix, “Charting Formosan Waters: British Surveys of Taiwan's Ports and Seas, 1817-1867,” Hanxue yanjiu 32, no. 2 (June 2014).
25 Charles William LeGendre, Reports on Amoy and the Island of Formosa (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1871).
26 Henrietta Harrison, ed., Natives of Formosa: British Reports of the Taiwan Indigenous People, 1650-1950 (Taipei: Shung Ye Taiwan yuanzhumin bowuguan, 2001), 66.
27 London and China Telegraph, 14 October 1867.
28 “Ship Registers (1857-1900),” Mystic Seaport Museum, https://research.mysticseaport.org/.
29 North China Herald, 1 September, 1860. I reconstruct the detailed activities of the Rover based on the shipping intelligence published in this newspaper.
30 “Executive Documents No. 52 American Bark Rover,” 20.
31 “Ship Registers (1857-1900).”
32 China Directory for 1862 (Hong Kong: A. Shortrede, 1862), 39, 48, 64.
33 In relation to the optimistic assessment, see the telling conversation between Albert Knight and his contemporaries in the mid-1860s. Shuhua Fan, “The Knight Brothers in Niuzhuang: U.S. Merchants & Foreign Life in a Small Chinese Treaty Port,” The Chinese Historical Review 27, no. 1 (January 2020): 15; in hindsight, American commerce in China was in steady decline between the mid-1860s and 1880s. Thomas M. Larkin, “The Global American Civil War and Anglo-American Relations in China's Treaty Ports,” The Historical Journal 66, no. 2 (March 2023): 345.
34 Takahiro Yamamoto, “Privilege and Competition: Tashiroya in the East Asian Treaty Ports, 1860–1895,” Transcultural Studies 8, no. 2 (February 2017): 84–85.
35 Notable examples include vessels from the Shanghai Steam Navigation Company and the China Navigation Company. Robert Bickers, China Bound: John Swire & Sons and Its World, 1816-1980 (London: Bloomsbury, 2020), chap. 4.
36 “Ship Registers (1857-1900).”
37 Mayers and Dennys, The Treaty Ports of China and Japan, 230–32; London and China Telegraph, 8 August 1867. This news article cites in detail the statistics in the Chinese Maritime Customs reports for April 1867. For an overview of trade in northern Guangdong, Shantou included, see Fan Jinmin, “Qingdai Chaozhou shangren jiangnan yanhai maoyi huodong shulue,” Lishi jiaoxue, no. 741 (April 2016): 3–12.
38 Fei Chi, “Wanqing dongbei shangbu geju bianqian yanjiu,” Shixue jikan 2007, no. 2 (March 2007): 75–80.
39 London and China Telegraph, 13 August 1867.
40 Mayers and Dennys, The Treaty Ports of China and Japan, 235–40, 543. The quotes are on pages 235 and 237.
41 For a few captains’ biographies, see John T. Grider, “‘I Espied a Chinaman’: Chinese Sailors and the Fracturing of the Nineteenth Century Pacific Maritime Labour Force,” Slavery & Abolition 31, no. 3 (September 2010): 467–81.
42 “Executive Documents No. 52 American Bark Rover,” 20.
43 “Executive Documents No. 52 American Bark Rover,” 50.
44 China Directory for 1862, 32.
45 North China Herald, 1864, passim.
46 North China Herald, 18 February 1865.
47 London and China Telegraph, 25 October 1867; also 9 October 1867.
48 The Rover had only fourteen crew members in total.
49 China Directory for 1863 (Hong Kong: A. Shortrede, 1863), 31; Chronicle and Directory for China, Japan, and the Philippines for the Year 1868 (Hong Kong: The Daily Press, 1868), 190.
50 See a work based on the mission's internal documents: Lida Scott Ashmore, The South China Mission of the American Baptist Foreign Mission Society: A Historical Sketch of Its First Cycle of Sixty Years (Shanghai: Methodist Publishing House, 1920), 1, 15–34; for local resistance, see Melissa Macauley, Distant Shores: Colonial Encounters on China's Maritime Frontier (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021), 110.
51 The advertisement was located by John Shufelt. John Shufelt, “Li Xiande luechuan,” trans. Lin Shuchin, Lishi Taiwan, no. 6 (November 2013): 61–62; LeGendre once stated that some sponsors were Mrs. Hunt's (instead of the captain's) friends. Maybe the consul meant some of the three men. “Executive Documents No. 52 American Bark Rover,” 48.
52 Douglas L. Fix makes this comparison. See Charles William LeGendre, Notes of Travel in Formosa, ed. Douglas L. Fix and John Shufelt (Tainan: Guoli Taiwan lishi bowuguan, 2012), 256 note 8.
53 Chronicle and Directory for China, Japan, and the Philippines for the Year 1868, 190.
54 China Directory for 1863, 31.
55 “Executive Documents No. 52 American Bark Rover,” 48–49; coincidentally, Botefuhr and LeGendre would be on the same ship from Hong Kong to San Francisco in 1870. Japan Weekly Mail, 25 June 1870.
56 Tseng Ming-te, “Langqiao diqu fanchan jiaoyi tixi yu 1871 nian Liuqiuren yunan shijian,” shiyuan, no. 29 (September 2017): 137–71.
57 Larkin, “The Global American Civil War and Anglo-American Relations in China's Treaty Ports”; Thomas M. Larkin, “The Only Girl in Amoy: Gender and American Patriotism in a Nineteenth-Century Treaty Port,” Gender & History, forthcoming, 9–13, 18 note 89; notably, the worldviews of merchants and missionaries were often in conflict. Arthur Schlesinger Jr., “The Missionary Enterprise and Theories of Imperialism,” in The Missionary Enterprise in China and America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974), 344.
58 Hane Jiro speculates about the connection between commercial developments and the increasing cases of shipwrecks in nineteenth-century East Asian waters. Hane Jirō, “Nanjia zhimeng he Liuqiu piaoliumin shahai shijian,” in Kuayu qingnian xuezhe Taiwanshi yanjiu xuji, ed. Wakabayashi Masahiro and Matsunaga Masayoshi (Taipei: Daoxiang, 2009), 6–7.
59 Fix, “The Changing Contours of Lived Communities on the Hengchun Peninsula, 1850-1874,” 242.
60 London and China Telegraph, 27 May 1867; Baojun, ed., Chouban yiwu shimo Tongzhichao (Taipei: Wenhai chubanshe, 1970), 4732.
61 LeGendre, Notes of Travel in Formosa, 314–15.
62 The following paragraphs are based on the four Chinese purchasers’ statements. “Executive Documents No. 52 American Bark Rover,” 15–16.
63 “Executive Documents No. 52 American Bark Rover,” 57.
64 “Afforestation in China,” Nature 32 (April 1889): 593–94; Mark Elvin, a renowned environmental historian of China, concludes that China began to face severe forest crises in many of its regions from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries onward. Elvin, Mark, The Retreat of the Elephants: An Environmental History of China (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 85Google Scholar.
65 Tseng Ming-te, “Langqiao diqu fanchan jiaoyi tixi yu 1871 nian Liuqiuren yunan shijian,” 162–63; Hane Jirō, “Nanjia zhimeng he Liuqiu piaoliumin shahai shijian,” 15–23.
66 Swinhoe, Robert, “Additional Notes on Formosa,” Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society of London 10, no. 3 (1865): 127CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Tseng Ming-te, “Langqiao diqu fanchan jiaoyi tixi yu 1871 nian Liuqiuren yunan shijian,” 157–58; Yen, Taiwan in China's Foreign Relations, 1836-1874, 51–52.
67 Ying-kuei, Huang, “Jinchu dong Taiwan: Quyu yanjiu de xingsi,” in Renleixue de shiye (Taipei: Qunxue, 2006), 149–74Google Scholar.
68 For political developments after the 1870s, a topic beyond the scope of this present article, see Liu, Kwang-Ching and Smith, Richard J., “The Military Challenge: The North-West and the Coast,” in The Cambridge History of China, ed. K., John Fairbank and Kwang-Ching Liu, vol. 11 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 258–66Google Scholar.
69 In the second half of the nineteenth century, spatial interconnections were affected by the making and remaking of different types of borders, processes that influenced millions of local people and those who travelled or migrated. Such processes often had implications for international relations. Two fascinating examples of this global phenomenon are the bandits in Sino-Vietnamese borderlands and smugglers in the South China Sea who caused problems for the Dutch and British colonial governments. Davis, Bradley Camp, Imperial Bandits: Outlaws and Rebels in the China-Vietnam Borderlands (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Tagliacozzo, Eric, “Smuggling in the South China Sea: Alternate Histories of a Nonstate Space in the Late Nineteenth and Late Twentieth Centuries,” in Elusive Pirates, Pervasive Smugglers: Violence and Clandestine Trade in the Greater China Seas, ed. J., Robert Antony (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2010), 143–54Google Scholar.