The foundation of Western Shanghai: (Part One).(History)

AS SOON AS the formal treaty ending the first Opium War was signed at Nanjing in August 1842, the opium traders despatched their floating opium warehouses to Wusong at the mouth of the Huangpu River. The treaty, which opened five ports, including Shanghai, to trade, failed to even mention the ostensible cause of the recent hostilities. Opium remained illegal and, therefore, unmentionable.

The British plenipotentiary, Sir Henry Pottinger, proclaimed that no trade was to be permitted at any of the new ports until the final details of access had been established by further negotiations. Captain Charles Hope, the British naval commander in charge of the squadron based at Zhoushan Island, south of the Yangzi's mouth, made the mistake of reading this proclamation too literally.

A good naval man, Hope had an instinctive aversion to pirates and smugglers. His animosity was reinforced by the entrepreneurial drive with which many naval officers supplemented their income by capturing pirate vessels as prizes, a long-standing incentive which has never received sufficient weight as an explanation of British naval supremacy. Under the Navigation Acts, ships without licences for their arms or without formal port clearances were liable to seizure.

Many British naval officers had made small fortunes from wartime prize money and, during the recent hostilities, officers in the Royal Navy contingent had cast covetous eyes over the opium fleet. In November 1842 James Matheson was warned about the officers' festering invigilation by Robert Thom, a former Jardine Matheson employee, then acting as an interpreter for Pottinger. Thom wrote (as quoted in John King Fairbank, Trade and Diplomacy on the China Coast, 1964):

 
   I have been living on board men o'war and thus 
   being thrown into the company of Naval officers 
   the opium trade and the ships engaged in it have of 
   course been discussed. I have heard only one 
   opinion expressed, which is that these vessels are 
   navigating expressly in the teeth of the Navigation 
   Act. What I dread is that, when the admiral is at 
   Macao stories may be circulated about piracy, 
   murder, cutting off of tails etc. and the old 
   gentleman may all of a sudden give orders to have 
   all the opium vessels detained, and this would be a 
   calamity indeed. Be good enough, my dear Mr 
   Matheson, not to let the contents of this 
   letter go further, as it may compromise me 
   in a number of ways. Let me assure you 
   that Naval men never miss any opportunity 
   of making prize money when they can. 

"Those opium gentlemen," Captain Hope later declared with a hint of sarcasm:

 
   hitherto have been allowed to go along the coast 
   without port clearance and no questions ever put to 
   them. I never interfered as long as they confined 
   their smuggling operations to the south. But when 
   they went to the Yangzi and above all to Shanghai, 
   I thought it high time to put a stop to such lawless 
   proceedings--more especially as those vessels are 
   manned and armed more like men of war than 
   merchantmen and are well known to commit all 
   kinds of irregularities and great excesses to promote 
   their own selfish ends.