Foreign Devils in the Flowery Kingdom

by Carl Crow

  The traders endured their isolation and exile by making it as comfortable as possible. The honorable company maintained its own living quarters for the staff and all ate at a common mess. When private British and American companies were established and prospered they followed the same custom. Chinese cooks soon learned how to prepare the strange food the barbarians ate and there was competition to see which mess could set the best table. There was perpetual open house and constant visits back and forth from one mess to another. In default of anything else social life centered around the table and the sideboard.

  For the greater part of the year these early traders were almost completely isolated from the rest of the world. They left all social contacts behind them, lived in a community of men where there were no restraining influences except those which they imposed on themselves. To replace the conventions of their homes they built up a rigid code, which, though often broken, was never denounced. The keynote of the code was that the prestige of the white man must be maintained by clean living and honest trading. The British had brought a part of the code with them from India and the Americans adopted it as did the other foreigners. When the center of foreign trade moved from Canton to Ningpo and then to Shanghai, the code went with the traders and although changed conditions have modified it, it still exists.

  Differences in rank among the foreigners were as sharply defined as on board a man-of-war. The general manager of a firm, who was known as a taipan, was supreme. He associated only with other taipans or with the consul and in small ports kept to himself. For him to sit down to dinner with a minor employee was as unthinkable as for a general to get chummy with a sergeant. Juniors had to secure his consent before they could marry or join clubs. There were some clubs to which only taipans were eligible. It was dictatorial and snobbish and undemocratic and a lot of other things that Americans especially did not like, but it was a product of peculiar conditions.

  Employees were brought out from America or England at considerable expense for passage and as many of them fell by the wayside, those who remained as reliable and well-established “old China Hands” represented a rather heavy investment on the part of their employers. Strict employment contracts prevented the employee’s going to work for any competing concern, so that each employee’s career was bound up with one company. If he remained with it he might expect advancement and in many cases a partnership. If he was discharged for any reason, his passage home would be paid, but his career in China was ended. Some of them left the old firms and started in business for themselves, but this was always looked on as rather questionable conduct. It was generally felt that the firm that had brought a man out to China and trained him had the first call on his service; that it was unfair for him to go into competition with his old employers. The man who had been a popular and highly respected minor employee of one of the old firms might find himself snubbed and a social outcast when he came back as the proprietor of his own business. He had violated the code, and while the code perpetuated many individual acts of injustice, it was in the main sound.

  A great many local amenities were established. Every ship carried mail for every other ship or for every business house, but no mail was ever delivered until the ship which had brought it was ready to sail. Any letter in the ship’s mail bag might contain information of great value to a competitor, and so mail day coincided with the sailing rather than the arrival of a ship. After the cargo was stowed, and the hatch battened down and the ship ready to sail, the heads of firms would call for a farewell drink with the captain and he would distribute the letters which may have been locked away in his safe for a month or more.

  Although American trade started with small ships and limited capital, it was not long before one of the greatest of all of the princely houses of the China Coast flew the American flag. This was Russell & Co., founded by Captain Samuel Russell of Middletown, Connecticut. The firm was so successful and gained such a reputation for honesty and fair dealing that it became a synonym for wealth, honor and power. It has been out of existence for more than sixty years but is still talked about on the China Coast, and a few old men are able to boast that they were once Russell employees.

  After one or two voyages to China on trading ventures, Captain Russell saw that an agency was needed in Canton to take care of the business affairs of the sailing-ship skippers who were not always good business men as well as good seamen. His firm was established for the sole purpose of acting as commission agents for other traders, to sell and buy cargo for them and take care of all of the shore details of the business. Before the establishment of his firm, the skippers of the sailing ships had not only the responsibility of the long and difficult voyage but also that of disposing of the old cargo and the purchase of new.

  The Russell venture succeeded from the very beginning. Business men in America now consigned their ships and cargo to this firm and had no further worries about the business abilities of the skipper or the responsibilities of a supercargo. Russell & Co. collected a commission on the sale of cargo and on the purchase of tea or other China produce, and no matter how the deals went they always made money. Soon the company was able to maintain an establishment as luxurious as that of the Honorable company itself. The wine cellar was well stocked and it was taken for granted that any distinguished American who visited Canton would be the guest of the Russell hong. As other ports were opened to foreign trade a branch of Russell & Co. was to be found in each one and the same pattern of princely hospitality was duplicated. The Russell mess was as well stocked as the largest hotel. Commodore Perry, who was a guest both at Macao and Shanghai, tells of having expressed a preference for a certain brand of table water and it was immediately produced and served to him daily during his stay. Money was made so fast and with such certainty that there was a constant stream of young partners coming out to engage in the business and old partners going back home to retire. The names of the partners read like a blue book of Boston society, for most of them came from that city.

  The company soon went into the private banking business, became the agents of the great firm of Baring Brothers, and financed shipments not only for Americans but for British. Partners who had made their fortunes and returned to live in America invested in the shipping business and the company acted as their agents. As profits piled up the firm gained a reputation not only for integrity and princely generosity but also for a canniness in trade which was little short of the miraculous. Their ships beat the British in the race to London with the first tea of the season. The ponderous Indiamen, bulky and slow running, slipped into second place, for the clipper ships built by the Russell partners and managed by the Russell hong were the fastest things afloat. They built the first telegraph line in China. The first steamships on the China Coast and the Yangtze were owned by Russell. The Russell partners appeared to have the touch of Midas. The steamship venture had meant a huge investment and at the beginning of the year 1864 the company was a million dollars in debt. But when the books were closed at the end of the year the debt had been wiped out and there was a balance in the bank. The Russell ships have long since disappeared but they left a pleasant memento behind them. Russell brought out Negro cooks to teach the Chinese, and the American tradition has been preserved in all China Coast boats, for hot cakes and syrup are always to be had for breakfast and baked beans are on the menu once a week.

  The monopoly of the Honorable company came to an end in 1834 and other princely houses grew up under the British flag. One of the most famous was that of Jardine, Matheson & Co., founded by Dr. Jardine, who had been a surgeon on one of the Honorable company’s boats. He established new traditions of efficiency by having only one chair in his office - the one occupied by himself. There was no opportunity for callers to sit down for a comfortable chat. But that was as far as the Jardine inhospitality went. The French chef at Shanghai was famous for his skill, and the wine cellar was even better than that of Russell.

  The princely tradition persisted long after keen compe
tition had made trading anything but a princely occupation and the business formerly monopolized by a few big concerns was divided among dozens of smaller ones. But through good times and bad, the China Coast was always a spendthrift place where a man would spend his last dollar entertaining his friends or possibly go into debt by spending money he did not possess. There was always the chance that one would get a break and be able to meet all obligations. In a foreign trade based on silver currency of constantly fluctuating value, any man in business was likely to go to bed broke and wake up prosperous, or vice versa, with complications either way. There was a strong element of chance in all business and the reckless spirit of gambling crept into most business transactions.

  When I arrived in Shanghai in 1911 there were a half-dozen business concerns which maintained private bars where business or personal friends could drop in for a drink an odd moments during the day. This was before higher customs and excise duties had raised the prices of liquor. As everything was cheap the fact that a business firm should maintain a private bar was considered no more unusual than that a business man should have a box of cigarettes on his desk, for the convenience of his callers.

  In fact the China Press, the paper on which I was city editor, maintained a private bar for the staff though there was nothing free about it, and the Chinese cashier, who was suspected of having a silent partnership in the enterprise, always deducted the bar bill from the pay checks. The managing editor insisted that having a bar in the office made the reporters hurry back after covering the assignments and also was personally a great timesaver as it made it unnecessary for him to leave the office.

  For various reasons many of these private bars were discontinued and ten years ago there were only three of them left. The most famous was that maintained by the great Hongkong & Shanghai Bank. To be invited to enjoy its hospitality was an honor reserved for exchange and bullion brokers and people with heavy overdrafts. It was a distinction something like that of being known as a friend of the Morgans. A more democratic bar was that of Lane, Crawford and Co., general storekeepers. Every morning at 10:30 the venerable Mr. Crawford, who had been doing the same thing for more than twenty years, would empty a bottle of gin in a pitcher of ice, add other ingredients and serve a drink which was known as a “Crawford Special.” This was a daily ritual attended by a half-dozen or more old cronies and there were usually a dozen more who would drop in for a drink before noon. As the famous old private bars disappeared, Caldbeck, McGregor & Co., the premier wine and spirit merchants of the Far East, included in plans for their new building a replica of an old English tap room which is an architectural joy. A list of those who have enjoyed its hospitality would include some of the most famous of the many famous visitors to Shanghai.

  In the good old days drinks were provided free to passengers on the British boats in the China Coast trade just as wine is considered a part of the meal on French boats and, incidentally, on French airplanes today. I can imagine there was a terrible uproar when this practice was discontinued. The companies must have had a difficult time getting passengers to pay for their drinks. To this day every ticket sold for passage on the Yangtze or the Coast contains a bold-face notice warning passengers that the passage money does not include drinks, which must be paid for at bar prices.

  * Americans in Eastern Asia

  III

  The lordly compradore

  “If two men unite, their money will buy gold.”

  The British traders who went to Canton in the eighteenth century and the Americans who followed them could not speak the Chinese language and few made any attempt to learn it. Cantonese is the most difficult of all the spoken dialects of China. Words of the same sound are given a variety of meanings by changes in tone. A single slip in the tone of a word may change the whole meaning of a sentence and turn a pious phrase into a ribald joke - a circumstance of which Chinese punsters have taken the fullest advantage. Anyone who undertakes to learn that particular dialect must not only master the vocabulary but also become as proficient as a professional singer in the control of his voice.

  Under the most favorable circumstances it would have taken years of study to become proficient enough in the language for it to be of any practical use. There were no teachers. The Manchu government had threatened with death anyone who taught the language to a foreigner. This was not a new regulation directed against this new generation of traders. For several thousand years there had been a similar prohibition against the teaching of the language to barbarian tribes which was relaxed in the case of Marco Polo and others as a mark of Imperial favor. The early missionaries learned Chinese and translated and printed their tracts by methods as clandestine as those of the counterfeiter.

  The foreign merchant in fact was equipped with nothing more than a cargo of opium, furs or sandalwood, or a few barrels of Spanish dollars and a desire to trade with the Chinese. He did not know how or where to secure the cargoes of tea and other Chinese commodities, or what he should pay for them. He had only general and often mistaken ideas as to what the Chinese might want to buy. The problems of finding markets in the interior for the sale of goods or the purchase of produce; of packing and inland transportation and the complicated transit taxes were all mysteries and his Chinese associates did not help him to solve them. That was their secret and they guarded it carefully.

  The Treaty of Nanking which opened a number of ports to the foreigner also ended the Cantonese trading monopoly and gave every Chinese equal opportunity to sell to and buy from the foreigners. They were quick to see the possibilities of profit in this new business but they were as helpless as the foreigners in all matters beyond their own shores. Except for the clerks who had worked with foreigners in Canton the Chinese had only a vague idea of what kind of goods a foreigner bought and sold. They knew little or nothing about ocean freights, marine insurance, bills of lading, exchange contracts and all the other complicated mechanism by which the goods of one country are shipped across the sea and sold to the customers in another. Like the British and the Americans, the Chinese business man was faced by the language difficulty. He had an inadequate knowledge of English, the language in which nine-tenths of the international commercial correspondence of the world was conducted.

  This gap between the two groups of business men was bridged by the employment of the compradore, a personage peculiar to the China Coast, who represented the taipan in all of his dealings with Chinese traders. The name is derived from the Portuguese word “compra,” which means “to buy” and it is probable that the first compradores were solely engaged in buying tea and other Chinese produce for export trade. The exporting of Chinese produce was the most important function of the foreign trader at the time that the first compradores were employed. When the foreigner finally found goods the Chinese wanted to buy, the compradore took on the task of selling them. He was a good trader but a poor salesman and it was not until the selling of goods to the Chinese became of equal importance with the purchase of produce from them that he began to lose his dominant position.

  The foreign trader could not do business without the compradore and the compradore could not do business alone. Each supplied the defects in the knowledge and the training of the other so that foreign trade was made possible only by the dual system in which each played his part. Although each safeguarded himself by contracts and agreements, no written undertakings could possibly foresee and provide for all of the problems which might arise and the arrangement was practical and workable only because of the mutual trust and confidence which was built up between them. Assuming a reasonable amount of honesty and fair play on each side this was a natural growth.

  Neither learned the other’s language. A staff of Chinese interpreters took care of translating documents. The compradore and the foreign manager carried on their conversations and negotiated very important deals by the use of pidgin or business English, a language which had been invented by Cantonese clerks and servants so that they could make themselves understandable to
their employers. The word pidgin represents the Cantonese attempts to pronounce the word business. The language contains a vocabulary of several hundred English words adapted to Chinese pronunciation. The words are used without regard to English grammar but placed in a sentence as they would be in a Chinese phrase. In fact the language developed through attempts to make word for word translations from Chinese into English, expressing the sounds of English words by means of Chinese characters in which many words can only be approximated. This accounts for the fact that the English word “security” becomes “sclew” and “that” is hardly recognizable as “lat.” Most of the early British traders came to Canton by way of India and brought with them a few Hindustani words which came into general use and added to the picturesqueness of the pidgin glossary.

  The language is adequate for most business purposes. For example a typical conversation in the office of a foreign hong might run as follows. Taipan: “How fashion that chow-chow cargo he just now stop godown inside?”

  Compradore: “Lat cargo he no can walkee just now. Lat man Kong Tai he no got ploper sclew.”

  Taipan: “How come you talkie sclew no paper? My have got sclew paper safe inside.”

  Compradore: “Aiyah! Lat sclew paper he no can do. Lat sclew man he have go Ningpo more far.”

  To the outsider this conversation would be completely meaningless but to the taipan and the compradore and to any old-time resident it was perfectly intelligible. The inquiry was about the reason why a shipment of mixed cargo (chow-chow) was still in the godown (warehouse). The compradore replied that the cargo could not be moved (walkee) because the security (sclew) of Kong Tai, the purchaser, was not in order. To the taipan’s assertion that he had the security in his safe the compradore replied that it was now worthless because the man who had guaranteed payment for the cargo - “sclew man had go Ningpo more far” - which was the local idiom for stating that he had defaulted and run away from his creditors.