Shanghai Cosmopolites...

During the Nineteenth Century, ties of friendship and association within the treaty ports of China’s eastern coast became tangled and infinitely complex. From the late years of the 1800s, the foreign communities were united in their mistrust of the Chinese peoples upon which they had imposed themselves and they watched warily for any sign that the Celestials would try to force the foreign powers from Chinese soil and take over the lucrative businesses which the treaty powers had spawned and nurtured.

In Shanghai, this mistrust manifested itself as a general affinity amongst the younger men with the Shanghai Volunteer Corps (SVC) which had been brought about by the Taiping Rebellion during the 1860s and which continued into the Twentieth Century. The sports-mad foreign community saw the SVC as another means by which the male elements of the concessions could exercise and maintain some degree of fitness, alongside such activities as cricket, jai-alai, horseracing, and paper hunts. As time progressed, the various national communities generated their own versions of the SVC under its umbrella heading, leading to the presence of a German Volunteer Corps, as well as one for the French and an International Corps, comprised mainly of Anglo-American members.

Shanghai abounded with nationalistic feeling, but it was a sentiment not devoted to exclusivity. Every national holiday was celebrated and manifested itself through open invitations to embassies and other nation-based organisations which would alternately host celebrations for other countries during their holidays. Given the tangled connexions between the “Shanghailanders”, it was not uncommon for British embassy venues to host open-air picnics for American celebrations, for which German bands would provide the music. This meant that almost every day in Shanghai, there was a party of some kind going on, given the days of national significance for all the various communities, as well as Catholic and Protestant church high days - not to mention the myriad Chinese celebrations, which the foreign communities held in fear and dread.

One particularly shining example of this foreign unity was the memorial to the German gunboat Iltis (above) which was erected in the Public Gardens at the northern end of the Bund, upon land owned by the “princely hong” Jardine & Matheson’s. In return for this privileged location, the German Concordia Club hosted the members of the British Shanghai Club for over a year, while that facility underwent renovations. In later years, as divisive tensions manifested, this monument became a sore point amongst the International Community: it was pulled over by French troops in 1918 then quietly re-located to the German School in 1929.

In short, trust and fellow-feeling abounded in the foreign communities but only amongst the foreigners. Business and social fraternity flourished and intertwined like invasive weeds, like a huge hedge of thorns designed to bar and obfuscate the Chinese. In the new century, all of this was about to change.

The first spoke in the wheel of Shanghai’s smooth-running cosmopolitanism was not the announcement of hostilities after the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo, as one might expect. Despite declarations of war, the Shanghai community decided to ignore the fact that Europe was in conflict and let life continue as it had for decades. Below the surface, however, a slow-building anxiety started to manifest as newspapers from Britain and other western countries began to ask what Shanghai was doing exactly to support the war effort? The Brits in China were intermixed with Americans – who were not involved directly in the Great War – and working hand-in-glove with all of the other European representatives, so there was a great deal of inertia in regard to doing anything about it at all. Shanghai reporters observed instances of British businessmen pointedly failing to recognise their German counterparts in the streets – the “cut direct” – and wondered just what exactly was going on behind boardroom doors, where these different national representatives were almost invariably thrown together? And what about the home lives of these taipans, whose German daughters had married English sons and vice versa? Much of the inconvenience of the overarching state of war between countries was expressed in matters of etiquette, such as who would be seated next to whom at festive gatherings, or whether one should avert one’s gaze from the German Concordia Club whilst en route along the Bund to the Shanghai Club. At no point however, did any notion of global politics interfere with the smooth running of business.

And then, on the 7^th of May in 1915, the Germans sank the RMS Lusitania off the southwest coast of Ireland. On board were 1260 passengers and 700 crew, crossing the Atlantic from New York. After the German submarine had made its fatal move on the Cunard liner, 1201 – mostly civilian - people on board were killed, including the majority of the 150 American passengers. To be fair, the ship was secretly loaded with contraband weaponry and other military munitions which were destined for the British war effort; as well, the Germans had taken out advertisements in all of the New York newspapers days before the ship left port, warning everyone of their intention to sink her. Nevertheless, world opinion turned against Germany and in Shanghai the local news organs loudly proclaimed Germany as a warlike state with no moral compass when it came to battle. With the headlines professing anti-German sentiments, the mood in Shanghai changed.

Notices were posted asking for men who could shoot and ride to sign up for active war duty in “the war to end all wars”. In response, many Shanghailander men active in the SVC answered the call. Among the Shanghai Municipal Police (SMP) force, there were ructions as men indentured to the SMP, tried to cancel the terms of their contracts and join the Army. In later years, many officers who just walked away from their police duties to fight for Britain, were dragged before courts military and otherwise to account for their desertion. Meanwhile, many taipans and the gryphons beneath them, turned in their resignations, put away their polo helmets and stood up to be counted. A Japanese ocean liner, the Suwa Maru, was commissioned to transport all of these enlistees to Britain. A band played as they left port and the International Community (minus its German contingent) gathered proudly to see them off, accompanying them along the Whangpoo in a small flotilla of motley craft, from which fireworks erupted.

A dismal time awaited them. After more than a month of travel (they were held up in Hong Kong and again in Penang) the majority were dispatched to a training camp in the Chiltern Hills of England, where they were informed that, apart from the four commissioned officers, no uniforms were available for them. As well, no guns were able to be issued to the recruits and they were forced to train with wooden, dummy weaponry. Having endured and enjoyed lectures on (outdated) military strategy, semaphore-signalling, body-building regimens and daily calisthenics onboard the Suwa Maru, running around the soggy cold hills of the Midlands in the clothes in which they had arrived did little to inspire military fervour. At one point, a society of women in Shanghai was formed to knit socks for these soldiers – mostly banded together in the 10^th Yorkshire Regiment – and the swift delivery of this much-needed apparel went a long way towards preventing wholesale desertion.

It goes without saying that the Shanghailanders of the 10^th Yorkshire were unprepared for the hardships which awaited them. Many of these men were first generation, Shanghai born and bred, unused to getting through their daily lives without the benefits provided by a Chinese “boy”, or servant, to do all the boring chores which enabled them to go about their business, things like shining boots, cleaning and pressing clothes, or even shaving. For many it was a confronting wake-up call.

Eventually, many months later after uniforms and guns were found for them, the regiment were sent out to the Western Front to finally engage the enemy. Here too, the fact that they were ill-suited for the battle and ill-trained on top of it, was driven home. Having been selected for their equestrian and shooting abilities, it became instantly apparent that what was needed were skills of a less glamorous nature, such as a forceful manner with a shovel, a deft way with a knife and the ability to accurately toss a grenade. At the Battle of Loos, the 10^th Yorkshire’s inexperience came together in tandem with some of the worst tactical planning ever devised by old and ill-informed British generals who had no clue about this new type of warfare that they were engaged upon. For many years, the Battle of Loos has been an exemplar of British military inefficiency and the 10^th Yorkshire Regiment the cause for much of the lacklustre action; recent reviews however, have shown that, in fact, the 10^th Yorkshire, in spite of being inexperienced, under-trained, poorly-supplied and grossly misled by their superiors, did surprisingly well.

Shanghai – specifically, the International Communities – being as parochial as they were, many of the letters sent home to anxious wives and parents from the field of battle, were published in the daily newspapers. As the horrors of the Western Front and Gallipoli were paraded in print to an avid and eager audience, sentiment hardened against the German community. For the first time, serious thought was given to the possibility of extricating businesses from their hopelessly-tangled cosmopolitan situations.

One particularly famous example is a case in point. In the early Settlement days, British taipans saw a need for a source of good-quality cheap beer in Shanghai. Supplies were erratic and the need for shipping them from overseas into the city forced the price upwards prohibitively. Funds were raised and a company created; the problem of where to build a factory for the enterprise was resolved by a German consortium in Shantung (the province, known for its iron ore supplies, was rented from the Chinese by the Germans) and the metal for the brewing facilities quickly provided. The British company owners engaged a master-brewer from Germany who, in turn, built a staff of well-trained German beer technicians around him. Beer and money soon flowed in copious quantities. In 1919, however, the rising anti-German sentiment and the aftershocks of the First and Second Sino-Japanese Wars, saw Shantung wrested from its German tenants: the Japanese ousted the Germans from the factory, with the exception of the meisterbrauer who stayed on due to British insistence. Eventually, the Japanese took full-control of the factory as the world fell into its second war and after 1949, the Chinese took over after them, a fate that the foreign communities had dreaded from the outset. The Tsingtao Beer factory is still running today; many other businesses were not so fortunate.

In 1919, the Germans were forcibly evicted from Shanghai and the other treaty ports. As part of the ratification of the Treaty of Versailles, all extraterritoriality benefits accorded them were severed. By about 1926, there was once more a German community in the city, but it was a much more subdued group, subject to the laws of the Chinese citizenry where once almost total diplomatic immunity was theirs to enjoy.

In the final analysis, the feelings of the ex-pat communities within Shanghai from 1914 onwards, was a deep and bitter sense of betrayal. Where once nations had co-existed harmoniously, united by greed and their distrust and loathing of the Chinese, now great divisions had cut them apart. The letters detailing the experiences of the Shanghailanders on the Western Front ensured that there would be no going back to the ‘good old days’. Thomas Wade, who survived the Battle of Loos debacle, painted a telling picture in his journal of the new sentiments which the Shanghai men would bring back to the newly-Republican China with them:

“One young chap,” having captured a German prisoner on the battlefield, he reported, “took out a photograph of his brother who was killed a little while back, showed it to the German, then killed him.”

For Shanghai, it was the dawn of a new world order.