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Tianjin
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And there were sections of the city where different foreigners lived - Japanese, White Russians, Americans and Germans - but never together, and all with their own separate habits, some dirty, some clean. And they had houses of all shapes and colours, one painted in pink, another with rooms that jutted out at every angle like the backs and fronts of Victorian dresses, others with roofs like pointed hats and wood carvings painted white to look like ivory.
- Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club China's third largest city, the commercial centre of TIANJIN , on the coast some 80km east of Beijing, is a dynamic and modern city, but for visitors its most attractive feature is its legacy of colonial buildings reflecting an assortment of foreign styles. Overshadowed by the capital and little visited by tourists, Tianjin has architecture and shopping opportunities, especially for antiques, that make it well worth a day trip from Beijing, just over an hour away by train. A longer trip will prove expensive as there is no budget accommodation in the city. Though today the city is given over to industry and commerce, it was as a port that Tianjin first gained importance. When the Ming emperor Yongle moved the capital from Nanjing to Beijing, Tianjin became the dock for vast quantities of imperial tribute rice, transported here from all over the south through the Grand Canal. In the nineteenth century the city caught the attention of the seafaring Western powers, who used a minor infringement - the boarding of an English ship by Chinese troops - as an excuse to declare war. With well-armed gunboats, they were assured of victory, and the Treaty of Tianjin, signed in 1856, gave the Europeans the right to establish concessionary bases on the mainland from where they could conduct trade and sell opium.
These separate
concessions
, along the banks of the Hai River, were self-contained European fantasy worlds: the French built elegant chateaux and towers, while the Germans constructed red-tiled Bavarian villas. The Chinese were discouraged from intruding, except for servants, who were given pass cards. Tensions between the indigenous population and the foreigners exploded in the
Tianjin Incident
of 1870, when a Chinese mob attacked a French-run orphanage and killed the nuns and priests, in the belief that the Chinese orphans were being kidnapped for later consumption. Twenty Chinese were beheaded as a result, and the prefect of the city was banished. A centre for secretive anti-foreign movements, the city had its genteel peace interrupted again by the
Boxer Rebellion
in 1900, after which the foreigners levelled the walls around the old Chinese city to enable them to keep an eye on its residents. Other useful information
for tourists (each section contains more specific sub-sections): |
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China,
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