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.
The City
of Tianjin
Tianjin has few actual sights, and it's the city's
streetscapes, an assemblage of nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century foreign architecture, mostly
European, juxtaposed with the concrete and glass
monoliths of wealthy contemporary China, which are
its...
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