20th June.
Firty years ago yesterday, on the 19th of June, 1842, a British force captured Shanghai, and opened the great. trade of mid-China to the Western world, A fect came up the river, and a force of a thousand men marched overland, from Woosung which had been captured the day before. There was little resistance from the batteries which had been thrown up on the river bank, and of which some traces remain to this day, and when the city itself was reached by the land force, there was no resistance at all. As Captain Hall of the Nemesis writes in his well-known "Narrative," which contains a very pretty engraving of the Battle of Woosung; "On reaching the north gate of the city, there appeared to be no preparations made for resistance, and the only two guns which could be seen moutited at the gateway looked harm-Jess enough. In fact, there was no one at the gate; and two or three of our men, having contrived to get over the wall, soon opened the gate, and ad-witted the rest. It was now discovered that the place had been abandoned by the authorities the previous evening. The people generally showed no ill-feeling towards the foreigners, but rather an inclination to conciliate their good offices." After dwelling on the extent. of the trade of Shanghai which "is suid to rank only second to Canton in commercial importance," and where Mr, Medhurst saw a thousand large junks in the river, the writer continues "The inhabitants of Shanghai have on all occasions shown a friendly disposition towards foreigners; and where the latter have been treated with rudeness, it has been solely by the orders of the mandarins, or at their instigation." This friendly disposition towards foreigners on the part of the inhabitants of Shanghai and its tieighbourhood has continued to the present day, and very greatly has this aided our enjoyment of our residence here. We may go still further and say that almost everywhere in China the disposition of the people towards foreigners is generally friendly; and that where troubles have arisen they have been intentionally excited by men of the literary and official classes.
The despatches which we reprint from the London Times of the23rd and 25th of November, 1842, give a graphic description of the capture of Shanghai; and it should be remembered by foreign writers when they animadvert on the faults of Great Britain, that what.she did in opening China she did with the most complete unselfishness, and that every advantage gained for commerce by her action, was thrown open to the participation of all' her rivals, fully and ungrudgingly. The French, indeed, who were not at war with China at the time and had no share in the proceedings, sent the Arigone and Favorite to Woosuuig to watch what we were doing, and the captain of the latter actually asked: Admiral Parker to lend him' one of his few steamers to help-him to get up the river to Nanking. What these steamers were, which were found so invaluable in aiding the sailing ships of which the fleet consisted, may be judged from the fact that the Nemesis and Phlegethon were sent up the Whangpu to reconnoitre nearly as far as the Si Taiha; "but the water shoaled as they proceeded until... there was only one fathom, and, as the Nemesis and Phlegethon could not safely ascend higher, the Admiral, with other officers removed on board the Medusa, which, being smaller, drew a foot to eighteen inches less water. But they were not able to go up more than eight or nine miles further; for they were stopped by the increasing shallowness of the water at the entrance of a large lagoon."
When we suggested some time since that the Municipal Council should make preparations to celebrate the jubilee of the capture of Shanghai, it was objected that such a commemoration might' hurt the feelings of the Chinese, and this objection was addressed to Englishmen hoare invited and are pleased year after year to join in the celebration of the Fourth of July. The idea that the feelings of any Chinaman here would be hurt by the commemoration of the capture of Shanghai fifty years ago, is too far-fetched. The Chinese of Shanghai, and the whole empire, have been as great gainers by our operations in 1842 as we have, "Civilisation does get forrad," says Lowell, " sometimes upon a powder-cart," and civilisation has got forward enormously in China since the
englishmen fifty years ago. The stan-tes of Shanghai were opened by dard of living has been raised round every foreign settlement, Chinese boys have found new openings, and comforts and luxuries, unknown before, have penetrated into the farthest corner of the empire, while a higher and purer religion has been everywhere preached, and its preachers have spread at the same time invaluable secular knowledge. Shanghai itself was a safe refuge during the Taiping rebellion for thousands of fugitives, and the rebellion itself was crushed by foreign help drawn from Shanghai. The foreign settlements have been and are a permanent object-lesson in the comforts and amenities of existence to hundreds of officials who have passed through them, and cannot but have had some impression made on them. The hands of the government have been strengthened by the introduction of foreign appliances, steamers and the telegraph, of which Peking would never have heard in this century but for the unlocking of China at Shanghai. The work was well done, without unnecessary loss of life or destruction of property, and the results have equalled all that was expected at the time. If it is objected that in fifty years foreigners have only succeeded. in scratching the surface of this. great empire, and have made no deep impression, we, can fairly reply that Gfty years is a very short time in the whole existence of China.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.