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Shanghai

city · earth

Shanghai is a port city at the mouth of the Yangtze, opened to foreign residence and trade as one of the five treaty ports of the 1842 Treaty of Nanking, and rapidly displacing Canton as the principal outlet for Chinese tea and silk. Its hinterland reached the green tea districts of Zhejiang and Anhui and, by river, the black tea country of Fujian and Jiangxi. Robert Fortune used the treaty-port foothold as the base from which his journeys inland began and to which collected plants were returned for shipment. The city is included here because the shift of the tea trade from Canton to Shanghai is the commercial consequence of the first Opium War.

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Evidence · 2
Timeline

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Connections · 1
Assembled narrative · 1

Assembled from 23 blocks · 2 evidence · 25 related

  1. Story
  2. Shanghai is a port city at the mouth of the Yangtze, opened to foreign residence and trade as one of the five treaty ports of the 1842 Treaty of Nanking, and rapidly displacing Canton as the principal outlet for Chinese tea and silk. Its hinterland reached the green tea districts of Zhejiang and Anhui and, by river, the black tea country of Fujian and Jiangxi. Robert Fortune used the treaty-port foothold as the base from which his journeys inland began and to which collected plants were returned for shipment. The city is included here because the shift of the tea trade from Canton to Shanghai is the commercial consequence of the first Opium War.
  3. Knowledge
  4. Canton (historical) — modern Guangzhou
  5. Shanghai
  6. Connections
  7. Robert Fortune
  8. Canton (historical) — modern Guangzhou
  9. Treaty of Nanking
  10. Robert Fortune removes tea plants and tea makers from China
  11. Tea
  12. Cohong (Gonghang)
  13. Silver
  14. Opium
  15. Shanghai
  16. Qing trade confined to Canton
  17. East India Company's China monopoly ends; Tea Committee founded
  18. Lin Zexu destroys confiscated opium at Humen
  19. The Opium Wars
  20. Treaty of Nanking
  21. Evidence
  22. The treaty opened five ports, ceded Hong Kong, abolished the Cohong monopoly, fixed tariffs and imposed a silver indemnity — and made no mention of opium.
  23. Fortune's own published account documents his commission by the East India Company, his travel in disguise into closed tea districts, the use of Wardian cases, the recruitment of Chinese tea makers, and that green and black tea come from the same plant.
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/atlas?object=CITY_SHANGHAI&experience=CITY_SHANGHAI