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.