It’s a cliché, but journalists and foreign correspondents are in many ways mirrors of the society they exist in and write about. They try to reflect often-complex events in faraway lands in a way their readers can hopefully understand. This was especially true of the old China press corps that started in the Canton Factories of the opium-dealers in the 1820s and reached its high point, both in terms of word count and number of reporters, in the 1930s and during the Second World War. Whether they wrote for an audience back in Europe or America, Japan or elsewhere, or...

The birth of foreign newspapers and a foreign press corps in China really begins in the small enclave of Canton, the city now known as Guangzhou, in what were called the Factories, the somewhat fortified and mostly self-sufficient warehouses where a select group of foreigners was begrudgingly permitted to trade by the Qing dynasty. The twin European imperatives in China were to trade and proselytise to advance their various national agendas, empires and treasuries. This meant that the very earliest newspapers and journals to be produced reflected a tripartite of interests: God, Mammon and flag. From the start the first...

The foreigners who had arrived to claim their rights in the treaty port of Shanghai had barely begun to get to work when the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom suddenly appeared in revolt and threatened the very existence of the Qing dynasty in 1851. The Taiping were both mysterious and an immediate object of fascination for the foreign press and its readership. The Taiping’s charismatic leader Hong Xiuquan was born a Hakka, encountered Christian missionaries, converted, declared himself a brother of Jesus, allowed only female disciples in his personal bodyguard and led an uprising that engulfed China in a massive civil war...

In the half century since it had been launched, the North China Herald had gone through a number of incarnations: it had become the North-China Daily News, had merged with subsidiary publications and had no fewer than nine editors. However, the major change that was to dictate the future direction of both the paper and the Shanghai press in general was the take-over of the business in 1880 by Henry Morriss. The paper went through a few changes of ownership. After the death of Shearman, the founder, it was sold to Edwin Pickwood, who had served as the first-ever secretary...

The major event to consume foreign correspondents in China after the onslaught of the Boxers was the 1904–05 Russo-Japanese War. Characterised by some as a rehearsal for the First World War, with trenches and sword-wielding cavalry going up against machine guns, China was not a combatant, but the conflict was fought largely along its borders and a fair amount of it on Chinese soil in Manchuria. It should have been an instructive conflict for European generals and politicians, giving them some indications, which they largely ignored, of how brutal and efficient modern warfare was becoming. It should also have...

China was changing, and the Chinese were changing and, though generally considered hopelessly sclerotic, some elements in the imperial court were also changing. The dynasty was limping to its death but some tried desperately to modernise it in an ultimately futile attempt at last-minute regime survival. Primary among these men was His Excellency Taotai Yuen-cham Tong, better known as Y. C. Tong, who was one of the first Chinese graduates of Columbia University. Tong wanted to get out the message of his progressive faction within the court to create a channel of communication and understanding with the Western powers. To...

Decades can be messy things; the 1920s in China really began on 4 May 1919 with China’s disappointment following its betrayal at the Versailles Peace Conference. Despite President Wilson’s pledge that every country would be represented, China was not. The Great Powers and America did not apply any more than cursory pressure on China’s behalf and Japan retained the “special rights” it had snatched from the Germans in Qingdao and Shandong. The seats at Versailles reserved for the Chinese delegation were never occupied and the Chinese decided not to sign in protest against the clauses in the treaty agreeing to...

As the clouds of revolution and war gathered, the rash of new visiting journalists and correspondents descending on China continued with many not intending to stay long. Ada Chesterton came to China with impeccable Fleet Street training in the early thirties and recorded her impressions of the country while Gerald Yorke of Reuters came initially for a brief visit, ended up staying two years and found both a country in flux and a new interest in mysticism. After leaving China Yorke pursued his mystical interests and became the Frater Voto Intelligere of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (a...

For the foreign press corps, China in the 1930s, and particularly Shanghai, was a mixture of hedonism, excess and privileged extravagance in a world pitched into deep depression on the one hand and sliding into polarised politics and conflict on the other. The China press corps was, like its colleagues around the world, forced to take sides. Some did so willingly and others found themselves slipping into activism. This was the “dirty thirties” of fascism vs socialism, war vs peace and civilisation vs barbarism; but, for those with jobs and money in a relatively cheap country like China, it was...

The number of foreign journalists who happened to be in the vicinity of central Shanghai when the bombs fell on Black Saturday, 14 August 1937, was incredible. Chinese air force planes flew over Shanghai to bomb Japanese cruisers on the Huang Pu to prevent Japanese air raids on China, but they missed. One of their 550-pound bombs fell at the crowded intersection of Nanking Road and the Bund and two more bombs fell on the bustling Avenue Edward VII. The bombs caught crowds of onlookers gazing up at the planes and the loss of life was appalling, with 1,740 people...

In October 1938 the government retreated to Chongqing which is geographically closer to India than Shanghai and where the population swelled to a million. The government and the refugees were followed by a horde of foreign correspondents pouring in for either brief visits or the duration. War correspondents were to become stars on their newspapers, widely read and bylined but not always writing exactly what they saw. Notions of censorship both in China and at home still applied while patriotism and political expediency to support the Allies was actively encouraged and ordered by editors. For many arriving with friendly intentions...

As the war against Japan ended, renewed civil war erupted between the Nationalists and Communists. For those who had been active in the press corps before the war, the writing was clearly on the wall, though they didn’t always immediately see it and tried to restart life as before. In 1948 Norman Allman returned to Shanghai to be the editor and publisher of the China Press, but eventually could find no accommodation with the new regime, and so gave up and left China. Randall Gould tried to relaunch the Shanghai Post and Mercury and attempted to reach some sort of...