The Alcock Album: Scenes of China Consular Life 1843–1853

By the 1830s, a sophisticated and richly documented hybrid Sino-foreign mercantile culture had evolved in China’s Pearl River Delta. It reached from the Portuguese colony at Macau to the tiny “Factory” site at Canton, the complex of warehouses and residences to which visiting foreign traders were restricted by the Chinese authorities, and it encompassed the residential complexes built by elite Chinese merchants on Henan Island and the infrastructure which supported the fleets that arrived to trade and which were moored in the delta. At its heart were the export of tea and, increasingly, the smuggling of opium into China by British and American merchants, despite the prohibition of that trade. All this was smashed in the violent conflict with the British that unfolded after an Imperial Commissioner, Lin Zexu, arrived in Canton in early 1839 to suppress the illegal opium business.

A year after the First Opium War ended in August 1842, a fledgling new infrastructure was developed across the new ports opened to British foreign trade and residence. Areas for foreign residence were marked out in Shanghai, Fuzhou (Foochow), Xiamen (Amoy), and Ningbo, and the restrictions at Canton were eased, while the island of Hong Kong became a British colony. Foundations were dug, buildings were thrown up, roads laid, wharves and jetties constructed. We know a great deal about how the world that was upended in 1839 looked, because it was richly documented in paintings and other media by Chinese and European artists and craftsmen. Galleries and museums hold rich collections of this “China trade art”, much of it produced for export, commissioned from artists at Canton or Macau, or sold in the shops at the back of the Canton factories. As Patrick Conner notes in the introduction, we also have some more informal sketches and watercolours by foreign residents, mostly inspired by the wonderful work of the Macau-based British artist George Chinnery. We have some fine pictorial records of the major embassies to China, including William Alexander’s sketches from Lord Macartney’s embassy. We have some pictorial records of the conflict itself, starkest among them the watercolours of naval surgeon Dr Edward Cree, who did not flinch from portraying the violence of the conflict: even the most bucolic of his colourful sketches is overshadowed by the horrors others portray. But it is striking to consider that we know almost next to nothing about how the new establishment outside Hong Kong looked in its early decades, for we have almost no visual records of it at all.

For scholars who have repeatedly traversed this world in the archives, Henrietta Alcock’s watercolours and sketches are revelatory. We do not lack for written records of the establishment and teething problems of the new order being introduced in these diverse and important Chinese cities, even though time, termites, and mould took their toll on these. The Treaty of Nanjing that laid its foundations was quite sketchy and high-level: details needed to be worked out in situ, and this proved challenging. The Qing might have lost the war, or at least caused it to be brought to a halt by ceding to their British challengers what the aggressors had demanded, but this did not translate into easy cooperation on the ground. Problems and protests were turned into prose. Opium imports were still illegal, but also remained a busy and inventive trade. Out of the newly established consulates flew despatches and letters detailing this challenge and that incident, as consuls puzzled at how to make it all work, proposing this approach or deprecating that one. Complainants called in at their makeshift offices, setting out this affront or that one. Words piled up, and they were sometimes accompanied by sketch maps and plans. But, in many ways, this is something of a dark age, compared to the wealth of material that records the sights and people of the old Canton trade.

The new sketches presented in this volume bring early treaty port China to life. We can now see what these new sites of British diplomacy looked like, and what those very early pioneer residents saw, and it can prompt us to think afresh about the novelty and significance of the encounters that are documented here. They also provide a particular and new perspective, that of a woman married to one of the British consular officials who was engaged in trying to make the new structures and processes work. Those mountains of paper were written for men by other men: and it was mostly men who lived in the developing new communities of foreign nationals in the opened ports. But even so, it was not exclusively a male domain, even if it often reads like one, and Henrietta Alcock’s story, richly documented in Andrew Hillier’s expert commentary, provides a new way for us to understand this early history of the treaty ports.

Henrietta’s is a particular perspective, that of the comfortably born and well-connected wife of a British surgeon, Rutherford Alcock, who was appointed in 1844 to one of the first consulships, at Fuzhou. The story of this marriage is set out in the following pages, and it was in a sense also recorded in the sketches they made in Xiamen, Fuzhou, and Shanghai, where they lived from 1846 until her death there in 1853. In the drawings we catch sight of consular interiors and gardens, their surrounds, the cityscapes the Alcocks looked out upon, and the country into which they were able to travel. This was still a period of some restrictions on journeys by foreign residents from the opened ports, but the drawings show how the limits to these were pushed as the Alcocks and friends made for the countryside and sights outside the cities.

It looks idyllic. The fighting had stopped, and although it would resume, it only did so after Henrietta’s death (provoked in no small way by Harry Parkes, who features extensively in the narrative that follows as a colleague of Alcock and friend to the couple). What we have here is a record of the first peace, one in which there was leisure to explore, certainly for his wife, but even for a busy consul, and time enough to sketch and paint. One thing that is quite distinctive about the world portrayed here is how makeshift it was, compared to what it became. In time, the British built consulates, housing for their staff, consular courts, and even jails, plans of these all duly filed with the Works Department of the Foreign Office. It all looked quite dull. But at this early point the new British arrivals in China lodged where they could, in Chinese buildings which look striking and exotic, even though we know they recur as sources of complaint in official documents and private letters. The exception here is Shanghai (plate 7) where we get a strong impression of the way in which a new suburb was being built in a style that contrasted sharply with the Chinese city.

By the 1860s, the visual record of the treaty ports begins to thicken, not least in the work of photographers who set up studios in the treaty ports or who toured them, most famously John Thomson, whose work was published in the landmark four volume Illustrations of China and its People (1873–74). Thomson’s landscapes and his photographs of the still relatively young settlements have largely come to dominate our visual record of the treaty ports and their environs. By then, also, the demographic picture was changing and while it remained a predominantly male world, more European and American women were living in the foreign communities in China as well. The story of Henrietta Alcock has great value, then, as an intimate record of a pioneer life, of what was a leap into the unknown for both her and her husband. They had probably come no closer to anything Chinese before they left for Asia than Nathan Dunn’s Chinese collection in London, which will not have prepared them in the slightest for what they encountered. In their surviving art we find an evocative survey of the early treaty port experience, its sights, and almost its sounds and smells, caught on paper, and here presented in public for the very first time. I wish there was more of it, but what there is I think significantly expands our understanding of the lived experience of the British in the very early years of the Chinese treaty ports.

Robert Bickers
University of Bristol