Preface

Canton sits on the east bank of the Pearl River, around 80 miles from its entry into the South China Sea. Its name by which the city is popularly known, is said to be derived from the Portuguese Cantäo, which applied to the old walled city. “Guangzhou,” following its designation as the prefecture’s seat of Government in 1918, takes its name from the ancient Guang Province. The mountains are high and the emperor is far away (shãn gão, huángdi yuan) comes from an ancient Chinese proverb dating back to the 13ththirteenth-century Yuan dynasty. It alludes to a past age where those who operated at a suitably convenient distance from Peking were apt to disregard the proclamations of central authorities or even Imperial edicts that they deemed less than relevant to local circumstances or personal interests. In the context of past events, this perfectly encapsulates the position of Canton, at least up to the fall of the Qing dynasty, situated 1,316 miles from the capital and sheltered by the Baiyun Mountains whose thirty peaks were often shrouded in white clouds. The day of my first arrival in Hong Kong on the September 9, 1976, marked an unanticipated watershed in modern Chinese history, as it coincided with the death of Mao Tse-tung. My first impressive view of the city was therefore further distinguished by long lines of people, patiently queuing outside various branches of the Bank of China to sign the books of condolence. At the time it seemed to do little in terms of resolving the marked insularity on both sides of what was then an almost insurmountable land border, guarded by military representatives with mutual interests to protect. In December 1978, the metaphorical bamboo curtain, that had until then been only slightly ajar, was made somewhat more permeable by the planned reforms, set out at the 3rd Plenum of the 11th Central Committee by Deng Xiaoping. These did not unfold as a “grand design” but as a tentative approach that would set China on a new economic and social trajectory, and heralded a rapid transformation toward economic growth accompanied by tight political control. The vehicle for this was the Four Modernizations in agriculture, industry, defense, and technology. As a result of this my first visit to Canton was in late 1979, coinciding with new accords that were ORO Editions opening up Guangdong Province to both business and professional interests. Within two years my firm and I, who by that time were engaged with Hong Kong’s new town and rehousing programs,

became increasingly involved in some of the early urban planning and design projects in southern China. These were being hastily assembled as part of modernization initiatives that were to open up overseas investment, and unleashed forces that have propelled China to the forefront of global economic importance in the twenty-first century.

The route into China’s many southern cities at the turn of the 1980s was less than straightforward or convenient. Canton was a five-hour journey on the Kowloon-Canton Railway, or a seemingly endless road journey that involved various river crossings via car ferry. A visit further afield normally demanded a combination of rail, road, and air travel to a destination that we can now reach by air from Hong Kong within an hour. It generally involved an overnight stay in Canton’s Dongfang Hotel, well within walking distance of the station, with an early flight the next morning, and finally a pick-up and an overland journey to the point of arrival. But it was the “getting there” that often provoked the learning experience.

Canton remained the largest city within the dependent territory of Hong Kong’s immediate ambit, but with a population of only three million people, contained within a compressed topography where the Beiyun Mountains define its northern edges, and the alluvial plain to the south around the Pearl River tributaries was largely given over to agriculture.

Working visits to Canton required periods of stay in a government guest house, set in a quiet compound where meetings were usually held. Bedrooms were surprisingly large and comfortable, with stuffed armchairs and beds protected by giant mosquito nets. Mealtimes were rigidly enforced, and if one arrived late for the 6 a.m. bowl of congee it quickly disappeared back to the kitchen. Lunch followed a not dissimilar pattern at 12 noon, followed by a compulsory siesta, during which I took to exploring the adjoining streets, the Temple of the Six Banyan Trees with the remarkable Hua Pagoda, and the even older Guangxiao Temple, with the nineteenth-century spires of the Sacred Heart Cathedral puncturing the horizon.

The collection of craft of all types and sizes along the Pearl River was so great it almost obscured the water’s surface. This included passenger ferries that crossed to the riverside wharfs of the Liwan district, seemingly unhindered by the competition of countless small crafts that followed their own personalisedpersonalized itineraries along the Zhujiang.

The city was in the process of building China’s first international hotel—the White Swan—and we would occasionally drive from Macau on weekends to monitor progress. It was financed and conceived as one of several public initiatives by the Hong Kong businessman and philanthropist Henry Fok Ying-tung, who was later appointed as vice chairman of the 10th National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference—the country’s top political advisory body. As a member of the FIFA executive committee he also brought football teams to Canton to play in front of 50,000 wildly cheering and denim-suited supporters, which gave me, as an occasional visitor, something to do in the evening—even participating in pre-game kickabouts. ORO Editions

The hotel opening that I attended in February 1983 was followed two days later by an invitation to all local residents who came in their thousands to experience the grand central atrium with its

imposing waterfall feature. Soon afterwards it hosted more impressive visitors including Hu Yaobang, Zhao Zi-yang, Deng Xiao-ping, and later Queen Elizabeth II. The privileged location of what was to become the first international hotel in China was situated on the southern bank of Shamian Island overlooking the Pearl River, and provided the first tall building insertion in what was a grand collection of British and French buildings that formed the Canton concession area dating from the mid-nineteenth century. Ten years later the Fok Ying Tung Foundation became the first foreign investor in Nansha, now a city district of Guangzhou, with the objective of developing a city for the twenty-first 21st century as part of the Pearl River Delta Region. To the north and across a canal via a narrow bridge were the markets, with sights both impressive and startling, and as far as the livestock section went, not for the faint-hearted. This led to the compressed street system that was formally the center-point of the Thirteen Hongs, through the now pedestrian Shangxiajiu Street, and along Zhongshan Lu to the Temple of the City God. To the east of Shamian was the bund with its tree-lined promenade and collection of older treaty port buildings, including the Port Authority building. Further to the north, Liuhuahu Park provided boating opportunities on the lake, while Yuexiu Park to the east incorporated the Five Rams statue and Zhenhai Tower, and at its southern fringe the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall. Through the closing decades of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, our work in Mainland China extended to a number of the largest cities including Beijing, Shanghai, Xian, and Chengdu. However, Canton has remained as an always engaging destination at the head of the designated Greater Bay Area. Its active program of urban regeneration has equipped the city with the means to meet the new demands of a carbon-neutral future while embracing necessary goals of livability. The history of Canton is a complex and multi-facetted one. Its trading relationship with the West extended back to the maritime silk route that flourished between the second century BCE and the fifteenth century CE, and connected China with Southeast Asia, the Indian subcontinent, the Arabian Peninsula and Europe. From the sixteenth century international trade with the West advanced considerably following the arrival of the Portuguese in 1552, which effectively exploited pre-existing trading conditions. By the beginning of the eighteenth century many parts of Asia were becoming active bases for expanding commercial networks, including trading links with Chinese ports, but with independent physical identities that reflected a strong Western influence in administration, planning, and city making. In this sense “modernization” was, in significant ways, essentially equated with Westernization, under which sweeping political forces of change over the next two centuries would shape emerging cultural identities. By the early nineteenth century, during the Qing dynasty, only 10 percent of China’s population lived in urban situationettings. The combined total of China’s top ten cities amounted to only two percent of the total population of 300 million that had doubled over the preceding 150 years, as Imperial policy favored a balanced pattern of growth between market towns and villages. However, some of the most significant urban entities in China ORO Editions were the major port cities, situated around the natural coastal harbors and river deltas, of which Canton was the most important as a center for trading activity.

Well before the problems that beset China from the mid-nineteenth century, both inter-provincial and external trading conditions were extremely robust, with commodities including tribute grain and silver shipments distributed through a system of waterway transport.1 The beneficial mutuality of close Chinese bureaucratic and merchant contact through guangxi also acted to protect vested interests on both sides, and resisted or excluded foreign traders from traditional avenues of commerce. It can in fact be argued that China’s political and market systems were, in their somewhat isolated context, both sophisticated and self-sustaining, and therefore in little need of external interjections to forcibly alter their course. However, the need for new instruments of change and accompanying institutional adjustments were virtually inevitable in re-shaping its position within rapidly evolving world events.

Canton and other port cities were established as beachheads of foreign influence during a period of massive Western expansionism and trading ambition. The Treaty Ports exerted a strong hold on urban politics, economic growth, and new patterns of urbanization, with foreign settlement opening up parts of the country to Western cultural influence just as it expanded its commercial horizons. In a more elusive way, the new “gateways” into and out of China, transformed not only attitudes to modernization but almost inadvertently fueled changing political attitudes, offering an alternative urbanism outside hidebound standards and state control.

The foreign occupants of hastily constructed “concession areas” in the mid-nineteenth century arrived with fortuitous advantages from an industrialized and militarized Western world. However, the initial capacity to coerce was fated to erode over the following century as forms of occupation gave way, first to commercial collaboration, and finally to subdued exit. This echoed and interfaced with the parallel process of change within China itself. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the Treaty Port period had begun to give way to a new era of revolution, military occupation and instability over the middle decades of the twentieth century. This led to the Socialist Planned Economy between 1949 and 1976, followed by the reforms of 1979. The reinvigorated city of Canton slowly began to re-emerge as a significant force through the continuing modernizations that heralded unprecedented urban growth, while Guangdong Province as a whole has greatly contributed to China’s emergence into the global marketplace.

John Fairbank, the noted Harvard historian, identified British activity in China during the early and middle years of the nineteenth century as the turning point in the “interface” between China and the West.2 In a number of ways this can be simplified into what, after the Treaty of Nanking, it had more or less become—an opening up of China through a commercial exploitation by foreign interests. It is, however, a more complicated and ultimately more ambiguous process than this, leading directly to the revolutionary events of the twentieth century, with an emerging social and political order that continues to reverberate through its intense transition from national disintegration and isolationism to strategic remodeling, economic regeneration, and world stature. In all, ORO Editions the period that extended over almost two centuries reflected a frequently unstable but inevitable transition from the old to the new China.

The sudden Western presence, crudely superimposed on a very different societal structure, might be considered, in retrospect, as a timely stimulus toward internationalism, just as much as it was an imperialist intrusion. This being said, Niall Ferguson has ventured to suggest that the British historically regarded forceful occupation and attempted jurisdiction over foreign territories as an inherent part of their “civilizing mission.”3 At the same time, China’s somewhat passive response ORO Editions toward a militant presence of “barbarian” invaders could be explained through the potential benefits of new trading trajectories rather than a critical challenge to the very structure of its society.

From the mid-nineteenth century, the Concession Areas grafted awkwardly onto older city forms or transposed on completely separate sites along river shorelines, almost inadvertently contributed to a new urban order through a combination of new port works, imported industrialization techniques, the integration of rail routes, and the gradual formation of new business and commercial centers. New areas of land reclamation, created to facilitate new growth areas and port works, evolved into multi-story commercial and diplomatic enclaves that absorbed evolving development typologies. These not only helped to establish present-day urban identities but effectively realigned city growth processes toward the newer urban quarters and commercial districts that created a focus for business development. However, many of these measures at the time ran counter to deeply ingrained organizationaloperational patterns within the country, and only superficially brought about a genuine amalgamation of interests. At a more elusive level, it can be quite legitimately supposed that the overall intention of European powers was not imposed imperialism but trading concessions. This was facilitated by an adroit single-mindedness in terms of establishing separate compounds within or at the fringe of existing port cities, where both land use and municipal control could be exerted independently of external constraints, but where there was a common bond. Canton and other treaty ports, which included Hong Kong, formed the start of what has been termed the “Western Century” in China, whereby the country experienced a remarkable transition from the disintegrating Manchu state to foreign partnership and a new international order.

From a historical perspective, while interactions between Chinese and foreign communities shaped the growing city of Canton and its institutional development, urbanization patterns also reflected the underlying robustness and continuity of the historic trading dynamic, irrespective of Western influence. It might be said, therefore, that foreign intervention, with its imperialistic overtones, redirected but did not alter the overall course of urbanization. For a time, however, the symbolism associated with Canton and other treaty ports informed and circumscribed the relationship between Chinese and foreign residents, just as it reflected new tiers of economic organization and urban definition. Fresh planning concepts for growth and expansion were introduced into Chinese cities, establishing a different morphological basis than the narrow streets and tightly packed courtyards of the older walled conurbations. There was also a possible need, however ambiguous, to reflect cultural differences through architectural patterns—not merely the distinctions between foreign and Chinese styles, but between the national characteristics of different concession areas.

Scholars of recent Chinese history tend to have put different interpretations on events, either contending that the treaty ports were crucial in overcoming an almost feudal society and leading China into an emerging industrial and trading world that could have only been resisted for a short time, or alternatively reasoning that treaty ports had little real political significance. In fact, the foreign settlements acted as the focus for largely independent mercantile and even city-building regimes, but were relatively disengaged from both revolutionary forces that were gathering momen-ORO Editions tum during the early twentieth century, and invading forces that eventually signaled their demise. It is perhaps prudent to broadly subscribe to the former view, with the ports propelling an emerging

role as trading gateways, particularly during their later years, while acknowledging that Canton had, for the most part, a thriving merchant class well before the advent of foreign merchant traders. The gradual disintegration of a long established imperial order can be largely attributed to the dislocation that China faced at the end of the nineteenth century, exacerbated by military struggles that it could scarcely contain. What is beyond dispute is that Western residents and Chinese formed an unofficial alliance, outside the established order of the time, to further both individual and collective commercial interests that had strong urban and political repercussions. This also contributed to the breakdown of the rigid demarcation between the traditional bureaucrat and the urbanizing merchant class. The nineteenth century treaties were undoubtedly unequal, but the re-vamped urban management under the much maligned “extraterritoriality” for a time acted as a bridgehead toward modernization, ultimately proving to be an essential tool for the regularization of economic activities that would, sooner or later, have been inevitable. The supplanting of tribute by the treaty system, and its subsequent rationalization of administration, in effect cut loose the ancient instruments of ritual and gradually prepared the path for new institutional development, while advanced modes of planning established a workable city infrastructure that opened the door to investment in China’s urbanization, and activated new urban ideologies. Concentrations of capital in the hands of both foreign and Chinese banks facilitated the continued expansion of the Chinese merchant class, and by the turn of the twentieth century Chinese ORO Editions investors and management input were represented in around 60 percent of all foreign capital ventures. The tight network of commercial guild associations helped to maintain a high degree of

separation from foreign financial institutions run on more formal lines, and Chinese financial bodies remained dominant in terms of domestic operations.

The path to modernization in China took a bewilderingly different course from that of many colonized Asian countries. There are several possible reasons for this, beginning with the paradoxical situation that prevailed until 1911, whereby foreign influence and ideology failed to implant a sufficiently viable new order, despite a weak and progressively ineffectual dynastic leadership, partly due to the dislocation and civil unrest initiated and prolonged by the foreign occupation itself. It led many disaffected Chinese intellectuals to question the established order and inherent resistance to change, and generated a commitment to a bourgeoning Chinese nationalism and a realm of support for Western-style modernization as an agent of economic transformation.

In socio-cultural terms, China possessed a long-established and self-sufficient identity that was intuitively resistant to external pressure—even the prevailing Manchurian Qing dynasty adapted to the indigenous Han model. It proved to be relatively accepting of Western cultural overtures, including new patterns of modernization that became insinuated within established cities, and remained relatively immune to the confrontational pressures of foreign intrusion. The overthrow of the Qing dynasty in 1911 as a result of revolutionary forces that had been gaining momentum since 1894, gave way to a civil struggle and war with Japan that culminated in the Communist victory in 1949. This came to represent a series of conflicts and reconciliations, many of which were interrelated: those between invasive forces and political imperatives; those between social struggle and ideological principles; those between the entrenched Confucianist order and the inevitable pressures of a new internationalism; and those between the modernisingmodernizing impetus of urbanisationurbanization and the conservative rural heartland, steeped in tradition.

The modernizing forces associated with Canton and other port cities had little or no interface with the vast rural realm that allowed the established system of self-sufficiency to continue, impervious to the central bureaucracy and the distant currents of urban change. This separation survived relatively unchanged until the post-1949 period up to the late 1970s, during which time economic upheaval was compounded by problems of mismanagement of agricultural policies, impossible industrialization targets, and mass deprivation.

Contemporary China, with its emphasis on rapid city growth, has, to a significant extent, optimized the responsive urban legacy and latent capital markets of the major port cities. Canton today is China’s third largest city and its most prosperous. It still retains within its morphology a physical legacy of the early concessions and resulting urban form. The monumental but fragmented residue of foreign occupation, enshrined in Lingnan traditions of brick, stone, and architectural ornament in relation to place and situation, now infuses the present day city with a mellow and timeless sense of place. The road to modernization has been fraught with hurdles, revolution, and reform. In the twenty-first century it has led to a type of state-controlled capitalism, with a guarded acceptance that this ORO Editions represents a nuanced interpretation of orthodox Marxism, but arguably one which is suited to the unified tradition of Chinese society, even as China accepts the implications of the global marketplace.

Nineteenth-century plan of the Pearl River Delta.

As such, much of the twentieth century can be considered an unstable period of transition up to the present modernizations, which still hold within them many pre-modern conditions. The unequal treaties of the nineteenth century, coupled with the cataclysmic events that evolved from this, arguably fed the political undercurrents. This in turn induced a strengthened sense of purpose in restoring territorial integrity, that was later to embrace the return of Hong Kong to China in 1997 followed by the return of Macau in 1999 under Special Administrative Area status. Globalization and the return of overseas educated Chinese increasingly impart Western values and an international outlook, but as Chinese society matures so does a sense of nationalism. This includes a forceful definition of patriotism and respectful identification with the new China as it plays a leading role on the world stage. There is not a little irony in the fact that the Royal Mint in nineteenth-century London that received the shipment of millions of taels of silver that China was forced to hand over to Britain ORO Editions as reparation at the conclusion of the Opium Wars, is now owned by the Chinese government and houses its embassy.