The Chinese in America - Iris Chang [12]
Just outside these mansions lay terrible poverty. Indeed, the social distance between merchant and coolie, or unskilled laborer, in these coastal cities was almost as great as that between official and peasant in inland China. During a famine in Shanghai in the late 1840s, the poor literally died in the streets at the doorsteps of the rich. Many begged piteously for soup-kitchen tickets that entitled them to the ladlefuls of rice gruel that were dispensed as acts of charity by wealthy merchants.
Nonetheless, the areas closer to the sea also supported a working class of small entrepreneurs. In the province of Guangdong, boatmen, peasants, and small merchants mixed in a way that rarely happened inland, sparking an important part of the economy. Along Guangdong’s Pearl River drifted floating villages of junks, whose occupants handled cargo, or fished for a living, and these water-borne communities amassed the experience that comes with constant travel. Some natives of Guangdong worked the land, which was so poor that it bred a certain resourcefulness. Since the province was hilly and cursed with sandy soil, many rural families sought other ways to survive, such as producing handicrafts or working as middlemen merchants. And because Guangdong derived a certain energy from its port cities, such as Canton, many villages supported a thriving professional class, complete with doctors, artisans, real estate speculators, and teachers. It was this class of entrepreneurs who were the most eager to travel abroad.
The Chinese had once been adventurous and robust world travelers, and, at the peak of the Ming dynasty, long before the Manchu invasion, had launched from the coast several voyages of world exploration. Unfortunately, in the mid-fifteenth century, an emperor suspicious of the pressures for change introduced by these returning travelers abruptly shut down the naval expeditions, believing the Chinese people would do better to curb their wanderlust and tend to the graves of their ancestors. This marked the beginning of a long period of self-imposed isolation. During the early years of the Qing dynasty, the Manchu conquerors, fearing that Chinese overseas would ally themselves with rebel forces in the tropical Chinese island of Taiwan to plot the overthrow of the government, kept this anti-emigration policy in place. The penalty was death by beheading. Of course, once they had left the country, émigrés who flouted the law were obviously out of the reach of the government, so the law provided that any magistrates who assisted them were to be executed. Bureaucrats who captured people attempting to leave the country were rewarded with merit points that could lead to promotions.
But the law proved difficult to enforce. Despite the threat of execution, millions of Chinese, mostly from the coastal areas, left the country during the Qing dynasty to seek better lives elsewhere. In fact, the nineteenth century saw perhaps the greatest single exodus from China that the country had ever experienced in its history.
The nineteenth century also saw China’s decline as a world power. Centuries earlier, the Chinese had earned international admiration and respect as the most powerful civilization in the world, wealthier than all other countries, vastly more sophisticated than the societies of medieval Europe. China not only surpassed in area the greatest expanse of the Roman Empire, but lasted longer as well. But by the 1800s the nation had finally fallen prey to its own isolation. The Industrial Revolution vaulted many European countries far ahead of China in technological development. This almost fatal failure to keep pace would soon result in China’s humiliation by Western powers.
The West had received a bewildering array of contradictory reports of the decline. Some nineteenth-century travel writers from Europe or the United States saw the problems but preferred to dwell on the glories of the Chinese past, still extolling China as a land of imperial splendor, steeped in Confucian wisdom, a near-utopian society in which