The Official British Establishment
in Shanghai: Foreign Office Files,1836-1955
Lane J. Harris

Department of History
Furman University
A map showing the military situation in China during the Northern Expedition. (Situation in China, Shanghai and Hong Kong. 1927. MS WO 32 War Office and successors: Registered Files WO 32/16176. The National Archives (Kew, United Kingdom).
China and the Modern World, link.gale.com/apps/doc/QADRGY072678760/CFER?u=asiademo&sid=bookmark-CFER&xid=0ab01587&pg=193.)

This digital collection of material from the British
Foreign Office and British Consulate in Shanghai
between 1836 and 1955 titled China and the Modern
World: Records of Shanghai and the International
Settlement represents an extraordinary assemblageof archival sources vital to our understanding of thepolitical, diplomatic, military, social, economic, andcultural history of the British informal empire in China
from its unofficial capital in Shanghai. The British
informal empire in China became, over the course of
the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century,a mixture of commerce, capitalism, and culturethat manifested itself in a settlement governed bya legally-ambiguous Municipal Council, a readyfleet of British gunboats plying coastal and inland
waterways, an externally-imposed legal system
privileging foreigners with extraterritoriality and otherpreferential rights, a free trade system designed tofacilitate capital and trade flows between Europe
and China, a pedagogical regime of international law
policed by diplomats and consuls, and a discourse
holding up Western culture as the normative globalstandard. As such, these are the invaluable official
records of the creation, growth, consolidation, decline,
and end of the British informal empire in China.
The British informal empire in China was not partof some grand, strategic design predicated on
constant warfare and treaty-making, but the result ofalmost daily contestations and negotiations between
the official British establishment, the expatriates,
settlers, and Chinese residents of the International
Settlement, and the Qing and Republican authorities.
Hence it is no surprise to see that this digital archive
contains much useful information on local British
and Chinese society, the activities of the Shanghai
Municipal Council, and the workings of the Qingand Republican governments over this tumultuouscentury. Starting in the aftermath of the Opium
War and ending with the British retreat after thesuccessful Communist Revolution in 1949, this digitalarchive also contains much valuable information
about the Taiping Rebellion, the Second Opium War,the Boxer Uprising of 1900, the New Policies Reformsof the late Qing, the 1911 Republican Revolution, thewarlord era, the May 30th Movement of 1925, theNationalist Revolution of 1927, the Shanghai War of1932, the conflicts of World War II in Shanghai, theCivil War of 1945-1949, and the Communist takeoverin the early 1950s.

Origins of the British Establishment in Shanghai
On November 8, 1843, Captain George Balfour arrived
in Shanghai as the first British consul. The British
consuls in the cities of Shanghai, Ningbo, Fuzhou,
Xiamen, and Guangzhou were the highest British
executive and judicial authorities in the newly opened
treaty ports. Shortly after arriving, Balfour negotiatedthe opening of the port to British commerce, theestablishment of a special residential area known as
the British Settlement, and facilitated the issuance of
the Land Regulations of 1845, which gave the British
community the independence to govern this new safe
haven without Chinese interference. Over the next
twenty years, the British consuls and the ShanghaiMunicipal Council turned Shanghai into the heart ofthe informal British empire in China.

Page extract from a despatch of Captain Balfour on his plan to establish
a British settlement in Shanghai. (CHINA: Papers. Money for Groundat Shanghai. Draft to M. Bonham, No. 12, 1848. Note: Bound: China
47. Copy. 16 May 1865. MS FO 881 Foreign Office: Confidential Print
FO 881/394. The National Archives (Kew, United Kingdom). China andthe Modern World, link.gale.com/apps/doc/NENWDB987454920/
CFER?u=asiademo&sid=bookmark-CFER&xid=6ea280f5&pg=2.)

The Shanghai Consulate Files: GeneralCorrespondence, 1845-1955
The efforts of the successive consuls to preside overBritish Shanghai are reflected in the voluminous
general correspondence files of the British consulate.
The early consuls, particularly Balfour, Rutherford

Alcock, and Harry Parkes, frequently sought toengage in diplomacy with local Qing officials, andexpand the British position, but these headstrong
consuls disappeared from the scene as the nineteenth
century wore on and gave way to professional
consuls like Patrick Hughes or Nicholas Hannen,
who more often dealt with local issues in accordancewith Legation guidance. Their primary tasks wereto ensure that the Qing and Republican authorities
abided by the provisions of the treaties, that British
rights were protected, and that British living inShanghai also observed the treaties. In other words,
the consuls were tasked with making sure the treaty
regime worked.
Aside from the consuls and their staffs, the British
who came to Shanghai were soldiers and seamen,
merchants and traders, and missionaries andscholars. Over time, the successful expatriate
businessmen formed the core of the cosmopolitan
merchant oligarchy that ran the Municipal Council
and whose economic activities attracted employees.
Many of those employees became settlers or
Shanghailanders, as they would later be known, who
made up the majority of the foreign population of
the International Settlement until Japanese settlers
supplanted them in the early twentieth century. The
expatriate sojourners and local settlers were alsojoined by missionaries from Christian communities
around the world, soldiers and seamen temporarily
stationed near the city or passing through, and awhole host of other visitors from members of theroyal family to local Chinese dignitaries to American
jazz musicians. Over time, this heady mixture ofsojourners and settlers built up all manner of politicaland educational institutions, opened their own placesof worship, developed their own social practices, andconstructed their own cultural worlds.
The British government did not promote the activitiesof these British communities—the consul presided
over the whole affair from above—but the consuls
and their staffs did document the everyday, mundane
workings of empire in the city, supported andinteracted with British subjects living in the outports,
tracked the machinations of settler politics, andfrequently observed the happenings in the Chinesecommunity. As such, these general correspondence
files contain material on nearly every aspect ofBritish life in the city, the activities of the British inmini-settlements scattered throughout the treaty
port world, and the lives of Chinese residents of theInternational Settlement. The files also contain theconsiderable correspondence between the consuls
and local Qing and Republican officials, whose
Chinese-language originals were translated byconsular staff and included in the archive.

Shanghai Courts: Judges’ and Magistrates’
Notebooks, 1865-1941
The most infamous feature of the British informal
empire in China was the legal principle ofextraterritoriality. Under extraterritoriality British
subjects in China came under the jurisdiction of theirown consuls rather than Chinese law. As an important
tool of the British informal empire, extraterritoriality
protected and guaranteed British officials, merchants,
settlers, and missionaries access to their accustomed
rights. But, the law enforced in the Shanghai consular
courts was far from a monolithic, centralized systemof legal practice. Instead, consuls were guided by theForeign Office, who managed consular administrationand formulated the general policy for British interests
in extraterritorial jurisdictions. British consuls, then,had considerable scope to adjudicate cases within theframework laid out by the Foreign Office. This portionof the digital archive contains a wonderful range ofrich documents on the often thorny cases heard by
the consuls and magistrates. Through a close readingof these notebooks, we can understand the intricate
workings of the consular application of law as they
addressed civil, criminal, divorce, and admiralty cases
as well as inquests, bankruptcy, and probate hearing

Supreme Court, Shanghai, 1862-1939
In 1865, an Order in Council established Her Britannic
Majesty’s Supreme Court for China and Japan inShanghai. The chief judge who presided over thecourt tried cases involving the exercise of British
extraterritorial jurisdiction in China and Japan, until
the end of extraterritoriality in the latter in 1899.
The Supreme Court in Shanghai was responsible fortrying civil or criminal cases in which British subjects
were the accused or defendants. In Shanghai, theSupreme Court had jurisdiction over all cases
arising within the consular district, but only heard
cases from other consular districts in China upon

appeal. In 1878, a Crown Advocate was appointed
to serve at the Supreme Court, a position similar
to an attorney general in a British colony. Between
1878 and 1942, only six men served in the position,
most notably Hiram Shaw Wilkinson (1882-1897) andHiram Parkes Wilkinson (1897-1925), father and son.
The Foreign Office files pertaining to the Supreme
Court in Shanghai contains all of the correspondence
related to the court, the general correspondenceof the Crown Advocate, and the files of the British
consular assessor at the Mixed Court of theInternational Settlement.

After 1906, Foreign Office files were arranged into
11 classes of general correspondence, including
political correspondence. In the case of Shanghai,these documents represent the work prepared by thevarious political departments within the consulate. In
this digital collection, the correspondence from thepolitical departments touch on everything from theMixed Court riots in December 1905 to the May Fourth
protests in Shanghai in 1919. Of particular interest
are British political reports on commercial andmonetary problems in Shanghai, British observations,analysis, and judgements on the late Qing New
Policies reforms, documents on the International
Opium Commission in 1909, the activities of anti-Qing
revolutionaries prior to the 1911 Revolution, and all
the chaos and tumult between the collapse of the Qing
monarchy in 1912, the first parliamentary elections

Letter of appointment whereby Hiram Shaw Wilkinson appointed his son
Hiram Parkes Wilkinson as his representative. (Correspondence to andfrom Shanghai Consulate. Note: Vol. No. 1855. 1892-1900. MS FO 656
Foreign Office: Supreme Court, Shanghai, China: General Correspondence
FO 656/83. The National Archives (Kew, United Kingdom). China andthe Modern World, link.gale.com/apps/doc/RXQRPS328146594/
CFER?u=asiademo&sid=bookmark-CFER&xid=58fb353a&pg=3.)

Political Departments: General
Correspondence, 1906-1920
Begun in Shanghai in 1845, the General
Correspondence files, discussed above, are themain repository for the documents collected by theBritish Foreign Office. The filing system for general
correspondence, however, was revised in 1906.

A telegram on the strike and riots in Shanghai. (Japanese policy in China:anti-Japanese boycotts, strikes and student riots in Shanghai; Versailles
Peace Conference negotiations; transfer of German interests in Shantung
Province to Japan. January 29-June 20, 1919. MS FO 371 Foreign Office:
Political Departments: General Correspondence from 1906-1966 FO 371/
3694/ F 16000/10/19. The National Archives (Kew, United Kingdom). China
and the Modern World, link.gale.com/apps/doc/NHJKCD874456676/
CFER?u=asiademo&sid=bookmark-CFER&xid=719c9ced&pg=199.)

of the Republic, the presidency of Yuan Shikai, andthe emergence of the warlord era. These are some of
the most useful documents about British diplomatic
responses to events in China.

War Office: Registered Files, 1860-1938
In the early years of the British informal empire inChina, when banging on the magistrate’s table failedto elicit the desired response, the consul’s ultimate
weapon was calling in the navy. As additional treaties
were signed over the course of the nineteenth century,
British naval vessels began plying freely in Chinesewaters, including inland waterways, and foreign
troops were stationed in large urban centers likeShanghai. These files from the War Office detail allaspects of the administration of British armed forcesin China and their involvement, among other things,
with the Second Opium War (1856-1860), the Taiping
attacks on Shanghai and the Qing capture of Nanjing(1860-1864), the tensions in Shanghai during theBoxer Uprising (1900), British military trepidations
and the formation of the Shanghai Defense Forceduring the National Revolutionary Army’s NorthernExpedition (1926-1928), and the British military
reports on the fighting in Shanghai during theJapanese invasions at the start of World War II.

Other Files, 1842-1954
Many other useful files related to the history of theBritish in Shanghai are included in this database.
Probably the most important of these other files is
the Foreign Office: Confidential Print (NumericalSeries) (FO 881), which contains diplomatic andconsular despatches, foreign office instructions,
official memoranda, and other documents of suchvital significance that they were printed and circulated
in bound form to all consulates. Another interestingcollection is the Register of Companies (FO 914)
covering the period from World War I, when British
trade and commerce started losing market shareto Chinese and Japanese competition, to the end of
the Chinese Civil War in 1949. For those interested invisual material, the collection contains FO 925, which
consists of loose maps and plans extracted fromconsular despatches and reports from 1890 to 1928.
Finally, there are intriguing files from the Treasury
Department, the Ministry of Labour, and the Public
Records Office.

Conclusion

A map showing the military situation in China during the NorthernExpedition. (Situation in China, Shanghai and Hong Kong. 1927. MS
WO 32 War Office and successors: Registered Files WO 32/16176.
The National Archives (Kew, United Kingdom). China and theModern World, link.gale.com/apps/doc/QADRGY072678760/CFER?u=asiademo&sid=bookmark-CFER&xid=0ab01587&pg=193.)

There is absolutely no doubt that scholars will use
this digital archive, representing the great avalancheof paperwork generated by the British on the China
coast, to engage in the deep study of the manifold
changes in the contours, boundaries, and geographiesof the British informal empire in China. This informal
empire in China was not intentionally designed nor
consciously anticipated—there hardly seems tohave been a coherent strategy at all—rather it wasformed through a series of everyday contestationsand negotiations that reveal the anxieties anduncertainties of building an informal empire in China.
What this archive, then, reveals is not a monolithic
British empire, but an informal system that slowly
emerged through frequent failure, local resistance,and occasional victories over bureaucratic blockages
erected by the Chinese as the British stumbled
towards empire in the late nineteenth century, sought
to maintain their position in the face of muscular
Chinese nationalism in the 1920s and 1930s, but were
ultimately forced to retreat in the 1940s and 1950s.