Early Steamships in China
The following article, Early Steamships in China, by A.D.Blue, was, I believe, first published in the 1973 Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society Hong Hong Branch.
See photocopied version.
HF: I have retyped the article to aid clarity and website searches.
Thanks to SCT for proofreading the retyped article.
Early Steamships in China
A.D.Blue
In East Asia: The Modern Transformation, Professor J.K.Fairbank writes, “This carrying trade on China’s waterways was to prove the Westerner’s main point of entry into the Chinese economy, for here the introduction of the steamship could alter the inherited technology.” As late as 1880 there was not a single mile of railway in China, nor a single machine-driven loom or spindle. At that date, however, the three leading steamship companies owned forty two steamships operating on the various routes on the Canton River, the Lower Yangtse, and between the various treaty ports on the coast. As K.C. Liu points out in his Anglo-American Steamship Rivalry in China, 1862-74, the steamship was not only a technological innovation. It was also a business innovation, because it brought with it new methods of capital organisation and management on a scale hitherto unknown in China. Many Chinese of the scholar-official class also recognised the importance of steamships, and of guns, and – by inference – the political system which made these things possible. From the mid 19th century onwards, memorial after memorial to the Throne emphasised this. Sir Charles Snow was not exaggerating so very much when he wrote that the steam engine helped to shape the modern world as much as Adam Smith or Napoleon. Unfortunately for China, officials closer to the Throne discouraged its occupants from pursueing modernisation.
Steam navigation in China began in the south, on the Canton River, and – like so many other aspects of the Western invasion – came by way of India. The first steamship in Asia seems to have been the Nawab of Oude’s steam yacht, about which little information has survived. According to Prinsep, this was built at Lucknow in 1819, and equipped with an eight horse-power engine sent out from England, so she must have been very small. She is said to have been capable of seven to eight knots, but when the Nawab tired of her was allowed to go to ruin. Apart from this, the first steamships in India operated on the Hoogly in the early 1820s, mainly as tug boats.
The first steamship in the Dutch East Indies was the Van der Capellen, a paddle steamer of 230 tons, designed to operate a coastal service in Java. The Van der Capellen was built by a consortium of British merchants in Sourabaya in 1825, and equipped with engines built by Fawcett and Company of Birmingham.