The Customs Of Later Qing And The World Exposition

The Custom of late Qing dynasty, a government ministry with various functions, was not only in charge of the taxation for external trades of the country, also very diplomatically important. Unfortunately, this very important government department which should belong to China was actually controlled by a British, Hart. During the period of his controlling of the custom of China, he tried to enforce the power of the custom via its relationship between politics, economics, military affairs, culture and diplomatism, which was verified by the custom's representation of China to attend the world exposition. So far there are no systematically detailed reports about the custom of late Qing dynasty and the world exhibitions. Therefore it could be interesting to study this topic comprehensively and systematically. In this thesis, I take three world exposition s in 1870's, London world exhibitions in 1880's and the last two exhibitions hosted by the custom of China as the instance to study the change of the custom's function from attendance to hosting in the world exhibition. I believe this will reflect the extremely difficult way of China's change from close to open in late Qing dynasty. There are four chapters in this thesis. The first chapter is about the background of the custom's representation of China to attend the world exhibitions. I start with the history of the world exhibitions (1851-1905), followed by the earliest interaction of China with world exhibitions. And then I clarify the time for Chinese government to attend the world exhibitions formally. In the last part of this chapter, I analyze the reasons for The Custom to attend the world exhibitions as a representative of China based on the historic background of the time, the nature of the Custom of late Qing dynasty and the governor of Custom-----British, Hart. The second chapter is the main body of this thesis. In this part I describe the detailed procedure of the Custom's representation of China to attend the world expositions. The Custom of late Qing dynasty got a lot of valuable experiences from the attendance into three world exhibitions in 1870's. In 1873, Premier of Qing dynasty consigned the task of preparation to attend the Vienna exhibition to the governor of the Custom of China of that time, Hart, who considered this attendance as a very good chance to stimulate the external trades of China. He used the external trades goods as the items on display and simultaneously he made a trades report of the Custom in the past ten years for the exhibition. He did very well in preparing the attendance of the Custom into the Vienna world exhibition as a representative of China. So from then the Custom of late Qing dynasty was always in charge of the preparation to attend world exhibitions for Chinese government. In 1876, Hart dispatched a Chinese, Gui Li to attend the United States Centennial Exhibition,1876 in the Philadelphia . Li recorded in detail what happened during the exhibition and he edited these materials into a book which was called 'meihui zhilv'. In 1878, Hart organized three committees to attend the Paris world exhibition (Exposition Universelle de Pairs 1878) and made a feasible meeting attendance agenda. They collected Chinese traditional goods as the items on display for this Paris world exhibition. In the following, I illustrate the motivation of the Custom of China to attend the world exposition according to two London world exhibitions in 1880's, which are London piscatorial world exhibition in 1883 and London sanitary(food) world exhibition in 1884.The actual purpose of Hart's representation of China to attend the world exhibition was not to export Chinese culture of fishing, cooking, medicine and et al, or to stimulate the fishery, industry and commerce in China, but to show off his own achievement in the Custom of Qing dynasty. China's attendance in the world exhibition was actually the support and tool for him to accomplish his own political aids. Finally, the St. Louis world exhibition in US in 1904 and the Belgium world exhibition in 1905 were studied. How the Chinese government in late Qing dynasty thought about the world exhibition and how the Chinese people performed in the world exhibitions were also discussed. It revealed that Custom's representation of China to attend the world exhibitions was useless to drive the development of industrial techniques and commerce in late Qing dynasty. In the third chapter, I discuss the reasons of the change of representative of China to attend the world expositions: from Custom to Department of Business. Even though Custom of late Qing dynasty had attended several world exhibitions as a representative of China, there were not any obvious achievements as what expected. Indeed, the motivation of Custom to be in charge of organization and to represent China to attend the world exhibitions was not to stimulate the development of industry and commence in old China, but was only for Hart and his colleagues to pursue their political purposes. For such reasons, there were not any obvious positive effects on the development of industry and commerce, and thus it slowed down the progress to some extents. Until in the early 20th century, when Chinese people's commercial consciousness, national consciousness, and sovereignty consciousness had been awakened and people realized the importance of attending the world exhibitions, Ministry of Commerce tried to be in charge of all businesses relating to the world exhibitions.