 I'm Jane Golly, I'm the director here at the Australian Centre on China in the world and I have two, I think, very important tasks. The first that I'd like to begin with is to acknowledge that we are meeting on the traditional country of the Ngunnawal and Nambri peoples and to pay my respect to Elders past, present and emerging. And I think at this point in our history and our environmental situation that we find ourselves in, I'd really particularly like to recognise and respect their relationship with the land. I think there's so much that we could and should be learning from them and we're pretty slow learners on that front. They have tens of thousands of years of history and if only we could learn we might not be finding ourselves in the situation that we do today. Thank you also for coming out during this rather difficult time. I think a lot of people recovering from the rocky start to the year here but particularly with the coronavirus. I understand now that we're not supposed to shake the hands of people that we come into contact with but some of us are well versed and enjoy a good bow and I think there are other possibilities there as well. I've got a double Benjamin Act and I will now have the pleasure of inviting Dr Ben Penny to the stage. I'm sure that everyone in the room knows him he's a founding fellow and former director of CIW and among many other things that he achieved I would say he is almost single-handedly with a little bit of help from the architect responsible for managing the project which brought to us the wonderful building that we're sitting in tonight and that we're both fortunate enough to call our academic home. So over to you, Ben. Thanks so much, Jane. It's a lovely building, please enjoy it. It's a great pleasure tonight to welcome you to this George E. Morrison lecture on Chinese Ethnology. I know that some in the room are regular attendees some are probably new to this lecture. It is one of the it is the university's longest standing public lecture. It actually began before the ANU was established. The first Morrison lecture was given in 1932. It was established by a group of largely Chinese people in Australia to remember the great George Ernest Morrison, the Australian Times correspondent in Peking amongst many other things. But Morrison was a great Australian and one of the first Australians who had a really intimate and profound connection with China. In after he died, as I say members of the Chinese community got together and formed the committee that gave birth to this lecture. It began in 1932 as I say. It paused during the Second World War. And then when the ANU was established in 946, one of the things that the first Vice Chancellor did was to re-establish the Morrison lecture as a public lecture hosted by the ANU. And the ANU has held a Morrison lecture every year since. The list of speakers that have delivered the Morrison lecture reads like a who's who of the study of China over the period. Some of the great, great names of Chinese studies have been Morrison lecturers. So I'm very happy to say tonight that our 81st Morrison lecturer only adds luster to that remarkable list of people who have delivered the lecture in the past. We are honoured, privileged to have Professor Benjamin Elman here to deliver this lecture. Professor Elman is the Gordon Wu 1958 Professor of Chinese Studies at Princeton, now Emeritus. He is the author of a large number of books and articles and edited volumes on Chinese history. He is undoubtedly one of the foremost historians of China of our generation. Amongst other books, his more recent work, if I went through the lot, we'd be here for a very long time, his more recent work includes classicism, examinations and cultural history from 2010, a cultural history of modern science in China from 2009, and a textbook in world history from a couple of years ago, worlds together, worlds apart, a history of the world from the beginnings of humankind to the present, which is moderately ambitious as a task. Apart from his work at Princeton, Ben has also been very involved with directly participating in education and scholarship in East Asia through regular appointments, let me say, at the University of Tokyo and at Fudan University in Shanghai. There are two things I've mentioned tonight in this introduction. One is Fudan in Shanghai, one is a book on the history of science. Tonight's lecture brings those two together, as you can see. This is going to be a fascinating and valuable lecture. I've had the pleasure of getting to know Ben over the last few days, and I know that you will enjoy and learn a great deal from this lecture. So, Ben, the stage is yours. Ben, thank you very much for that introduction. I can't possibly develop to it, so I hope you'll forget it as soon as possible. I will move on to more humanly domains where I can help out in some areas. It's great to see all of you here. I feared that there would be nobody here because of the recent problems with the drugs that are passing around and the situation there, but you all come, you're all brave souls, and I appreciated a great deal that that's speaking to a few parasites and the walls on the side. So thank you for coming. I understand the context for all of this. It was great to see Tony Reed here, former colleague at UCLA and later another opponent when he was at Singapore, and he's done so well our work together at UCLA really brought both of us together in terms of Southeast Asia and East Asian studies, which was very important for all of us. We appreciate that. A great deal. I'm at the end of my career, so I'm quite capable of being irreverent about things that I used to be very reverent about. One of them is, of course, trying to deal with things as they were when, in fact, you don't know what they were. One of the problems with historians is they know the results, and they think that the results tell you what happened to begin with when, in fact, it doesn't work out that way at all. The learning of what caused something often makes it impossible for you to understand why they made the choices that they did, the people on the ground, the people in the villages, the people in the government and other places. So when something started out and people chose made choices, that's more important in many ways than getting to what happened at the end there and what's so important about the end story. So I'm not betraying the end story, but I think a beginning story in many cases is very, very useful and helps us understand a great deal of what's going on. Normally we don't think of Shanghai in science. We think of Shanghai in money. We think of Shanghai in trade and commerce. We think of it as a kind of anti-Chinese place within the Chinese empire that ruled in terms of domains, areas outside of the domains of the Qing Manchu dynasty, that it was a city on its own and a very prominent city on its own. That's certainly true in many ways of what happened with the role of Shanghai. But I think what intersected more importantly with the rest of the world was that in Shanghai, scientists gathered to try to produce engineers and thinkers and the like to improve the military of Shanghai, the autocracy of Shanghai, and also to gain English interests in the area called Shanghai for future trade and commerce. They controlled, for example, the major trading centers and also the control of the custom laws at the time. I'll be giving you a good many optical illusions. What you can see in this particular illusion is that the emperor, if he's an emperor, is being sold by the British officer. In many ways it's indicating that it's a question of digestion. You have to have the opium for your own problems. We need the opium money to buy various kinds of commodities to make us able to dissolve the tea we drink, which is a problem for Brits over drinking tea, I assume, and dealing with this issue. There's a similar problem that emerges in this trading network that had to do with the issues of rhubarb. Rhubarb was a hot commodity in the 19th century. Anybody who could buy rhubarb could presumably go to the bathroom with ease and confidence. So this focus on digestion and the uses of digestion in these trading mechanisms, people are being killed in the rear and the Chinese fellow or perhaps Manchu fellow saying we're doing this for the good of our country. In many ways we want to have the benefits of having the medicines and other things that are available to us in these networks. So in this optical illusion China and Britain are presented as enemies of sorts, but trying to figure out how to digest their food. And the digestion of food matters in terms of the trade with India for opium and the various objects and our agricultural materials in China themselves that the British empire is limited to. It wants a large collection of porcelain, tea, all kinds of commodities are coming from China, going to Europe via India and then being returned in the trade. Where is the money? The good deal of money is in China. And so if we're talking about capitalism, this isn't capitalism quite yet. This is a trading network where the British are forcing upon the Chinese the obedience to buy the opium for the trading mechanisms for those who are addicted to it in the Chinese sector. And this will help the British suck up and devour their tea. So tea versus the opium is the key story. And we rarely get that story. We get stories of commodities going back and forth when you suit you. The British wanted to talk about commodities that later would become commodities based on drugs, drugs that were illegal even in the Qing Dynasty, the last dynasty. And this kind of illusion here is indicating that the illusions of digestive tract ideas is something that we all need to be very careful about. The British brought portions of Singapore, portions of Shanghai under control very quickly. And this is a outline of what was happening in 1842 that the war was ended by 1842. And Shanghai became a treaty port almost immediately. This is what the British wanted. They had the layout of the river approaching the various other rivers and providing a maximum trade and commerce in a single area. Hong Kong was very useful for that purpose. But Shanghai was closer to the big money, the big money in Shanghai, Suzhou, Yangzhou, and the other major cultural centers of the Yangtze Delta. The Yangtze Delta was at first looked upon as a great trading port. It was that too. But it was also a great area for agricultural goods, for porcelain making, and also for building a huge economic framework. So in this context, the British are trying to keep track of things that allow them to serve in gaining access to this huge marketplace. So in this particular digest here, we're getting access to what the British wanted from the area. And they noted that this would be a foreign settlement at Shanghai. This would be Shanghai. In brief, the history of Shanghai is being written very quickly in 1842 and being included under the Empire of the British in this context. So the British have picked a very important place to gain control of. And its uses of Shanghai for the next 15 years will be building a relationship between the Manchu throne, its Chinese mandarins, and also the people they come into contact with through the British exchange. So the British are in many ways incorporating India first and later China into their world system of sorts. I'm trying to explain to you here that China like India is becoming part of a much larger and greater economic gain than before. And that both India and China will have to come to grips with this very impetuous but well thought out way of bringing the Asian states within the framework of trade and commerce of India and China together. We know that the money was in China and India. They were getting the money for the goods and the British wanted to change the direction of trade so that the opium was coming from India to China and Chinese silver was going out via India to Europe. And so in this context the money travel was as important as medicines that were traveling. So the rhubarb went with silver and also with opium in this trading network. The boond which became very famous was the boond for the foreign city. The city of Shanghai was on the northern edge of the river, the major river going north and south. And the boond was being built around it in modern Western buildings, usually two stories in their context. You see some of this repeated in Southeast Asia, particularly among Chinese communities living in trading networks that fed into this larger framework of trade with India and China. And that these two story, three story brick buildings became places where traders and communicators could deal with various issues that they needed to deal with and they did so accordingly. This is the boond around 1900. And you can begin to see that the shipping is less impressive than it is initially here. But the increase in technology through the engines and ships that were being built in this period of time, the boond was it becoming to be a very major center. The problem with the boond is that this is only one part of Shanghai. Shanghai was more than just the boond, more than just the harbor on the northern side of the area. The mouse here shows you that there are two Shanghai's that we have to deal with. This is the foreign concession here that we've just seen called the boond. And this is the older city of Shanghai where the Chinese remain living in residence and the trading and commerce had focused on it one time. So here going basically from the Yangtze Suzhou River, which goes to Suzhou further up in the Yangtze Delta, it links up to Shanghai Harbor and links up to other areas. If those of you who were in Shanghai went to the fair three years ago, you'll note that this area was covered by a place of gardens and agricultural where you want to watch this particular area of gardens grow precipitously into the arsenal of East Asia in this point. But how it got there is a longer story. So I want you to see that we have the foreign city under the boond, but we also have the Chinese city under the Chinese state. The boond is independent and has its own laws and brings in its own people, hires its own employees. The Chinese city itself, older and going back to better days in the 12th, 13th, 14th centuries, is holding the fort in this particular area, which is bigger, who's going to win, is unclear in the 1840s. But nonetheless, the foreign consortium is using access to the lower Yangtze River to get access to the upper Yangtze River, going into Sichuan province. So the Yangtze is the avenue towards success, power and money. The foreign concession here from the British, and French and American, is access to this very important waterway, connecting north, north and south, and east and west. So this is where the central area for trade and commerce is emerging. And what we normally get, this is Shanghai in 1851, we get the foreign world of the west, particularly the English, the Americans, and the French quarters, and we get nothing for the Chinese city that was there. Here we can see the change, the rules a little bit, and move the north to the north, and build a different view of it. But here central Nanjing Road is here, the district is here, the north-grade Chinese city is here, and it's the northern city that gains mostly attention from the point of view of Europe. But the population size of Shanghai is much greater, and in many ways, still very important throughout this period. So it's a tale of two cities. It's a tale of the city of Shanghai under Manchu and Chinese control for centuries in the past, and the new city that's emerging from the Europeans, particularly the British and the French, and some of the Americans, coming up with a larger framework for this area. So I want you to get a sense of China, Shanghai in particular, is being cut up. You can cut up in such a way that people forget to talk about it even, as a place that needs to be cut up. The Europeans pretend it doesn't exist. The waterways in the Chinese part of the ports, and the new ports bringing in the new steamers, and others from Europe are quite separate in this framework. So we want to sort of look at the maps of Shanghai as revealing the transition from a Chinese Manchu city and trading network into a Manchu province, that Manchu Providence that covers the Chinese city still, but allows a huge number of Europeans and their Chinese workers to operate in the northern part on the routes to Suzhou and into central China. So this is an important place of interest for all of us, and we need to sort of understand how this outline plan of the foreign settlements evolved, and that this is the beginning point of the centrality of Shanghai in Chinese trade and commerce, and we need to take that seriously and understand standard, but also indicate that the Wangpo River and the other rivers in this area are equally part of the rise of the city. It's also rising in the framework of the new treaty ports that have been opened up just as in Japan. They're opened up here in China for bringing trade and commerce directly to, from India, Southeast Asia, directly into the British concessions in the city of, of, of Shanghai. Here we have a map that sort of begins to give you a sense of the city emerging. This is the western part, which is gaining in size and shape, and the elite of the old city of Shanghai is slowly but surely staying the same. It's what we call stagnant. Population is relatively the same, although it has the same area as before. It's the Europeans that, in the upper areas of Shanghai along the river, we see the growth in economic trade and commerce on a mass scale and on a scale that has never, had not been achieved up to that point. So the Chinese city is there, but it's still the old Chinese city. This will become Chinatown in the 21st century. When tourists come to China, they want to see quaint Shanghai. The Bund is not very much of interest, so they wind up saying Chinatown. And Chinatown was a prominent city under the Manchus, under the Ming dynasty, going back to the Song dynasty, and as early as the Tang and Song dynasty was one of the leading cities of the empire. And here we have eight or nine cities that people are brought into. The walls were necessary to protect the inner families and groups and officials and traders and those involved with the dynasty. And it was not repeated by the Europeans here. The European areas were usually wide open. There were no walls to keep people out. The walls were maintained in the Chinese part of the city, which I think we need to sort of keep in track. It was a walled city, both conceptually and physically in that regard. So this is your map. This is more or less half of what is left. This is the Chinatown that today is being built up with McDonald's and various other kinds of commodities coming from the West in this time. The European was coming in these ways in earlier times. And we see the new northern gate that's being opened up in this period, the small eastern gate. These gates became cultural icons, but useless in terms of law and order or trade and commerce. They were just simply there for occupation and for people passing back and forth into the European quarters, the French quarter, the American quarter, and the British quarter were certainly the most popular of the trading efforts. So you have, in many ways, it's hard to say two parallel cities. They're next to each other. They have a good deal to do with each other. And yet they're coming, they're reacting to two different governmental regimes. One, an empire of Banshu emperors who go back for 250 years and are operating in that community and trying to control the wealth and power of this very rich dynasty that had been able to hold off the British and the French and the others coming in until the Taiping rebellion. Many of you have probably not heard of the Taiping rebellion. It's not the Taiprider rebellion that we hear about, some people. The Taiping rebellion was a rebellion of huge massive peoples in South, Southeast China that wanted the Banshu out and they wanted to build a new society, return their society to the previous form and they wanted to take on new ideals, Christianity done by the Banshu, done by the Taipings. The Taipings claimed to have leaders who had direct contact access to Jesus, direct contact to God and therefore they were the real Christians, the Christians from England, France and Germany, elsewhere, regarded as frauds or regarded as brothers. And so the new icon of brotherhood emerged with one of the Taiping rebels being included in the rebellions, the world of the Europeans in this context. This tore the city apart in some ways, but it was spared destruction in 1860, roughly 1857 maybe, to 1867 or so, there was a huge civil war in these areas and up to 40 million people perished. Up to it's unclear 20 million is bad enough, 30 or 40 is even quite worse in this context. And so in this frame we want to see that these areas are being brought into a much larger conflict zone. And in many ways, Shanghai is not the biggest city in the area, but it becomes the biggest city because the other cities are wiped out. If you could imagine a civil war fought in the United States, fought like this in the United States, you would have had Washington fall twice. You would have had the Philadelphia, Boston triangles and the like. They would fall three times and that those urban centers and political centers would be destroyed by the civil war of the 1850s. Well that's bad enough, but in the Shanghai case, Shanghai was spared the boundary. It was ultimately protected by both Manchus, but more particularly Europeans who wanted trade and commerce and would fight for the Manchus and the Manchu dynasty to maintain it. So cleverly or not, the Manchus had been able to bring the British across to their side. And the money was coming from the arrangements of the Qing dynasty. The typings were gathering up the forces and peasants in the cities and shipping ports internal to the dynasty. And there the war was fought. And it was fought seriously. Guns and weapons increased precisely in technology to defeat these typings in these forts and factories that were emerging in these areas. So what happened was everything around the cities, both the European and the Manchu cities that we call Shanghai, were protected by foreign groups from the rest of the Yangtze Delta and other areas. So they fit into this system in such a way that they were agreeing to work with the British and others in this framework. And they would defend the dynasty against these crazy peasant rebellion rebels who claimed to be related to Jesus Christ and one of whom claimed to be the brother of Jesus Christ. I don't laugh at that when I hear it. When you take into account the issues of the forging of Christianity in the very beginning, Joseph and others, it's very hard to figure out what was going on. Here similarly, the mystification of the Christian church through incorporation into a typing ideology is something no one expected. And the Europeans were astonished that someone in another cultural realm could claim that they had someone who was the brother of Jesus Christ. I mean, most of you in this room would think that's laughable. But would you laugh about how they got to be Abraham and Isaac and all the others the way they operated in a historical framework we don't know very much about. I'm leaving it open to their beliefs and their possibilities, rather dictating their idiocies and their wrong-headed ideologies. It's from my point of view, looking at internally what up to 40, 50 million, perhaps as high as 100 million Chinese are rebelling against this emerging Manchu European monolith of trade, commerce, and growth. And most of the Europeans wind up on the side of the Manchu state into the 70s, 80s, and 90s up to 1900. Unexpected but unusual, we still remain unclear how it worked out that the agreements in the customs houses brought the English and the French and the Americans together with the Manchu state to forge a union under the Manchu state and grow the dynasty in a way that the British and the French and the Americans also prospered. So what's looking behind this is a group of clever bankers, clever physicians, clever doctors, clever traders, clever military people and missionaries, above all, coming in to save China, to protect China and to build a world of Shanghai in its mirror of the European society and changes going on. It was a huge experiment from the 1850s. It still goes on in some ways to this very day in terms of the control of mass education, mass issues of health and the like. And so in this context, we begin to see that the future of China is up for grabs in many ways. From their point of view, it's unclear how it's going to evolve. From our point of view, we know that the typings that were defeated in 1867 and removed and eliminated very ferociously by the four troops. Chinese Gordon made his reputation here. Later he wound up in Ethiopia, fighting in the civil wars there. But he was known as Chinese Gordon because he married a Chinese woman and then served in the force that the merchants paid for to protect Shanghai from the typing rebellion. The typing rebellion was a huge, massive subsidy for 300 to 350 million Chinese. It was a huge population area. And China had now reached areas of 500 million people in the whole land. It had never been that big before. The scale was increasing beyond belief. Certainly in India, we know that population growth was going beyond belief as well. And so in this context, China and India fall into this population production trap. They produce a lot, but they produce less per capita. In other words, they produce 10 times as much money and products as they do other things. But in the end, their production doesn't keep up with population. Population becomes emissarated, becomes less and less wealthy, less and less able to forge through these costs and the range of them. So in many ways, we begin to see the Indian model then carried over to the Chinese model where their production is always high. They're producing more of everything, rice, various kinds of goods, silks and like, but they're producing so many in a context of even more population. How do you keep up with it? The Americans are beginning to think about it in terms of 300 million, 400 million Americans. And Ken, the Iowa farmers and the Nebraska farmers pay up for the needs of that level of the society. Perhaps, perhaps not, but it turned out that the key figure for the Chinese empire was 350 million, at which point they ran out of the ability to control these forces and ultimately could not control the population bomb that was breaking off. That's in a way why in the 20th century, 21st century, the communists were pressing this so greatly on the society because they recognized one of the fundamental problems was that the system was set up to have certainly an upper class of rich people, but it was also set up in such a way that more and more people had less and less to eat, just to use for their lives. So I simply want to show you that Shanghai is caught up into that framework and the glamour of Shanghai is tied into this overlap between production is going higher and higher and the richer can afford it at all costs and the poor and poor cannot afford it and they are immiserated. There are many ways left at the bottom of this framework. So this population boom has its other side and I would say we always underestimate the productivity but we always underestimate the population growth. We never underestimate the production of goods and commodities which was singularly very high but divided by 500 million people that made for very low standards of living in fact, in that context. The United States is in the midst of facing that track. I doubt here you'll have much of a problem with population and economy for perhaps a few more decades. But then eventually India and China become precursors of this later realized economic rule is the more population outgrows your figures the more people get less and less rather than more and more that population will determine what's going on here. So looking underneath these population exchanges and looking underneath these kinds of interactions the population is changing dramatically. And even with a dip of 45 million by the Taiping rebellion and very quickly by 1900 it's back up to about 500 million. So it's a huge problem for the Chinese to deal with and hence why the communists prioritized it very clearly in the beginning when they dealt with it. This is the old docks that remained in China in Shanghai for quite a while. This was the other side of the city and the area that the Chinese used are junks are predominant here. The ferry boats that the Europeans carried are on the other side we just saw. And here we have parallel cities on the edges of these conflicting forces. And in many ways Shanghai gained its autonomy by balancing these needs and conceptions and Manchu emperors and Chinese mandarins helped create space in this area for the growth of both the Chinese city and the new city of Shanghai emerging. Here in the midst of this we begin to see science emerging in the trading networks here. And it's a clumsy exchange. We haven't followed through on it very carefully enough to realize what's going on but slowly but surely the Chinese are beginning to react to science, react to engineering and not just to talk about it and to laugh at it and to appeal to their own ancient values but to be able to master these materials to be rulers of their own fate in the military scene. These are journals that are being produced by the missionaries from Europe in particular and they are translated into Chinese to deal with the issues that they're being dealt that they're dealing with. You can see that the overdine roots between England, India and China sort of give you the scope of this where India and China are sort of faced with dealing with this the form of the earth, first principles of the steam engine. This is already being raised in 1853 to build the steam engine. And you can begin to see there's a huge interest in this kind of thing. The arrival of the vice-admiral served Fleetwood, Pellew and Spalnavia and other groups were written out and so this is all being recorded. Here we have the largest journal dealing with science in this period of time. The Liu He Tsung Tan which tried to focus on scientific issues and trade and commerce in this period of time. You can see that notice of new books is logarithms and trigonometry and logarithmic tables to be raised in this framework. In other words, the new mathematics, the new engineers textbook of technological writing and the new ways to solve equations was being taught and learned in this framework. Here you have birth of an English princess giving you the interaction with England but we're learning very quickly that French preparations for war in Algeria are being covered in these accounts along with Portuguese and Sicilian stories, Femtian and the other. China has been drawn into the world global system and learning about it as well in this context. The old city in 1884 begins to spur forward and it never achieves the growth and scale of the first city of the western colonialists. But this area goes through a number of urban renewals, shall we say, and repeats itself. Never quite breaks out of the population trap but over time it begins to sort of recover enough of a swell that the families that do have some goods and means can live on for a short period of time but the amount of begging in the streets is legendary, the amount of poverty in the streets is legendary as we deal with these frameworks from the point of view of the scales and maps of these events that they don't tell us exactly what was happening. We have a pretty good idea. Here's Nanjing Road about 1900 you can see the two-story buildings are everywhere and certainly this is the kind of Chinatown building that's being constructed in Southeast Asia. If you went to Bangkok or you went to Malaysia with those areas you found housing from the Chinese merchants and the like brought up into this area and usually no more than two stories. The two-story streets have been captured that way and certainly other cities in this area have captured that as well. And here we see the Sun Law being dragged and the nature of the society that's there, the merchant elites that are there and here we have some of the streets that are again, two-story mansions. These are not your 100-story Singapore buildings that you might see elsewhere. These are very preliminary, easy to build wood plentiful areas. Remarkably within this framework of money transitorversing the entire society for different kinds of things money of course buys women whether we like it or not and in this situation we begin to see women's fashions in China changing dramatically into not necessarily the game that we associate with business but with women reacting by saying that we want to drop the old regime of dress and costume and want to engage in a new one. Some of this is by women themselves some of this is by men who produce this for women who are the major purveyors of this but nonetheless we can begin to see that Shanghai in its free Western zone is open to these tactics, open to these issues and then buying opium and having opium on your agenda is not that much different from having women on your agenda as well and this begins to be a significant problem for China and particularly the Yangtze Delta in this period of time. It looks fairly harmless, traditional instruments the bund is lit up during holidays and women are dancing, riding bicycles and they're like it's peaceful but looking beneath it of course as we know in our own society and our own issues, the uses of women are certainly turned into economic features of the framework that they're dealing with. Here the good guys or the bad guys depending on who you want to deal with here these are the green gang triads who had to come from Fujian province south, southern China and they are the ones who sort of mop up and clean up and keep track of the societies in Shanghai and elsewhere that need this the states reaches very into the provinces and not down to the village levels or city levels so it's these green triads that you can see their summer look these are older men that when they were younger this is what they look like they looked like drug takers somebody had to be taking the drugs somebody had to be drinking the various issues that were coming forth so the opium den became a very prominent symbol and the midst of this the concluding point I want to make is the Jiamnan arsenal in Shanghai emerges as the largest fort the largest military establishment in the area in the 1860s, 70s and 1880s and 90s it's a manufacturing center it is a major arsenal it has a budget from the state of 250,000 silver dollars 348 silver dollars in value and that these are being built in Shanghai and other states as well for the state to pull together and gain control of its areas so we begin to see in this reflection of money and where it is going one of the places it's going from the point of view of the state is military power and they've learned their lesson in many ways about the dangers of not being ready to fight for your own turf and your own issues it was when the Shanghai was saved by the British and the Europeans now this Shanghai has made it possible to open the first arsenals in so-called China greater China in Shanghai and in other areas as well so China begins to be a huge naval port but particularly Shanghai does and you can see the scale of this this is remarkably a huge scale that has been worked out in agreements with the foreigners who opened the banks that fund these events so the bankers give you 30 years and they allow the dynasty to invest its costs and to build these large-scale arsenals and where are the arsenals located? They're located in the orchards this is an orchard, a quaint orchard outside the center of the city for 200 years in the main dynasty it was now sucked into the empire of the Shanghai, the European Shanghai and the Chinese Shanghai and it was drawn into this framework and many European missionaries and others helped build this naval power helped build this military power and ultimately also helped arrange the things that kept it strong this is a joint effort between the Europeans and the Chinese Qing dynasty to maintain the last great dynasty the Manchu dynasty in this and here we have the beginnings of the growth of that arsenal here and we know that Waidi worked there Magawan worked there Crayard worked there I'm not so sure about our fellow here George Morrison was a little bit later he would have been 1890s, 1900s but had to live within this framework of Shanghai as well he was involved in discussing issues with the Chinese forces in different groups Ben and his staff did a good job of bringing that forward to allow us to understand that kind of thing but these were missionaries shall we say gone wrong that they were working building guns and weapons and mathematics and astronomy for the weaponry that was needed at that time reading the elements of geology was not necessarily something that they did for fun this was to find out what the earth and soil values were and how to build cities and build around them as well and this became a very important rain area of some people like Li Shanlan translating Newton's Proccipia and creating the equations that were necessary for an engineer's life these are factories brought together factories for building ironclad weapons with ships and different kinds of steel ships and weaponry all around and we can begin to see that Shanghai has a big arsenal on its back door and the arsenal makes a big difference in the future wars that China will fight through this area these are the arsenal's types of factories and what was growing through it I won't give you the details but this is the entrance area to the Shanghai arsenal and this is one of the workers there to show I worked with the ship missionaries to translate these materials but ultimately provided them for usage in the arsenal's warfare was paid for through these taxes and through these special customs funds that were made available here's John Friar from England who seems to enjoy this a great deal he was appointed a high-level Qing official in his last years of 1894-95 and he himself later came to Berkeley to set up the Berkeley East Asian Studies Asian Studies community based on the funds and materials he had been somewhat of a failure in England before he came to China and in China he found his place and he became a key translator of military material mathematical material scientific material and he wore the traditional costume to show that he was worthy of such events I want to sort of impress upon you that people like John Friar and others bought into this system and played within it and dealt with it because it gave them great profit great wealth and ultimately access to many amenities and sexual benefits as well so Friar is going to come to Berkeley before Berkeley is Berkeley it's a Berkeley College at that point and set up the beginnings of the Asian Studies program at UCLA at University of California Berkeley before anywhere else so I want you to take a look at this and see this on top of all these other levels that I've been talking about here we have Xu Jiayin, Hua Hengfeng and Xu Xiu these are the masterminders of the translators they need all the calculus texts they need all the geometry texts translated into these languages both English and ultimately machine languages that are used here and so their translation office is a major center within the arsenal and here we can see that Friar is not even in the picture was he taking the picture or was he away or something the Chinese are taking the picture themselves and ignoring perhaps his Friar's contributions here we have journals this is the Peking Magazine journal that begins to carry regularly scientific goods and information sort of science scientific information journals here we have the Peking Magazine talking about dealing with the western countries and the role of geography the problems of mathematics and the like and going on from there here we have the Guizhou Huibian scientific and industrial magazine monthly journal this is produced in Shanghai in this period of time for an interested community in science and technology that is slowly but surely growing and enlarging as the Chinese state begins to increasingly fail the new sector is not taking office but getting into economic exchanges that bear bear bear forth military power and also bear with the new science directions that are absolutely necessary so this is brimming at the top this is not controlling the coffee at the bottom but it's brimming at the top and these are going on in such a way that we can begin to see these events occurring in China in 1890s 1900s building over the 20th century and it's continuing today this is a continuous framework Chinese have been choosing for whether good or bad reasons for long for many many decades now these are the various textbooks that produce translations of western textbooks on mathematics most of them in English most of them from Manchester or from London here you can begin to see how the new gardens are going to be the new agricultural lands are going to be kept intact through these pumps and running water up hills and controlling the water with dams they're learning the new niceties of ruining your topography by building them up behind dams and the like but nonetheless this scientific and industrial magazine is a big hit not among millions but certainly in several thousand are buying out the actual monthly subscriptions at that period of time and here we see again similar aspects of the mechanization of Chinese industry and control along the Yangtze Delta these are the reading books we know the textbooks and most of these are translations of Chinese of British textbooks as I said in England and being sent as translations by Fryer and the other groups that are involved and the venues for buying them and selling them were cleared to everyone and the Chinese prize essay was cleared to everyone these are questions they begin to ask in their examinations and their examinations on different questions Newton for example is queried in these questions and in one of the queries here we have the framework of Darwin Darwin is here a big hitter for the future of the strong and the weakness of the weak and there begins to be kind of neo-interest in the influence of Darwin and Darwin's theories in the growth and fall of great societies so I'm giving you a mismatch of all these materials mixing up together that we need to make more and more sense out of as we do research but before we do that research we have to recreate that mess and see how that mess operated and how it is that these go along with Newton go along with women as prostitutes go along with modernary customs agents all these different aspects are rolling through these societies as you know through your society here as well and here we begin to see the efforts to use science and scientific knowledge to bring China out of its abyss and to compete with the other states so within this there's interesting questions about Newton and questions about Darwin and answers by the candidates it turns out the candidate that answers this question in the 1860s was given a scholarship from the type of the Beijing government to go to Europe and tour Europe and get the latest textbooks and learn about these issues so science and technology is high on the agenda and we can see that this is your parallel to the peddlers on Shandong Road that this is at multi-levels those are going on here the military is very highly placed the naval power is very highly placed and it's been that way for many many decades since the late 19th century here you can begin to see the city of Shanghai emerging and outpacing its buildings pacing its Chinese section and the European section and the European section veils, falls apart and most of the missionaries and others are forced out by the 1950s 1933 the city is already a powerhouse a great city that ultimately lives through the veils of the 30s, 40s and 50s remarkable abilities these are the Boons in the 1930s you can see the constructions that are going on I've simply tried to give you a kind of context for understanding the question of what happened to China why did it fail and did it fail in this situation and so I've given you a list of things here we could argue for but I would say in many ways China's failure Japan's success European success are not necessarily universal and eternal that these change over time and that the Chinese are and Japanese are searching for ways to overcome the European and European interests and strengths in their ideals and bring together them under the framework of new military power and new naval power in this period of time the scale of money in this for example in the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-95 it cost about 7.45 million kegs of silver 3.8 billion if you could figure it out that's about 6.4 times the Japanese government's annual revenue that they were spending on warfare and their navies at that period of time the Chinese used who were sending a good deal of their money to Japan because they lost the wars that were fought at that time Friar for example by 1895 was fed up with China argued that China was over its language would fail and the Chinese would be simply serving serving the new Western powers the general decay of the Chinese language and literature uselessness and we have one of Chinese China's most famous philosophers Feng Yulan writing in 1920s why China has no science and interpretation of the history and consequences of Chinese philosophy so you begin to see the heavy hand in this this is getting into academic circles and there are scientific reasons for Chinese to have failed in their scientific endeavors I would suggest that are the good historical reasons to explain that without having to go through this menagerie the story I'm telling is not a very positive one it's in many ways even standard we need to know a lot more about how this operated how the different groups fit in with each other and in the end we can begin to see why someone like Feng Yulan had no idea that there had been science in China at different levels for several centuries but changed in dramatically in the 18th and 19th century restoring respect to the Chinese contributions to their own sciences is something we can begin with it's something you can begin with in terms of their loyalties to their own communities their own societies and their own values but at the same time being caught with not wanting to be caught with their panties down trying to fight the European superior forces that this was a military agenda as well and what kept China back is that she has no science and I don't think I understood what he was saying what he was saying was quite significant in this world that we live in you can't go anywhere without military power and you can't defend yourself without military power and this is necessary and we need to work with it so this debate about science in China it's more than just an intellectual debate it's a fully political economic cultural and a dynamic problem that almost all scientists have to deal with who's not going to have science now that would preserve their cultures and values who's not going to have economic and military power through the new equations that they get through Newton and others in this world so it's the amalgamation of these issues that tells you why Shanghai was the center for algebra was the center for the new sciences the new engineers at the same time all this other stuff is happening in the mix and how we put it all together I leave for the next generation I'll try myself to sort of contribute to this kind of contribution but it demands rethinking the endings and going back to the beginning and asking yourself how did Shanghai get to be the way it was in the very beginning what happened what happened to Tokyo in its frameworks of dealing with the West in the Second World War Tokyo is utterly destroyed almost to the last man, woman and building in this context so I'm not painting a positive picture I'm painting hopefully a creative picture of a very difficult time for the Chinese and the other groups in East Asia but focusing on Shanghai as one example Shanghai has the high life it certainly does but the high life itself shows the underside of the high life in quite clear form at that time with all those nooks and crannies that have left out I welcome any questions that you might have curious concerning these introductory endings that we can begin to think about thank you thank you so much for that I think it's clear that in this period Shanghai was a very various diverse and somewhat confused place that's not to say that your presentation wasn't immensely clear but the topic that you chose for yourself I think was one that resists simplification and I think it's a a mark of the true historian that the the simple story is rejected if a place was a mess find out what kind of a mess that place was and try to think through the different layers and the different aspects of the society in that place certainly though I think that for most of us here I mean many of us here have been to Shanghai some of us know Shanghai quite well now a presentation like this with actually such extraordinary images that you showed us is both revealing of the past of the place that many of us know as some of us come from but also a kind of sense of how that place came to be and now walking around the streets even though you know Nenjing Road doesn't look anything like that anymore and you see a map where Pudong is empty whereas now Pudong is you know extraordinary place nonetheless you can see this kind of Shanghai that you've presented to us somehow in the Shanghai that that we visit now the extraordinary place that is