After the Thirteen Factories were razed to the ground in 1856, and Canton occupied by British forces in the aftermath of the Second Opium War, another site had to be identified for the reconstruction of the new foreign settlement.
This was Shameen Island, a small sandbank to the west of the Thirteen Factories’ site; then home to thousands of boat people. Two years of land reclamation and major foundation works later, a man-made island rose from the swampy ground, separated by a narrow canal from the mainland of Canton.
The island was then split – four-fifths of it fell under British administration, while one-fifth came under the French, in accordance with the proportions by which the two imperial powers had financed the development of the island. In legal terms, Shameen became a foreign concession (租界 in Chinese) “a territory within a country that is administered by an entity other than the state which holds sovereignty over it” (Source: Wikipedia).
Shameen miraculously survived World War II and the cultural revolution, and is today gazette in its totality as a historic site by city authorities. And so it remains, as a somewhat incongruous and out-of-place world-within-a-world in the behemoth that is modern-day Guangzhou.
Strolling its verdant tree-lined streets, largely car-free, and flanked by dozens of beautifully restored European residences, bank headquarters, merchant houses and places of worship, one is flung back into the past; to a time when Canton was part of a larger global network of port cities that strung from London to Aden to Singapore and Yokohama.
This walking tour has two parts: the first takes in the smaller and more intimate French Concession in the East; and the second takes in the larger British Concession to the west of the island, where are also situated the foreign consulates of other imperial powers, the Russians, the Germans, the Americans and even the Siamese.
Documentation is patchy and in most instances I depend on the labelling the Canton authorities have stuck onto the buildings to identify what these were. Not all the buildings were so-labelled, and so there are quite a few buildings here which are “anonymous.”
The best thing about walking Shameen Island is that it is somewhat undiscovered, even by the Chinese themselves, and so one is almost guaranteed of a quiet stroll on one’s own in the early mornings and late afternoons. A rare treat in over-crowded China.
The French Concession
The British Concession