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| The British established five treaty ports, including Amoy, soon after winning the First Opium War in 1842. |
On a beautiful fall day in
1890, the newly appointed emissaries William E. S. Fales and Edward Bedloe went
off to China on the S. S. New York.
I imagine them on deck,
waving goodbye to no one because neither man had, at the moment, anyone special
in his life.
Between them, Bedloe actually
possessed qualifications, having served in the American Consular Service in
Italy and Egypt. Fales’ fluency in Chinese would be an asset, as well. Both men
were fascinated by Chinese culture: Bedloe with etiquette and weaponry; Fales
with decorative art and food.
Messrs. Bedloe and Fales were
heading to Xiamen, which Westerners called Amoy, a port city about 300 miles
northeast of Hong Kong, along the Taiwan Strait.
They would arrive at a country
stuck in time, except for a dramatic escalation of foreign intrusion.
The Qing Dynasty, dating to 1644,
continued its rule in the person of the Empress Dowager Cixi who had seized
power in 1865. First she stood in for her son, Tongzhi, who died young of
smallpox or venereal disease or both; then for Guangxu, her sickly nephew who advocated
national modernization. (She had him poisoned.)
During the Empress Dowager’s regency,
the United Kingdom and increasingly the United States, Russia, and Japan expanded
their control through treaty ports.
Treaty ports originally were established
by the British after they defeated China in the First Opium War. The treaties
governed trade on terms never favorable to China. They also created districts
within each port city, inhabited exclusively by foreigners who answered to no
one. Fales and Bedloe resided in such a neighborhood.
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| Parlor in the home of the U. S. Consul, Amoy; late nineteenth century |
Since Amoy was a treaty port,
the men focused on American trade interests. They were pleased to find that Far
East markets enthusiastically sought anything that came from the U.S.
But there was a problem with fraud:
. . . the filling of American flour bags with poor imitation British flour;
filling canvas covers of Chicago ham and bacon with really unmarketable pork;
putting up Siberian salmon in exact imitation of the best salmon canned in
California and Oregon, and selling cheap imitations of Ames’ shovels, Collins’
axes, McCormick’s farming implements . . .
The Consul kept a special eye
on arms and ammunition:
One
example [of fraud] was an imitation Winchester rifle made in
Belgium by an English firm of the lowest grade materials, which was liable to
kill the man who fired it as the man or animal it was fired at.
What else demanded the
attention of Bedloe and Fales?
The promising tea crop of
1891,
silver curios
and tea root carvings,
rituals
of death and burial.
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| City of Amoy; scene with the famous tombs, 1890s |
Like most Westerners, Fales
and Bedloe were fascinated by the hillsides of Amoy. Across the centuries, the
slopes had become packed with tombs. In some parts of the walled city, there
were no boundaries between burial grounds and private property.
“Amoy proper and its suburbs
have a living population of about one million, and a dead one of four and a
half times as many,” Bedloe informed the U. S. Government.
In the Journal of the American Medical Association he affirmed Amoy’s “reputation
as the dirtiest city on the face of the globe,” describing open cesspools and
impassable roads.
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| Sketch of Fales from a newspaper profile that appeared during his years as Vice Consul |
Despite the dirt, China intrigued
and delighted the men.
Both were well-educated,
sharp observers, and fine writers. They supplemented their annual salaries
(Bedloe: $1,490; Fales: $354.19) by writing for various U. S. newspapers and
magazines.
In an 1891 letter to the
editor of Lippincott’s Magazine,
Bedloe wrote:
You have no idea, my dear
Stoddart, what an inexhaustible supply of literary material this ancient
civilization possesses . . . my daily life here is one mass of surprises and
arrangements. They do everything that we do, but in exactly the opposite way.
After several examples
involving concubines, burglars, and animals, Bedloe closed:
Now I have two pretty poems
from the facile pen of my wicked Vice which I will bring on to you in January
or February. You shall have the first bid on them. They are truly great and I
hope you can afford to buy them.
It appears that editor
Stoddart, who had previously published poems by Fales, decided to pass.
Fales’ stories fared better: “Chinese
Armor,” “”Chinese Statuary and Figures,” “Driving out an Evil Spirit,” “Fortune
Telling in China,” “The Pharmacist in the Far East,” “Chinese Little Devils,” and
others appeared in American papers between 1891 and 1894.
In 1893 Fales took leave and
returned to the United States, where he married a pioneering journalist and
suffragist, Margherita Arlina Hamm. Together they returned to Amoy and traveled
to the Philippines and elsewhere.*
By mid-September, W. E. S.
and Margherita had returned to Brooklyn. Fales reestablished himself in law and
journalism and resumed his love affair with Chinatown while Hamm wrote books
and lectured.
The New York Press Club – a rowdy bunch – welcomed back William with a dinner featuring Punch a la Chinois.
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| The New York Press Club welcomed back Fales at a dinner in September 1894 (New York Public Library) |
*Hamm claimed that she and Fales were in Korea when
the Sino-Japanese War began August 1, 1894. She reported that she had witnessed
attacks on the palace in Seoul and an assassination attempt on Queen Min of Korea. However,
Fales and Hamm were back in the U. S. by September 22, 1894 . . . and sailing
time would have been at least 80 days.
*See posts 1/25/17 + 2/14/17; also 5/25/16.
*See posts 1/25/17 + 2/14/17; also 5/25/16.
