Life in a Chinese treaty port: Eurasian traces great-grandparents’ journey from London slum to Hong Kong and beyond
Ian Gill hadn’t even heard of Chefoo (now Yantai) until he started tracing his family’s roots and found out his great-grandparents had lived an enviable life there in the 19th century
My wife and I travelled to Yantai, formerly known as Chefoo, in October, to explore a family mystery. We had asked a local historian if we could meet him, but had no idea what to expect. To our surprise, our four-day visit to Shandong province turned out to be revelatory, attitude-changing and deeply moving.
A few months earlier, I must confess, I had not heard of Chefoo. Then I made the astonishing discovery that my English great-grandparents had moved from Hong Kong to northern China in 1873, during a period when many Chinese were flocking south to the fledgling British colony. Following the Treaty of Tientsin (1858), Chefoo had opened as a treaty port in 1861, presenting opportunities for the intrepid. But my forebears were neither colonial administrators, nor merchants, nor missionaries. They had no organisation to bail them out if things went wrong. So why had they risked their future, and that of their children, with such a move?
An investigation of this historical puzzle led to encounters as enthralling as the stories of Edward and Mary Ann Newman that would slowly emerge. It included finding two elderly cousins with whom I shared great-grandparents and meeting them on opposite sides of the world.
During our taxi ride from Yantai airport, it was hard to imagine that the bustling, modern city of seven million that unfolded before us could have grown out of the walled town of 10,000, plus a few dozen foreign residents, that had greeted the Newmans a century and a half earlier. But, when we alighted in the seaside district of Chefoo (Chifu), we found ourselves in the old foreign quarter, where many colonial-era buildings have been preserved or restored.