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FROM “LITTLE MULE” TO THE “RED FLAG” AND THE “CHANG JIANG”
- THE EARLY DAYS OFCHINESE ROAD TRANSPORT
With 5.1m cars sold in China in 2004 and the excitement that greeted last year’s Formula 1 in Shanghai, you might be forgiven for thinking the Chinese have been car enthusiasts for years. Not so – the country came relatively late to the popularisation of four wheel private transport. The bicycle, too, so long the symbol of the Chinese proletariat, was largely a foreign oddity until after WW2. Our China Briefing colleague Graham Thompson delves in the archives to tell the story of the country’s road transportation, two wheeled and four wheeled.
Early years
In 1866, a selected Chinese readership learned of a new “cycling device” from the travel notes of an Chinese official very shortly after Michaux’s construction of the pedal-driven prototype of a bicycle, and even some months before the invention became known to the European public (this historical background on bicycles is drawn largely from a web article by Amir Moghaddass Esfehani, published in Proceedings of the 13th International Cycling History Conference). The official, Binchun, had just returned from his journey to Western Europe, and reported
“On the avenues people ride on a vehicle with only two wheels, which is held together by a pipe. They sit above this pipe and push forward with movements of their feet, thus keeping the vehicle moving….they dash along like galloping horses”
Initially, it seems Chinese officials only became aware of the bicycle as a practical means of transportation, but in the late 1890s saw its potential value for military operations. With keen interest, Chinese newspapers reported on competitions between horse and bicycle in foreign armies.
But between the 1870s and the early 1890s, European and American expatriates, living in Beijing, Shanghai and Tianjin were practically the only cyclists in China. The bicycle came in the trunks of missionaries, businessmen or colonial officers, and spread rather slowly to the hinterland. As early as November 1868, Shanghai newspapers briefly reported on these cyclists.
A more detailed account is given in Hu you zaji, a forerunner of modern guidebooks to Shanghai, in 1876. The author twice mentions foreigners cycling through the streets, as a spectacular sight for the Chinese visitor to the foreign settlement. The athletic capabilities and stamina of the Westerners on their bicycles were portrayed with admiration. On the other hand, with ironic distance, the authors expressed their amusement over the fallen cyclist.
Strikingly, Chinese were absent from the scenes depicted. A rare exception is a cartoon from 1880 (maybe the first illustration of a bicycle ever published in a local journal), showing a Chinese cyclist unsuccessfully trying to ride an ordinary. It was printed in the journal Huatu Xinbao, a missionary periodical which circulated mainly in the small Chinese Christian communities. Readers learn that “Westerners ride a small vehicle with great enthusiasm…it is not pushed or pulled forward, but managed by foot-pedalling and is called bicycle, it can buzz along like the wind, faster than a horse-drawn cart . but only when you have enough practice in using it”. The young Chinese cyclist, though trying to partake of the Westerners’ passion, not only runs his machine into a pond, worse than that, he is losing face in front of two Chinese onlookers.
By hinting at the disgrace of the unfortunate cyclist, the text is pointing to the biggest cultural obstacle to the spread of the bicycle in 19th century China. Compared to Europe in the 19th century, for the tiny segment of Chinese society that could afford to purchase a bicycle, it was considered absolutely disgraceful to be seen pedalling through the streets, mounted on a machine, always in a delicate situation leading to a state of exhaustion. The wealthier Chinese was hardly ever seen walking in public. He was carried in a sedan chair or was pulled in a rickshaw.
Individual mobility was defined according to social lines, somewhat comparable to early 19th century Europe. The bourgeois or petty bourgeois of the cities went by rickshaw, due to cheap labour commonly available for low fees. Those who could not afford to rent or even own a rickshaw would mostly sit in specially constructed wheelbarrows with seven other passengers, quite common throughout the 19th century, and in use as late as the 1950s.
The first Chinese cyclists appeared on the scene in the early 1890s, students, journalists or businessmen who had returned from abroad and brought their bicycles back with them. Another group were the sons of wealthy families with ties to the US and Europe. They caused a qualitative turn in Chinese cycle history – in contrast to the old elites, more and more western-educated Chinese were not reluctant to display their progressive cultural orientation in public.
Beginnings of popularisation
Perhaps the first car in China the Benz vintage car belonging to Empress Dowager Cixi, c 1900
The first commercial bicycle ads published in 1897/98, in the newspapers of Shanghai and Tianjin, addressed this thin layer of Chinese consumers. The bicycles offered are imported high quality bicycles, often racing bikes. Also in 1897, the Imperial Maritime Customs listed “bicycles and bicycle parts” for the first time. The value recorded, about
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