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Chapter 1 provides an overview of the treaty-port media environment in China. It sketches the background of the key British and American-owned English-language papers in China’s treaty ports, particularly the North China Daily News, the China Press, and the China Weekly Review, and reveals the transnational feature of the treaty-port newspapers. By exploring China’s efforts to complete with Japan in establishing international news networks during the 1910s and the 1920s, it explores the intricate rivalries among various interest groups in the English-language press, and tensions between the treaty-port press and metropolitan papers.

This chapter provides a close reading of China's first translations that presented Western ways of hygiene under the rubric weisheng. “Fu Lanya” (John Fryer's Chinese moniker) had become almost synonymous with translations of “Western knowledge” in China. The books through which Fryer presented Western techniques of weisheng were fundamentally chemistry texts. Huaxue weisheng lun celebrates chemistry's ability to improve China's health by recategorizing the building blocks of nature, defining the health-giving properties of food, and eliminating the poisons of the atmosphere. The Weisheng bian series begins with advice on healthful nutrition. Juzhai weisheng lun places the ultimate responsibility for human health squarely on the shoulders of government. Zheng Guanying concludes that Western approaches to guarding life are occasionally helpful, but in no way superior to Chinese technology and knowledge.

Chapter 3 highlights the Nationalist government’s attempts to build an international propaganda system and to control the extraterritoriality-protected treaty-port papers from 1928 to 1932.The top-down information control exercised by the party-led propaganda system conflicted with the liberal journalism practiced in the treaty ports. Unable to achieve diplomatic progress in abolishing extraterritoriality, the Nanjing government made inroads into the extraterritorial system in specific fronts. Press control was one of them. By issuing postal bans, deporting journalists, and reviewing treaties with foreign cable companies, the government sought to strengthen its censorship power. It also adapted to the treaty-port press environment by camouflaging the party’s involvement through transnational covers.

In Yingkou, the city where Tanxu began his serious study of Buddhism and decided to become a monk, Tanxu was persuaded to found a temple, eventually becoming the Surangama Temple. The project illustrates many of the themes present throughout Tanxu’s career: he enlists local government, military, and private sources to support the temple. The temple also plays an important symbolic, political role: in a city dominated by European-style colonial architecture, the temple is the first significant building with traditional Chinese architectural features, and is used to promote a Chinese national identity in the treaty port.

This chapter discusses how Hong Kong became cosmopolitan. It can be noted that by 1865 the country no longer occupied the premier position on the China Coast, because there were other treaty ports that were growing in importance. It discusses the variety of nationalities that lived in Hong Kong, such as Germans, Jews, and Armenians, who slowly took some of the economic power long held by the British.

Chapter 4 analyses how English-language newspapers controlled by China and Japan defended their cases during the Mukden and Shanghai incidents. Drawing on the experiences of the Jinan Incident, Chinese-operated papers formed a united anti-Japanese line during the two incidents and endeavored to convince the Western public that the two events were successive steps of Japan’s imperial expansion. Having witnessed the atrocities committed by the Japanese army in Shanghai, Western journalists in the treaty ports gradually withdrew their support for Japan’s case, and warned the international public against Japan’s military expansion in China. Yet the concern was not entirely shared by metropolitan editors who were more eager to downplay the conflict.

Chapter 2 examines China and Japan’s confrontation in the English-language press during the Jinan Incident in May 1928. Japan’s swift, consistent and intensive reporting about the event drowned out China’s voice in both the treaty-port and metropolitan papers. But what contributed to Japan’s victory of the propaganda battle was not only its sophisticated news network, but also the favorable context of international public opinion. Japanese-controlled media portrayed Chinese troops as looters, and established Japan as a defender of imperial interests in China. The Nationalist government’s propaganda efforts, in contrast, were hindered by factional struggles among the top leaders, and the anti-foreign tradition of the Nationalist Party.

Chapter 6 employs discourse analysis of the response to the statement of the Amō Doctrine (1934) in the English-language press as a case study to reflect a highly contentious and disunited media environment during the appeasement period. Periodicals operated by different political groups in China expressed diverse views about Japan’s plan of domination in Asia. The multiple voices reflected the struggles among the Nationalist leaders in devising an effective policy to deal with Japan’s coercion. Equally disturbed by the rivalry between the state and the military, however, Japanese-controlled papers also failed to provide a definite interpretation of the statement. Japan’s ambiguous position further estranged the treaty-port audience whose suspicion of its imperial plan in China grew stronger. The metropolitan papers, again, reacted differently from the treaty-port press by evincing little interest in reading into the Doctrine.

Chapter 2 then covers the period following the disbanding of the Co-hong and the opening of trade from 1771 to 1781. The resulting debt crisis that emerged in the late 1770s had an impact on the owners of the factories as well.

Chapter 4 discusses the ups and downs of the trade in the 1780s. A downturn in the volume of trade might result in changes and alterations to the factories being postponed, which helps to explain why the buildings remained the same in those years in paintings.

Chapter 6 introduces changes that took place in the 1790s—especially the large influx of private traders. Those individuals had a significant impact on the architecture and management of the buildings.

This concluding chapter discusses the significance of the 1684 trade policy in Chinese maritime history. The economic and commercial prosperity resulting from the 1684 open-door policy greatly contributed to the emergence of the treaty ports, the best example of which is Shanghai. Becoming the headquarters of the Jiangsu customs, Shanghai's elaborate trade networks connected the Chinese heartland, Manchuria, the rest of East Asia, and Southeast Asia. As early as 1830s, Western travelers were so impressed by the thriving center that they judged it a suitable base for commercial expansion in China. And indeed, with the Nanjing Treaty, Shanghai became one of five treaty ports. Moreover, three of the other four treaty ports—Guangzhou, Xiamen, and Ningbo—had been chosen by the Qing court in 1684 to serve as headquarters of imperial customs. All three cities grew rich from trade with Japan, Southeast Asia, and the West.

This chapter considers the kinds of legal and medicolegal disputes that arose when foreign residents sustained injuries on the tracks of the Bangkok Tramway Company. It looks at the kinds of expertise and institutions responsible for adjudicating claims for compensation and considers the rights of the Bangkok Tramway Company, its employees, managers, and shareholders. In answering these questions, the chapter analyzes “jurisdictional politics,” “conflicts over the preservation, creation, nature, and extent of different legal forums and authorities,” in the plural legal arena of treaty port Bangkok. It deconstructs historical metanarratives about the “Westernization” or “modernization” of Thai law by revealing the fractious nature of Western law, including evidence of internecine squabbles between the representatives of legal and medical expertise—barristers and physicians—but also among the laypeople who advocated for particular brands of European legal tradition. It therefore complicates celebratory narratives of legal liberalism by demonstrating how nationalist sentiments and professional self-interest were the true impetus for legal change, not any grand imperial ambitions for bestowing law as a civilizing force.

Acknowledging the different vantage points used in paintings is important when interpreting factory scenes. A close examination of paintings from the 1760s to the 1820s reveals two commonly applied vantage points.