Yangtse Kiang – British Admiralty chart, (1842) 1934

CHART OF THE YANGTZE KIANG, THE GATEWAY TO THE HEART OF CHINA — FROM SHANGHAI TO NANKING

“Yang Tse Kiang – Shanghai to Nanking.” Copper engraving executed by J. & C. Walker after the surveys made by Captains Richard Collinson, Henry Kellett and Charles Bethune in 1842, and published by the Hydrographic Office of the British Admiralty. This edition with additions and corrections issued in 1934. Size: 70 x 102.5 cm.

Large nautical chart of the lower course of the Yangtze River, from Shanghai upstream to Nanking [Nanjing]. The chart depicts the river not as a landscape but as a navigational route: with countless soundings, sandbanks, channels, buoys, anchorages, beacons, current directions, tidal information and warnings to shipping. In this stretch of the Yangtze in particular, accurate hydrographic knowledge was of great importance. The river was broad and mighty, yet at the same time constantly changeable through siltation, banks, tidal action and shifting channels.

The origins of the chart lie in the military context of the First Opium War. In 1842 a British expeditionary fleet sailed up the Yangtze towards Nanking. The river then formed not only a natural artery of communication, but also access to one of the richest and commercially most developed regions of China, where the connections between the coast, the interior and the Grand Canal came together. It was in this context that the surveys of Collinson, Kellett and Bethune were carried out: they served to allow British warships to manoeuvre safely along the river, to fix anchorages, and to make the river usable as a route for military and commercial penetration.

The significance of the chart was further heightened by the fact that the war ended with the Treaty of Nanking in 1842. This treaty, concluded at the end of the very river route depicted on the chart, opened Shanghai, among other ports, to British trade. The lower Yangtze thereby became one of the most important zones of foreign commercial presence in China. Shanghai developed in the nineteenth century into an international trading city, while Nanking retained its historical and political weight as a major city on the river. The chart thus documents not merely a waterway, but also the nautical infrastructure underpinning the rise of the treaty port system.

Because the Yangtze is a dynamic river, a chart such as this remained continually dependent on new observations. The title records later additions drawn from, among other sources, surveys by the Chinese Maritime Customs and Admiralty returns. This 1934 edition thus preserves the historical core of the British survey of 1842, while incorporating almost a century of nautical information: altered channels, new buoys, adjusted beaconage, harbour information, light signals and corrections for modern shipping.

When this edition appeared in 1934, the chart once again carried a topical geopolitical charge. Nanking had been, since 1927, the capital of the Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek, while Shanghai was the foremost international trading and financial centre of China. The river between the two cities was one of the most important axes of communication in China: a link between political power, foreign trade and the economic hinterland of the Yangtze. At the same time, East Asia was under mounting pressure from Japanese expansion: Manchuria had been occupied since 1931, and the fighting around Shanghai in 1932 had already made plain how vulnerable the region was. Seen in this light, this Admiralty chart shows not merely a navigational route, but a strategic waterway of China on the eve of the Second Sino-Japanese War.

Where the chart in 1934 still shows separate cities along a changeable river — Shanghai with roughly three to three and a half million inhabitants, Nanking with around a million, divided by largely agricultural hinterland — this same stretch has today grown into one of the most densely populated urban regions in the world. The Yangtze Delta now forms a virtually continuous urban network of more than 123 million people; the core region around Shanghai, Nanjing, Suzhou, Hangzhou and Ningbo alone counts nearly 105 million. Shanghai itself, in 1934 a treaty port of a few million, has grown into a city of more than thirty million inhabitants. The shipping route that this Admiralty chart recorded as a vulnerable, perpetually silting waterway today cuts through the economic heart of China.

Price: Euro 950,-