Steamboats On The Yangtze River - Commercial Involvement

Commercial Involvement

Steamers came late to the upper river. The three gorges and the strong current hindered navigation. Archibald Little attempted a voyage with the Lee-Chuan, and the Kuling, delays and weak engines meant that he only succeeded in the first vessel in 1898. Little soon built the first truly successful boat, the Pioneer, in about 1899. She plied the river for two more decades and was even the flagship for the Royal Navy on the China Station. There were a few commercial steamers on the upper river at the turn of the century and the Boxer Rebellion period.

The commercial firms of Jardine Matheson, Butterfield and Swire, and Standard Oil had their own steamers on the river. Until 1881, the India and China coastal and river services were operated by several companies. In that year, however, these were merged into the Indo-China Steam Navigation Company, Ltd., a public company under the management of Jardines. The Jardine company pushed inland up the Yangtze River on which a specially designed fleet was built to meet all requirements of the river trade. For many years, this fleet gave unequalled service. Jardines established an enviable reputation for the efficient handling of shipping. As a result, the Royal Mail Steam Packet Company invited the firm to attend to the Agency of their Shire Line which operated in the Far East. Standard Oil ran the tankers Mei Ping, Mei An, and Mei Hsia on the river, in addition to many motor barges, launches, tugboats and other tankers. These three tankers, the largest in the oil company's fleet, operated on the river until 1937 when they were bombed by the Japanese in the USS Panay incident.

With the Treaty Ports, the European powers and Japan were allowed to float navy ships into China's internal waters. The British, US and French did this. A full international fleet featured on Chinese waters: Austro-Hungarians, Portuguese, Italian, Russian, and German navy ships came to Shanghai and the treaty ports. The Bank of Indochina was among the members of a western banking syndicate given control of China’s finances. French civil servants took control of China's postal service. In 1901 the gunboat Orly was detached from the Far East Squadron for a cruise up the Yangtze Kiang. The Olry was accompanied by the steam launch Takiang as far as Chunking before Lieutenant Hourst continued on in a vain search for an inland waterway linking Szechwan with Tonkin. The Orly very nearly was taken in a sinking in the Three Gorges in 1911. It hit the shore and damaged its rudder; out of control, it nearly foundered. However, excellent boatmanship and improvisation saved the day and the vessel.

The Japanese engaged in open war with the Chinese twice, and Russians twice, over conquest of the Chinese Qing empire—in the First and Second Sino-Japanese War 1895, and 1905; and the Russo-Japanese War of 1904. Incidentally, both the French and Japanese navies were heavily involved in running Vietnamese opium and narcotics to Shanghai, where it was refined into morphine. It was then transhipped by liner back to Marseilles and France (i.e. French Connection) for processing in Germany and eventual sale in the US or Europe.

In 1909 the gunboat USS Samar changed station to Shanghai, where she regularly patrolled the lower Yangtze River up to Nanking and Wuhu. Following anti-foreign riots in Changsha in April 1910, which destroyed a number of missions and merchant warehouses, Samar sailed up the Yangtze River to Hankow and then Changsa to show the flag and help restore order. The gunboat was also administratively assigned to the United States Asiatic Fleet that year, which had been re-established by the Navy to better protect, in the words of the Bureau of Navigation, "American interests in the Orient." After returning to Shanghai in August, she sailed up river again the following summer, passing Wuhu in June but then running aground off Kichau on 1 July 1911. After staying stuck in the mud for two weeks, Samar broke free and sailed back down river to take on coal. Returning upriver, the gunboat reached Hankow in August and Ichang in September, where she overwintered, owing to both the dry season and the outbreak of rebellion at Wuchang in October 1911. Tensions eased, and the gunboat turned downriver in July 1912, arriving at Shanghai in October. Samar patrolled the lower Yangtze after fighting broke out in the summer 1913, a precursor to a decade of conflict between provincial warlords in China. In 1919, she was placed on the disposal list at Shanghai following a collision with a Yangtze river steamer that damaged her bow.

The seamen's strikes were staged by the seamen at Hong Kong and by the crews of the Yangtse River steamers early in 1922. The Hong Kong seamen held out for eight weeks. After a bitter and bloody struggle, the British imperialist authorities in Hong Kong were finally forced to raise wages, lift the ban on the Seamen's Union, release the arrested workers and indemnify the families of the martyrs. The crews of the Yangtze steamers went on strike soon afterwards, carried on the struggle for two weeks and also won victory.