Ms Elsha Yiu
Independent Scholar
Paper Title:
Idealizing Space: Americans and the newly opened port of Swatow
Elsha Yiu is an independent researcher based in Seoul, who is currently researching and writing on the urban history of a Chinese coastal city, Shantou.
Abstracts:
The beginning of a Chinese treaty port is the beginning of urbanization in a specific location in China. The treaty port era, from when the first five Chinese cities were opened in 1842 to the end of World War II, is also the original period of urbanization in China. The beginning is both abrupt and distinct, and records of sharp contrasts in the eyes of both Westerners and native Chinese illuminate a historical era in which exchanges are pertained to physical contacts. Through physical contacts, ideas are acted upon and ideals are molded and formed. It was also in this era in which a distinctively non-Chinese urban form took shape on the Chinese soil, and which interrupted the century-long of city-town planning. The new urban form integrated and subsequently influenced the lives and consciousness of native Chinese. Yet, within this genre of new urban form, each treaty port city exhibited a different experience that made each port city a distinct case. Therefore, from an urban history perspective, each treaty port offers a distinct case of how an urban space is formed, and the more human question, by whom...