The American Civil War’s impact upon Sino-American commerce – a topic explored more thoroughly in my recent article with the Historical Journal – is more fascinating still given the parallel unfolding of China’s own Taiping Civil War. These simultaneous conflicts robbed China’s American merchants of their dreams of dominating Yangzi shipping. The Taiping Civil War, once cause for speculation, was soon realised to have destroyed riverine commerce. The American Civil War, in turn, dealt a second blow to struggling American firms that had invested in the promise of the river. While my article outlines this latter trend, I want to preface it here by highlighting the American John Heard’s exploratory 1861 voyage up the Yangzi aboard the Fire Dart.

A year earlier, John Heard’s brother Albert had written home that the Yangzi was a ‘promised land for foreign commerce,’ and with the Treaty of Tianjin opening ports upriver the Heards raced to be the first Americans to exploit this opportunity. It mattered little that the Taiping – in an active state of conflict with the Qing Empire – controlled large stretches of the Yangzi. Opportunistic Americans had long entertained the prospect of relations with the pseudo-Christian rebels. Many even participated in a brisk black-market trade, smuggling arms, munitions, commodities, food, and opium to entrenched rebel forces. But with new ports officially opened to foreign commerce, Taiping instability grew problematic.

Departing Shanghai for the interior entrepôt of Hankou, John Heard documented the state of commerce at every stage of his voyage. The Fire Dart reached Zhenjiang on 19 April 1861, where Heard recorded no trade could be done as there was ‘no one to do it with.’ Nanjing’s market was ‘very slim,’ and Wuhu’s was no better – a visit there from the Chinese merchant Yung Wing confirming Heard’s fears that regular trade in Taiping-controlled lands was negligible. Heard skipped Anqing, with its lingering encampment of recently-victorious imperial soldiers, and although informed at Jiujiang by two Chinese compradors that the city would again become ‘a great green tea district’ he personally observed ‘but a small market.’ On 1 May 1861 Heard docked at Hankou, registering ‘very dull’ trade on account of the rebels.

Ignoring the evidence of his voyage, Heard felt optimistic Hankou would be reborn a ‘great commercial emporium.’ He bought land there, established an agent, and over the next couple years acquired the steamships Shantung and Cortes. Augustine Heard & Co.’s rivals, intent on dominating the river, likewise commissioned numerous ships. American merchants may have been on to something, but, as my article suggests, their plans were ill-fated. Yangzi commerce revived following the Taiping’s defeat, but the ships Americans required to conquer the river were now waylaid by the demands of their own nation’s internecine conflict.

American commerce had fallen victim to not one but two civil wars.

1 John Heard, ‘A trading trip up the Yangtsze,’ A. Heard & Co. Diaries, 1861-1863, FP-3, Heard Family Business Records, Baker Library, Harvard Business School.

‘On the Yangzi,’ Photograph, Atwell Palmer Collection, Pa01-07, Historical Photographs of China, University of Bristol.