The port city of Shanghai became another important settlement for the Macanese, and an alternative for migrants from Macau. Long before it was conceded by China as a “Treaty Port” at the end of the first Opium War, Shanghai had been settled by the Tang Dynasty in 746 and served as a commercial center beginning in the 12th century under the Song emperors. Under the Ch’ing (Qing) Dynasty (1644-1911) Shanghai was described as a “A City Built by Guilds.” Over two dozen associations and guilds were active in the 18th and 19th centuries. These merchant organizations helped expand the original city by constructing guild halls, rental housing, and temples, as well as buildings for manufacturing and commerce. The guilds also provided civic services through their benevolent projects.
Thus, Shanghai was unique in the Chinese Empire. Major cities of the empire tended to be administrative or political cities. By contrast, Shanghai was a commercial city, which engaged in both domestic and international commerce. By 1830 the volume of shipping going through the port was equal to London.[1] Strategically located on a main tributary of the Yangtze River, and in proximity by ship to Hong Kong, Taiwan, Korea, and Japan, Shanghai soon played a key role in expanding European trade in Asia. [2]
In November 1843 under the Treaty of Nanjing, also known as the “Unequal Treaty System” following the war, the British, French, and American governments exercised extraterritorial powers leading to the creation of “concessions” in Shanghai that housed commercial factories and residences for foreign traders. Shortly after the treaty was signed, the British and American administrations merged to form an “International Settlement” to be governed by a joint municipal council. This was followed by the creation of a separate French council in 1849. Each nation initially appointed foreign merchants as Vice Consuls until professional diplomats took over in the late 19th century. [3]
The Macanese Community
Due to Lisbon’s diminished influence, racially mixed Portuguese from Hong Kong and Macau, with no national concession to support them, settled slowly in Shanghai’s other foreign settlements based on their occupational roles. Among the first six Macanese listed by the North China Daily News and Herald in 1850, four were mercantile assistants in large companies from Hong Kong and the United States that set up offices in the British-American concession of Shanghai. Two others were employed as compositors by the Herald, headquartered in the French quarter.[4] The population of the community did not change significantly until after the 1887 “Treaty of Friendship and Commerce” between Portugal and China, which attempted to solidify Macau’s permanence in China by taking advantage of the latter’s weakened state. [5] A local census in 1895 listed 1,936 Portuguese workers and family members, increasing to as many as 4,000 through the end of the 1940s. [6] As a relatively small group among almost 111,000 foreigners in Shanghai, the Portuguese were well represented in commerce, and social life.
Although the evidence of their origins before Shanghai is incomplete, a large number seem to have come initially from Macau and then Hong Kong throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries, while several families migrated directly from Macau. The paths were not always one-way. Many were among the back and forth migration of individuals looking for work, joining relatives, or retiring later in life. Some examples include Antonio J.H. de Carvalho and Cypriano Euzebio do Rozario, who came as compositors from Hong Kong 1850 to work for the North-China Heald in Shanghai. Carvalho later returned to Hong Kong. Henrique Carlos Lubeck, a ships navigator born in Macau, came to work in Hong Kong as a compositor for the “Echo de Povo” (Voice of the People) in the late 1870’s. In 1880 he moved with his wife to Shanghai to work at the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank.[7]
The majority lived in the French concession in an area known as “Siccawei” (Xujiahui), where the Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci began his mission around 1560. The area is named after a Chinese Christian convert and scholar named Xu Guangqi, who donated large plots of land for the building of a church and an astronomical observatory which still exist today. Unlike Hong Kong’s restrictions on non-English workers, there were fewer barriers confronting the Macanese in Shanghai until the 1930’s. Two distinguishing features were most evident: a wide dispersal of Portuguese workers across different sectors of the economy; and a large number of social organizations, which suggests extensive personal networks. As we shall see, the latter tended to allow many connections to exist between the Macanese communities in Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Macau. Let us look at these characteristics in more detail.
Working in Shanghai
Some of the earliest Macanese arrivals listed in the North-China Heald in 1850 worked as “mercantile assistants”, that is, as clerks or bookkeepers, for large foreign mercantile and trading companies. T.P. Cordeiro, for example, worked as a mercantile assistant at Wolcott, Bates & Co., a New York based firm that imported teas, silks, satins, hand-made shawls, oil, and pepper from Canton and Shanghai to Massachusetts, Liverpool, and Amsterdam. Another was J.S. Baptista, who worked for Dent, Beale & Co. in Shanghai, which was the main competitor in Hong Kong to trading giant Jardine Matheson & Co. Baptista began working before Dent consolidated business interests in Shanghai in 1867 after defaulting during a banking crisis. Another worker, P.J. da Silva Loureiro, Jr, was employed by the American firm Russell & Company, which included a grand uncle of Franklin Delano Roosevelt as an investor. Another was António dos Santos, also a mercantile assistant, who worked at two English trading companies, first at Holiday and Wise, Co. in 1850, and then later at Gilman, Bowman & Co. As mentioned previously, two other Macanese were employed by Shanghai’s first English newspaper, the North-China Herald. António J.H. de Carvalho, who later founded a newspaper of his own, was listed as the “Overseer”, while Cypriano E. do Rozario, was the paper’s sole compositor.
Among the largest employers of the Macanese after 1850 were printing companies owned by Macanese from Hong Kong or Macau. One of the earliest was Carvalho & Co, founded in 1857, which was owned by the same Antonio J.H. de Carvalho, the younger brother of Januario de Carvalho, Chief Cashier of the Hong Kong Treasury. The company was reorganized in 1875 due to poor sales, then sold in 1878 to Noronha & Co., the largest printer in Hong Kong. Up to its closure in 1893, the firm employed at least fourteen Macanese printers and compositors. There were also seven other printing companies, which owned and operated by Macanese between 1867 and 1940 in Shanghai. Each of those employed an equal number as Carvalho & Co., and several hundred Chinese and other foreign staff.
It is estimated that about half of the owners were from Macau, and the others from Hong Kong. Compared to Hong Kong, the number of other solely owned Macanese enterprises outside the printing industry seems to have been far less, largely in partnerships that began operating later in the period. Wang Zhisheng’s research indicates that there were only six recorded Portuguese enterprises in Shanghai from 1900 through 1949, although he does not name them.[8] Wang writes that those enterprises included an exporter, two importers, an independent industrialist, and two dealers. The six Portuguese enterprises, Wang wrote, employed twenty-six Chinese staff members, four Chinese workers, and eight other foreign staff members. According to Ho Tin Wong’s research on printers in Shanghai, their families comprised the majority of the port’s Macanese community. [9]
Cultural Networks
The most important sector of the Macanese community in Shanghai was not business, however, but associations. Most local organizations and clubs combined to form networks that served as vehicles and supports for the community and Macanese businesses, while creating personal and professional bonds among expatriate families that lived in the treaty port for over a century. Two important functions were providing a sense of identity and military protection. In many cases, members either formerly belonged to similar organizations in Hong Kong or had close relatives who were members.[10]
The oldest of these organization was the Club Portuguez, founded in 1882 by a committee made up of Joao Carlos Danenberg (Danish – Macanese); H. Pereira; Francisco Simão dos Santos Oliveira; and Antonio Joaquim Yvanovich (Ukrainian – Macanese). Each member was born in Macau and migrated from Hong Kong or moved directly from Macau to Shanghai in the 1860s. Nearly all had relatives belonging to Hong Kong social clubs. The same could be said for the Club de Recreio founded in 1893 and affiliated through relatives with Hong Kong’s Club de Recreio in 1903.
Another sporting club was the Clube Lusitano de Shanghai founded in 1910, which was connected to relatives in Hong Kong’s Club Lusitano founded in 1882. The latter, however, was considered a more exclusive “men’s club” for Portuguese gentlemen who were denied membership in similarly exclusive British clubs. There were also benevolent organizations in Shanghai similar to Macau’s Santa Casa de Misericordia (Holy House of Mercy) founded in 1569. These included the Associacao Macaense de Socorro Mutuo de Shanghai (1910), a women’s auxiliary named the Associação des Senhoras Portuguesas (1920), and the Portuguese Benevolent Association (1945).
The premier organization was the Portuguese Volunteer Company, a militia of the Shanghai Volunteer Corps (SVC). The larger multi-national Volunteer Corps was made up of units totaling less than 2,500 members, drawing from the British, American, French, Italian, Spanish, Japanese, and Korean residents of Shanghai. The SVC was first organized in 1853 by British and American units in response to the “Small Swords Society’s” uprising during the Taiping Rebellion, and fought its first battle in 1854 against Chinese Qing troops. The Shanghai Volunteers were then reorganized in 1861 until disbanded in 1942 by the invading Japanese army. [11] As part of the larger Corps, the Portuguese Company was slow to gain acceptance until early 1906. Once reliant on other militias for protection, the lack of an organized company remained an embarrassment for Portuguese businessmen until volunteers were formally recognized by the international municipal councils and trained by the British army.
The importance of the “Portuguese Volunteers”, as they were called, to the larger Macanese community was significant for several reasons. The company was ostensibly created to protect the community from periodic riots and other actions threatening Shanghai’s borders. Throughout the short history of the “Portuguese Volunteers”, however, the presence of uniformed members at ritual gatherings, rather than the infrequent calls to arm, became the principal rationale for the organization’s existence. Composed primarily of prominent men who were long-time residents, the membership of the “Volunteers” was well established in government and business. Many members had parents and/or grandparents who migrated from Macau and Hong Kong in the 1840s and 50s.
Those factors provided credibility and gravitas within a community where many Macanese settled with great frequency as the trade economy in China expanded or contracted. Above all, members of the Portuguese militia were supporters of Lisbon’s republican government, and had long term interests in maintaining positions in banks and trading companies, as well as the social standing of their families. Many families had lived in Shanghai for three or four generations by the dawn of the 20th century. Shanghai essentially provided them with an opportunity to climb the social ladder and maintain themselves unbounded by old world restrictions. Most had interests in securing a place in society that, in some instances, had been denied in Macau and Hong Kong.
Even as Shanghai grew into a busy port city and financial center for European trade, the growing demand for middle level workers necessary to keep international commerce moving made it clear that, at least for the Macanese in the late 19th century, the center of their world remained in Hong Kong. As more archival material, documentation, and analysis have become available, the details of colonial conditions for second generation Macanese, those born in Hong Kong after settlement in 1842, can now be discussed in greater detail.
[1] R. Edward Glatfelter, Introduction to Wang, Shicheng, Portuguese in Shanghai, Fundacao Macau, 1997, citing the research of Linda Cooke Johnson, Shanghai: From Market Town to Port City: 1074-1858. Stanford University Press, 1995:155-75.
[2] In 1843 the English horticulturist, Robert Fortune, described walking through the streets of Shanghai, found shops selling merchandise such as silk and embroidery, cotton goods, porcelain, ready-made clothes and numerous curiosity shops offering carved bamboo ornaments. Robert Fortune, Three Year’s Wanderings Among the Northern Provinces of China, London, 1847: 109-110.
[3] Data and information cited here can be found in Wang Zhicheng, Portuguese Shanghai, edited by R. Edward Glatfelter, Fundacao Macau, 1997:18.
[4] North China Herald, August 3, 1850; The Chinese Repository, 1851,141-49.
[5] The 1887 “Treaty of Friendship and Commerce” between Portugal and China resulted in limited recognition of Macau’s permanence and “dual jurisdiction” so long as local policies remained acceptable to China’s Imperial government. Austin Coates, A Macao Narrative, Hong Kong University Press, 2009:133-35.
[6] Shanghai’s Public Bureau of Municipal Government census of 1945 later listed 110,868 foreign residents, of which 2,043 were Portuguese. Shanghai’s Public Security Bureau from early 1950 indicated there were over 4,000 Portuguese. Wang Zhicheng, op. cit., 1997:12,45, 84-118.
[7] A review of recent genealogies of several individuals mentioned in this article suggest that several traveled directly from Macau to Shanghai in the period 1840 to 1860. See Jorge Forjaz, Familias Macaense, 1996 and 2017 editions., International Institute of Macau.
[8] Wang Zhisheng, Portuguese in Shanghai, 1997, op. cit.
[9] Hoi-to Wong, “Interport Printing Enterprise: Macanese Printing Networks in Chinese Treaty Ports”, in Bickers, Robert, and Isabella Jackson, Treaty Ports in Modern China, Routledge, London, 2016:143.
[10] The following Information is included in Wang Shisheng, Portuguese in Shanghai, 1997, op. cit.
[11] Information about the Portuguese Company of the Shanghai Volunteer Corp is scattered among many obscure documents, some that have recently surfaced from private collections. The present article relies on a history of the Portuguese Company entitled “Twentieth Anniversary of the Portuguese Co. SVC ” published in 1926.
