ISLE MATTERS Shamian Island came into the world as drug runners' booty. Lead by the British, foreign traders in Canton, as Guangzhou was called, had been banking opium-trade profits for almost half a centuryand going to war to preserve themwhen in 1860 they extracted Shamian from the Qing as spoils of the Second Opium War. They built a granite wall around what was then a sandbaressentially building an island.
During a mid-1880s visit to Shamian, the Shaoguan-based Wesleyan missionary John Turner described "a beautiful island, fronted with lawns and flower gardens, with the foreign consular and merchants' houses standing behind them,...
To continue reading:
or
Log-In
