Databases

Regional China and the West, 1759–1972, consists of 38 British Foreign Office series sourced from The National Archives, UK, and one privately held collection, documenting the social, economic, and political histories of more than 20 Chinese coastal and inland treaty ports from the late Qing to the Republican eras. Produced between 1759 and 1972, with the bulk between the 1830s and 1950s, these documents shed light on local conditions, transactions, and various East-West interactions in regional cities and locations such as present-day Tianjin, Ningbo, Xiamen, Wuhan, Zhenjiang, Qingdao, Dagu, Fuzhou, Chengdu, Kunming, Guangzhou, Macao, Tamsui, Mongolia, and others. As a perfect complement to Imperial China and the West Part I and II, this archive provides an essential primary source collection for scholars studying the Chinese social, political, and economic histories that played out not just in the Chinese capital but also at the regional level in those numerous treaty ports that dotted the map of China.