In June 1923, the President of the Republic of China set up his office in Tianjin's British Concession. Not in a government building, not in a Chinese district, but inside a foreign-administered enclave on the west bank of the Hai River. That a Chinese president would govern from a British colonial territory tells you everything about the strange power dynamics of early twentieth-century Tianjin, a city where nine foreign nations maintained their own concessions, their own police, their own water systems, and their own cricket clubs. The British Concession was the earliest established, the most prosperous, and ultimately the most contested of them all.
The concession was born from military defeat. On September 11, 1860, the Qing government signed the Treaty of Tianjin and the Convention of Peking, and by December, British diplomat Frederick Bruce had forced the governor of Zhili Province to demarcate about 460 mu -- roughly 28 hectares -- on the Hai River's west bank in the former Zhizulin village. The concession opened on December 17, 1860. Most British merchants initially avoided buying property there, preferring cheaper rentals in Chinese Tianjin, but trade grew rapidly. The number of British merchant ships at the concession's docks nearly doubled in the first two years, from 51 in 1861 to 89 in 1862. Consulates from Prussia, Denmark, Portugal, and Belgium soon followed, along with billiard rooms, clubs, and the infrastructure of a self-contained colonial society.
In 1870, the Tianjin Massacre changed the concession's trajectory overnight. A Chinese mob burned the French church and consulate and beat the French consul, Henri-Victor Fontainer, to death. Foreigners across the city, suddenly confronting the reality that living among the Chinese population carried risks they had preferred not to consider, flooded into the concessions. The British authorities, seizing the opportunity, expanded infrastructure: more wharves, better port facilities, new roads connecting the concession to the Chinese city. By the 1890s, the results were dramatic. Tianjin's foreign trade value quadrupled from 10 million taels in the early 1870s to 44.27 million taels by 1894. The British Concession had become not just a colonial outpost but the financial heart of one of China's most commercially active cities.
The crisis that eventually broke the concession began with an assassination in a Shanghai cinema. On April 9, 1939, pro-Japanese activist Cheng Xigeng was shot dead, and four suspects were arrested in the British Concession. Japan demanded their extradition. Britain refused, citing insufficient evidence. On June 14, 1939, Japan blockaded the British Concession, halting normal life and subjecting British residents to humiliating searches regardless of gender. British Prime Minister Chamberlain threatened economic retaliation -- canceling Japan's most-favored-nation status, abolishing the Anglo-Japanese Treaty. But the fall of France in June 1940 left Britain fighting alone in Europe with no capacity for confrontation in Asia. On June 12, 1940, Britain signed the Tianjin Agreement, handed over the four suspects -- all of whom were executed -- and the Japanese lifted the blockade after 372 days. The compromise did not save the concession: when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941, its troops occupied the British Concession permanently.
The physical legacy of the British Concession is woven into modern Tianjin's fabric. Victoria Park, opened on June 21, 1887, to mark the 50th anniversary of Queen Victoria's accession, was the first landscaped public park in the concession and a model for later Tianjin gardens. The concession's water plant, built in 1898 by Gibb, Livingston & Co., was only the third water treatment facility in all of China. By 1941, four water plants served the concession with a near-100 percent penetration rate across its 3.7 square kilometers. The first road in any Tianjin concession was built here in 1870; the first gravel road in 1887. Today, the settlement-era buildings along Tai'an Road and in the Xiaobailou district have been preserved and repurposed, their European facades a reminder of the decades when Tianjin was, in effect, a divided city governed by nine different nations.
Located at 39.12°N, 117.21°E along the Hai River in central Tianjin. The former concession area is identifiable from altitude by its grid-pattern streets and European-style architecture along the river's west bank, contrasting with the Chinese urban fabric surrounding it. Tianjin Binhai International Airport (ZBTJ) is approximately 15 km east. Recommend viewing at 3,000-6,000 ft to see the distinctive street grid and riverfront of the former concession district.