Railway (Steam Train)

In 1877, the Qing government dismantled China's first operating railway — a short foreign-built line called the Woosung Railway, opened in Shanghai in 1876 by British merchants without Chinese consent. The decision is often pinned on Empress Dowager Cixi, the formidable woman who effectively ran China from behind the throne for nearly half a century. Recent scholarship is more careful: the official who actually led the dismantling was Shen Baozhen, a senior viceroy (a regional governor with almost viceregal powers) tasked with coastal defence.

The objections recorded in official memorials to the throne were a mix of the spiritual and the very practical. Spiritually, there was feng shui — the Chinese geomantic tradition in which the landscape has a living energy, and straight-line cuts through hills or embankments slicing across rivers were thought to disrupt that energy and bring misfortune. There was also the matter of ancestral tombs. In Confucian thought, the graves of one's ancestors were not merely family memorials but active sites of ongoing obligation; disturbing them by digging a rail cutting through a burial ground was close to sacrilege, and the sort of thing that could end an official's career. Practically, there were canal porters and muleteers whose livelihoods would evaporate the moment steam arrived, and a sharp geopolitical anxiety about foreign-controlled infrastructure running deep into Chinese territory (which, given the era of unequal treaties and foreign concessions, was an entirely reasonable thing to be anxious about). Li Hongzhang, the great modernising statesman of the period, tested the waters with the Kaiping Tramway in 1881 — mule-drawn at first, with steam permitted only once political nerves had settled. Inside the Forbidden City, a short Xiyuan (palace) railway was built for Cixi between 1886 and 1888, with carriages pulled by eunuchs so that a steam engine would not offend the dignity of the imperial household.

The older Western story — superstitious empress blocks progress — flattens most of this. Work by Jung Chang (Empress Dowager Cixi, 2013) and Elisabeth Köll (Railroads and the Transformation of China, 2019) shows Cixi supported selective modernisation, and that Qing resistance was as much about sovereignty and strategic penetration as it was about tombs and geomancy. The technology arrived on Chinese terms eventually. It just took longer than the foreign merchants had planned.