It’s true, Qingdao is basically forgotten today. Whenever I tell people that I’m writing my BA on Qingdao, that German colony in China, the usual response is something along the lines of "wait, we had a colony in China?" Which is highly ironic, considering that while it still was a German colony – and in fact, even for some time afterwards – German propaganda talked of the Musterkolonie, or "model colony", the one city to be representative of Germany’s colonial ambitions.

In order to answer you’ll question, we’ll have a look at what the German administration planned for Qingdao to be and loudly proclaimed to be, and then at what German colonial policies actually meant on the ground.

Germany had long harboured colonial ambitions in China, but they took concrete form in the aftermath of the Sino-Japanese War from 1894 to 1895. The war ended in a disastrous defeat for the Qing Empire and left it vulnerable to the ambitions of Germany and especially of its emperor, Wilhelm II. The whole operation was planned thoroughly: agents were sent to survey potential sites until the decision fell on the bay of Jhiazhou. In the autumn of 1897, the murder of two German missionaries gave the longed-for excuse, and the German Far Eastern Squadron occupied the bay without bloodshed.

There was no city on the shores of the Jhiazhou bay when the Germans landed there. Instead, there were villages and plans for a Qing military harbour. The German occupation bought up six of those villages and razed them: on the basis of a purpose-built law for the purchase of land, the Jhiazhou concession was to be built from the ground up. Behind that idea was Alfred von Tirpitz, former head of Germany’s East Asia squadron and now naval minister of Germany; this led to the interesting construction of Jhiazhou being administered not by colonial ministry (which in 1897 didn’t exist yet, anyway), but the navy. The plan was for it to become a German Hong Kong - an example of German colonial administration, the backbone of German naval presence in East Asia and a port for the theorised import/export potential of Shandong province.

These plans started with the building of the new town. The motto was "hygiene", which meant broad streets, the building of clear- and wastewater infrastructure, and clear zoning. There were three quarters: One for European villages, one for European dense building for living and business and one for Chinese dense building for living and business. On the outskirts of the planned harbour, there were two villages for Chinese labourers; beyond that, there were other villages, which the Germans interfered with little.

This was a system of segregation not only of race, but also of town vs. countryside, by profession, etc. It was a concentric hierarchy, to a certain degree with possibilities for upwards and downwards movement. For example, the German and Chinese business quarters were built directly beside each other, with only a normal street running between them, but it was indeed illegal for Chinese people to buy property in the European quarters. Keeping Europeans and Chinese from intermingling was seen as a health hazard, so this prohibition was stated in the concession’s hygiene law.

Throughout the German rule of Qingdao, the Chinese inhabitants of the town always vastly outnumbered the Europeans. In 1902, for example, Qingdao had 15,593 inhabitants, 688 of which were European and 14,905 Chinese; in 1913, the numbers were 55,611 total with 2,069 Europeans and 53,312 Chinese. This does not include the numerous villages in the concession, whose inhabitants rose from ~90,000 to ~200,000 during that time. Overshadowing the European civilian presence was the large garrison (first 1,850, then 2,400 soldiers) together with the seamen of the German East Asia squadron, which was stationed in the harbour.

Qingdao was never planned to be a settlement colony; in fact, Europeans who wanted to live in the town had to apply for permission from the Governor. This meant that the few Europeans who did live in the town were overwhelmingly male. The same was true of the Chinese quarters, especially the labourers, who were often seasonal workers from nearby villages. One noteworthy exception were the workers in the brothels servicing labourers and military. Overall, in 1914, the quota was 76% male, 24% female.

A 1914 report by the US consulate gives some detail on the working day of a Chinese labourer in Qingdao. A "coolie" could be a driver of a ricksha (1,000) or other cart (700), driver of a wheelbarrow (1,200) or horse waggon (100) or a "normal" worker only offering physical labour, mostly in the harbour (4,000). He lived in a lodging where he paid 2 copper cash per night, together with 50-100 others. Breakfast was at 5 o’clock, lunch at 12, dinner at 7; it consisted mostly out of mantou (steamed wheat bread), tofu and bean soup. Sometimes, he could afford noodles, raw fish, innards, or bean sprouts. Food was 20 cash per day, other things 5. In total, he needed 27-30 cash per day for himself and could hope to earn 35 to 40; the difference was sent to his family.

Another tool of German rule was the separate jurisdiction for the Chinese inhabitants. Since Qingdao was not part of Germany proper, Governor and Emperor basically had free hands in terms of jurisdiction, which for the Chinese inhabitants had one big consequence: Corporal punishment, which at that point had been abolished as judicial punishment in Germany. I’ll take one example from my BA, damaging a telegraph. For that, a Chinese person could, additionally to the punishment prescribed by German law, be punished by up to 100 blows. Up to 25 blows, corporal punishment could be administered by police on the spot, without due process.

So, Qingdao definitely was run as an example of German colonial administration. It was also Germany’s naval base in the Far East, though the ships stationed there were never able to rival the big detachments stationed in the region by the UK, France, or Japan. That’s not to say that no money was spent on Qingdao: In fact, Germany spent more on Qingdao than on any other of its colonies. This was bad for the German government, because, while the German parliament did not have many powers, it did have a say in the budget. This meant that with every year, the opposition increased its, well, opposition to the enormous sums invested in a single port in China without the hoped-for riches ever materialising.

The German plan for Qingdao’s economy was, overall, a failure. The dream of 400 million Chinese customers, an endless market for German products with Qingdao as its doorway, was never realised. Together with a stronger Chinese state and popular resistance through strikes and boycotts within Qingdao led to a gradual change of policy in the time from 1905 to 1910: Qingdao was now supposed to become a centre of German culture within China. From German teachers and German schoolbooks, future Chinese businesspeople would learn to properly invest in German, not British, machinery.

The most important part of this scheme was the German-Chinese Hochschule.^1 Its four faculties were law, science and engineering, medicine and agriculture. The teachers were prestigious, but faced a huge obstacle: Lessons had to be given in German, which led to a lot of frustration for the more ambitious teachers. The pupils came from wealthy families, of which there was an uptick after the 1911 revolution. The prohibition of Chinese buying land in the German quarter had been dropped as a reaction to this influx.

This was a very limited overview over some of the aspects of life in German Qingdao. Urban life is always a multi-faceted thing, especially with the additional colonial dimension, but I hope I picked out some interesting aspects. I’d also be glad to answer any additional questions you might have, and also put some sources you might find interesting underneath.

Notes

1: Well, not quite. The official name was Höhere Lehranstalt für Spezialwissenschaften mit besonderem Character, "Higher institute of education for special sciences with special character". This was the result of long negotiations between German and Chinese governments over Chinese recognition of its degrees, which China did in the end not grant.

Sources

Leutner, Mechthild; Mühlhahn, Klaus (ed.): "Musterkolonie Kiautschou". Die Expansion des Deutschen Reiches in China. Eine Quellensammlung, Berlin 1997. (collection of tons of sources, mostly documents, both Chinese and German)

Mohr, F.W. (ed.): Handbuch für das Schutzgebiet Kiautschou, Tsingtau 1911. (collection of laws enacted by the governor and others relating to Qingdao)

Photographs (of which there are a ton, mostly in the German Federal Archive but many digitised like here)

Tsingtauer Neueste Nachrichten (one of Qingdao’s two daily newspapers, digitised for 1914)

Weicker, Hans: Kiautschou. Das deutsche Schutzgebiet in Ostasien, Berlin 1908. (travel guide and very racist)

Literature

Hiery, Hermann J.; Hinz, Hans-Martin (ed.): Alltagsleben und Kulturaustausch. Deutsche und Chinesen in Tsingtau 1897-1914, Berlin 1999.

Hinz, Hans-Martin; Lind, Christoph (ed.): Tsingtau. Ein Kapitel deutscher Kolonialgeschichte in China 1897-1914, Eurasburg 1998.

Huang, Fu-teh: Qingdao. Chinesen unter deutscher Herrschaft, Bochum 1999.

Mühlhahn, Klaus: "Mapping Colonial Space. The Planning and Building of Qingdao by German Colonial Authorities, 1897-1914", in: Victoir, Laura; Zatsepine, Victor (ed.): Harbin to Hanoi. The Colonial Built Environment in Asia, 1840 to 1940, p. 103.

Reinbothe, Roswitha: Kulturexport und Wirtschaftsmacht. Deutsche Schulen in China vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg, Frankfurt a.M. 1992.