The tradition of freak shows in Europe dates back to the sixteenth century. Medical “monstrosities” became standard components of traveling exhibitions. During the nineteenth century such shows caught the imagination of large viewing (and paying) audiences.
Human exhibits were presented for public entertainment and the parade of “freaks of nature” was a booming business. With the expansion of colonialism, the emphasis changed from physical to racial characteristics. Displays of exotic but “backward” populations (“human zoos”) became common in the 1870s in the midst of imperialist ambitions.
This social phenomenon also inspired a remarkable venture at the beginning of trade relations between the independent United States and Imperial China. P. T. Barnum may be considered the “father” of the American freak show, but he was not the first to sense its commercial opportunities.
Tea & Opium
Formerly named Canton City, Guangzhou has a long history as a trading port. During the Tang Dynasty (618-907) many foreigners settled in the city, establishing a network of commercial ties.
Muslim merchant Sulaiman al-Tājir (“Solomon the Merchant”) left a travelogue of his visit to the city in 851 in which he observed the strict control over the movement of foreigners and the steep rates being charged for imported goods. He pointed at the city’s sizeable Muslim community and commented upon local tea consumption. Solomon admired the quality of local porcelain.
Trade between China and Europe began during the sixteenth century. Portuguese and Spanish traders brought silver from the Americas in exchange for silks. Having settled in Macau, the Portuguese monopolized the early foreign trade with China.
In 1685 the nation’s legendary Kangxi Emperor (1654-1722) permitted Western merchants to trade in Canton, but their freedom of movement was limited. They could deal with the “Cohong” only, members of which were official representatives of the Emperor.
The “foreign devils” (European traders) worked out of rented offices called “factories” in a walled off part of the city that combined warehouses and offices with living quarters. Their vessels were required to anchor downstream on the Pearl River. The British East India Company soon dominated commercial dealings.
Payments were demanded in silver Spanish dollars minted from mines in the New World. As the Qing Imperial Court refused opening its internal market to foreign goods, Britain could not sustain its deficits and needed a substitute currency.
Opium appeared as a new form of exchange. Rapidly expanding through the 1800s, India-grown opium was traded illegally for bullion (“specie”) with local smugglers and reinvested in tea for importation to British and American markets.
Growing Anglo-Chinese friction over the practice started the First Opium War in 1840. Two years later, the defeated Qing Empire was forced to sign the Treaty of Nanking (1842) that ceded Hong Kong to Britain, eliminated trading restrictions and opened five new ports to foreign trade.
Old China Trade
The British East India Company had long been selling Chinese goods to the colonists, but no American ship is believed to have had ever sailed beyond the Cape of Good Hope. Prior to 1783 Britain did not permit the colonies access to Asian markets.
The Company’s so-called East Indiamen were amongst the most powerful merchant ships ever built and dominated the trade routes. American contacts with China started after the Revolution when American merchants took over from the British.
During the uprising armed privateers, backed by the infant American government, had preyed on British commercial shipping. Their crews were ready to take on a new challenge.
The three-master Empress of China was built in 1783 as a privateer, but refitted for trade after the war. Leaving New York Harbor on February 22, 1784, she became what is believed to have been the first American vessel to enter Chinese waters.
Organized by Robert Morris (1734-1806), a financier from Philadelphia, and captained by former Philadelphian U.S. naval officer John Green, she returned to New York on May 11, 1785, after a round voyage of fourteen months and twenty-four days, opening up what today is known as the “Old China Trade.”
She also transported former army officer Samuel Shaw (1754-1794) to Canton who would act as the first American consul to China. This profit-driven venture acquired political significance.
The nation’s ability to access Canton was seen as a statement of the Republic’s independent intentions. The Empress of China marked the entry of America as a serious player into global trade markets.
(The next ship to engage in the China trade was the Experiment, a sixty-foot-long sloop captained by Stewart Dean of Albany. It left in the spring of 1785 for China, 14,000 nautical miles away.)
The Empress of China carried silver as trading currency and thirty tons of ginseng. A traditional medicine in China used for restoring strength to the infirm, American ginseng was found in abundance in the Appalachian Mountains.
Its export opened the Chinese market to merchants (other commodities were added in the process, including furs, metals, cotton and sandalwood). The Empress returned with a rich cargo of eight hundred chests of tea and a huge quantity of porcelain.
Canton ware is a cobalt blue and white porcelain, the ceramic recipe of which was a closely-guarded secret. Manufactured in Ching-Te Chen province (the “Capital of Porcelain”), plates and dishes were sent to Canton for decoration by professional artists who, working on an “assembly line,” painted a single element before passing it to the next workstation. The hand-painted subjects of tea houses, pagodas, foot bridges, meandering waterways, mountains and small figures were popular.
Porcelain was exported in large quantities by East India cargo ships, serving at the same time as ballast to keep the vessel stable. From 1784 to circa 1850, about two million pieces were exported to North America.
Canton ware was inventoried at Mount Vernon, the Virginia home of President George and Martha Washington, in the late 1790s.
Flood of Imports
A few Chinese migrants may have crossed the Pacific during the first decades of trading contacts, but their movements were barely recorded. In 1847, a former cook on a packet liner named Ah Sue, opened a store on Cherry Street, Manhattan, selling tobacco.
He also ran a small boarding house renting rooms to sailors. Ah Sue set a pattern for fellow newcomers, although their number remained low. According to the 1875 census there were 157 Chinese immigrants living in the city of New York.
Knowledge of the country therefore was limited, but the colonies were familiar with Chinese imports. From the mid-1600s onward, an array of products was imported from Canton.
Quantities of tea, silk and porcelain were available in these early years, both by legal and illegal means. Dutch smugglers were active in bringing tea to the colonies from Batavia. American pirates also circumvented the East India Company’s monopoly. The United States became hooked on tea.
The American China trade flourished after independence in spite of the risk of pirate attacks on bullion carrying ships. Merchants and investors were keen to explore the trade. The demand for Asian goods made the gamble worthwhile. It marked the beginning of America’s international trade.
Until the Treaty of Nanking it was a free trade arrangement whereby products were manufactured specifically for the American market. Production was based on a business model that relied upon the Chinese genius for imitation.
Having transported exclusive European items to Canton (shawls from Italy, tapestry from Belgium, perfume from France), replicas were churned out en masse by local manufacturers.
Selling cheaply produced items whilst pretending class and status, became a lucrative trading stratagem. Design theft in the Far East was stoked by American merchants. Boatloads of cargo made their way to the United States to satisfy the desire for oriental and exotic goods.
In 1832 a vessel named Howard returned to New York from China. Soon after, its owners placed its cargo up for auction. For the Carnes Brothers this had been a first foray into the Canton market. Up until then, they imported luxury goods from France. The emergence of an affluent urban middle class had prompted the venture. The surviving auction catalogue of the Howard shows an intriguing trend.
Absent were standard items that characterized the trade (teas, porcelain or jade). Instead, the merchants offered an assortment of “pongee” fabrics, silk shawls, decorated window blinds, fireworks, backgammon boards, snuff boxes, colored paper, walking canes, lacquered furniture and folding fans.
The Carnes Brothers aimed at creating a new market of fancy non-necessities to an emerging group of (female) shoppers. They also introduced a novel promotional ploy.
The Chinese Lady
Attempting to draw attention to their sales, the Brothers decided upon the strategy of exhibiting a young Chinese lady in a “home” decor of opulent furnishings. They approached Captain Benjamin Obear, whose ship Washington was setting sail for Canton, to arrange a deal on their behalf.
It is not known how and on what terms Obear persuaded the parents to part with their fourteen-year old daughter, but on October 17, 1834, a Cantonese youngster arrived in Manhattan.
Listed on the passenger list as “Auphinoy,” she was given the anglicized name of Afong Moy (her true name is unknown as are the details of her family background). The first reported female Chinese immigrant to the United States, she was treated as a commodity.
Her first “performance” took place in November 1834 at Obear’s Manhattan home at No. 8 Park Place. Seated in a throne-like armchair and dressed in silk, her bound feet were displayed on a stool (foot binding tales created enormous curiosity).
A lithograph of “The Chinese Lady,” produced in 1835 by Charles Risso and William R. Browne, recreated the settings of Moy’s presentation.
She was surrounded by a range of goods, lanterns, mirrors, curtains, wall hangings, paintings, vases, lacquer furniture and ornamental boxes – the sort of items that the Carnes Brothers were putting up for sale. The aim was strictly commercial.
Not only did New Yorkers enjoy a “meeting” with an exotic Chinese woman at her imagined residence, but they were also offered the opportunity to acquire elegant items for an affordable price.
Assisted by an interpreter, Afong would occasionally walk around the room and encourage visitors to make a purchase. The exhibition created excitement and journalistic attention.
As she represented a culture that was alien to Americans, thousands paid the entrance fee of fifty cents to see this “Unprecedented Novelty” (including Vice-President Martin Van Buren). Sales soared.
In January 1835, the exhibition was taken on tour. In Philadelphia she suffered the indignity of white doctors examining her feet (a violation of privacy in Chinese culture).
In March, she was presented to Andrew Jackson in Washington DC, the first American President to meet a Chinese person while in office. She visited Maryland and South Carolina, before returning to New York in June that year.
On arrival, a new manager by the name of Henry Hannington had taken over. He organized a whirlwind of tours for her. Over a period of six months she traveled over a thousand miles.
Back in Manhattan where Hannington ran his “Grand Moving Dioramas” at the City Saloon, an amusement house on Broadway, he transformed Moy’s role to an onstage “oriental” spectacle.
He made her display her unbound feet, eat with chopsticks and sing a Chinese song to audiences. His operations collapsed during the 1837 financial panic. Those responsible for Afong’s arrival had disappeared from the scene. By 1838, she entered a poorhouse in Monmouth, New Jersey.
She reappeared a decade later as an exhibit in P. T. Barnum’s American Museum, on the corner of Broadway and Ann Street, being reduced to a freakish spectacle of “otherness.”
Beginning in July 1847 at Niblo’s Garden in Manhattan, she began touring again, at times appearing on stage with Charles Stratton, better known as “General Tom Thumb” (a little person who would become a global celebrity).
Within a few years, she was replaced by a younger Chinese woman whose feet were even smaller than hers.
Chinatown
Moy’s last public exhibition took place on February 21, 1851, after which she disappeared from the public eye. There is no evidence that she ever returned to Canton; her name has not been traced in any census or death records.
The “interaction” between Moy and the public fed and formed early perceptions of Chinese culture, but to some observers such displays raised ethical questions about exploitation. Protests were voiced against the abusive manipulation of a young “disabled” foreign woman for commercial gain.
The New-York Mirror refused to print any reference to the Chinese Lady and her “little feet.” The anger, however, was not directed against the men who profited from her appearances, but turned against a cultural system that allowed for women to be physically deformed.
It was believed, therefore, the duty of missionaries to bring the gospel to China. Lacking accurate information, stereotypes emerged of a stagnant Empire which allowed western authorities to justify imperialism as a “noble” quest to civilize that section of humanity.
Stock images would re-emerge during the economic hardships of the 1870s when, after a period of mass Chinese male immigration (and recruitment by mining and railway bosses), resentment against incomers raged in California in particular.
Large numbers of migrant workers fled the region and moved towards Manhattan. Settling in the surroundings of Mott Street, a new and vibrant district of immigrants emerged that would later be named Chinatown.
Illustrations, from above: Detail from Risso & Browne’s “Afong Moy, the Chinese Lady,” 1835 (New York Public Library); A reverse-glass export painting of Canton’s harbor and its European “factories,” 1805; Artist unknown, “The Production of Tea,” 1790-1800 (Peabody Essex Museum); Fan depicting the Empress of China on the far left, the only traced image of the ship, ca. 1784. (Historical Society of Pennsylvania); A collection of Canton ware. (Porter-Phelps-Huntington House, Hadley, Massachusetts); William John Huggins, “The Indiaman Asia,” 1836 (Royal Museums Greenwich); Risso & Browne’s “Afong Moy, the Chinese Lady,” 1835 (New York Public Library); and the Port Arthur Chinese Restaurant, at 7-9 Mott Street, ca. 1900, one of the first banquet halls of Chinatown.
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