From 1842, when the Treaty of Nanjing was signed, which ended the Opium War for the benefit of the United Kingdom, the Chinese Qing dynasty was forced to tolerate foreign enclaves on its territory and the presence of European and American missionaries, diplomats and businessmen. “These foreign communities appeared in the cities along the coast, then on the great trade route that is the Yangtze River, and finally in remote border places, where it was imagined, generally wrongly, that there were opportunities for business development”, explain it South China Morning Post.
In Wanderings in China (1886) Scottish watercolourist Constance Gordon-Cumming “shows that the couchsurfing was not an invention of the internet age”. Indeed, foreigners counted on expatriates to welcome them, while the latter were fond of contacts with Westerners. the South China Morning Post écrit :
“In the style of today’s worst travel writers and almost all ‘influencers’, Constance Gordon-Cumming watered down everything she saw, and she presented as truths simple expatriate reports, including the majority had little or no set foot outside foreign enclaves.”
In 1922, British novelist and playwright William Somerset Maugham published The Chinese Screen, an account of his wanderings from enclave to enclave. Not very grateful to his hosts, he says of them that they speak only of “shopping, golf and hunting” :
“They thought it was wrong to talk about abstract issues and that they shouldn’t be discussing politics. China bored them all, they didn’t want to talk about it; they only knew what was necessary for their business, and they looked suspiciously at anyone who studied the Chinese language.”