Beyond Benevolence: A Confucian Women's Shelter in Treaty-Port China

Beyond Benevolence: A Confucian Women's Shelter in Treaty-Port China Ruth Rogaski In the spring of 1878, at the height of one of the worst famines in history, merchants and officials from South China estabUshed a home for widows and orphans in the northern city of Tianjin. The founders called their institution the Hall for Spreading Benevolence [Guangren tang], claiming that through this act of charity, they would extend the benevolence of the emperor to save the beleagured North. By the turn of the century, the Hall for Spreading Benevolence had become the largest welfare institution for women and girls in North China, with massive corporate real-estate holdings that made its Board of Directors one of the largest and most powerful landowners in the city of Tianjin. Because of the power and influence of the men who ran it, the Hall for Spreading Benevolence was a microcosm of the complex political order in late-Qing treaty-port society. I examine the Hall for Spreading Benevolence in order to locate women within that society: to understand how the changes and continuities in late nineteenth -century China affected one particularly vulnerable group of women and to explore how these changes shaped Chinese male elites' attitudes about their responsibility for women's welfare.1 Scholars have previously studied the orphanages and widow homes of the Qing through the writings of their gentry-managers found in local histories and published institutional annals. The rich archival materials avaüable on the Hall for Spreading Benevolence aUow us to go beyond the public rhetoric of its founders—statements steeped in the language of Confucian piety and female chastity—and understand the more immediate circumstances that motivated the founding of the Hall.2 An analysis of these records reveals a central tension between the Hall's Confucian rhetoric and its urban reality. Although portrayed by its directors as a stately Confucian refuge for chaste widows, the HaU functioned primarily as a shelter for adolescent females who had been abused or sold as sexual commodities on the emerging national market in women. A startling dissonance existed between the public facade of the Hall for Spreading Benevolence and the changing conditions of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century China. The Hall for Spreading Benevolence was a type of multi-purpose benevolent society, or shantang, sirrdlar to those established by gentry in the southern provinces of Jiangsu and Zhejiang. A central goal of this article is to Uluminate the chain of events that led merchants and officials © 1997 Journal of Women's History, Vol. 8 No. 4 (Winter) 1997 Ruth Rogaski 55 from the South to establish a shantang for women and chUdren in the northern city of Tianjin. By placing the genesis of this institution in the context of Tianjin local history, we are able to locate women within the complex combination of inter-regional rivalries, foreign intervention, and domestic discord of late nineteenth-century treaty-port cities. This study also considers the day-to-day lives of the women and girls who Uved inside the Hall: how they came to the institution, how their lives were structured inside the institution, and how they left the institution. The Hall for Spreading Benevolence brings to light the merits and the limitations of Confucian solutions to the problems of women's weUare in the rapidly changing urban environment of modern China. A Southern Tradition: Welfare Institutions for Women and Girls Several scholars have noted the emergence of gentry-established welfare institutions in the southern Chinese provinces of Jiangsu and Zhejiang during the high Qing.3 Beginning in the late eighteenth and extending throughout the nineteenth century, orphanages, widows' homes, and multi-purpose benevolent societies flourished in the highly commercialized areas around the cities of Hangzhou, Suzhou, and Yangzhou. Founded by local elites to provide for local needs, these institutions fiUed in the gaps left by a government bureaucracy that was not expanding to meet the needs of a rapidly growing society. These institutions also served to further the reputation of their founders as exemplars of orthodox Confucian benevolence in a time of increasing commercialism and social stratification. For the most part, scholars have interpreted the extraordinary expansion of locally...