Conclusion

In June 1893, the newspaper North China Herald reported on the contemporary state of river transport near ShanghaiThe article praised the Chinese people’s technical ability saying that it was as good as any workmen in the world. The newspaper also commented on the capability of the Chinese managers of government machine shops and arsenals who had acquired the knowledge of machinery, asserting that, like their counterparts in Britain and America, their background of classical learning did not hinder their grasping the knowledge of machinery.At around the time of the First Opium War in 1839, there would barely have been a single lathe or a steam engine on the China coast, except for what might already have been installed on a Western steamship. By 1895, in the treaty ports of Shanghai, Guangzhou and Hankou, there were around sixteen Chinese-owned machine shops that hired dozens of workers and employed machine tools, servicing and building small steam vessels. Not spectacular perhaps, but the proliferation of machine shops signified China’s transition to modern mechanical engineering.