Belgian concession of Tianjin

The Belgian concession of Tianjin was a 120 acre Belgian Colonial concession in the Chinese city of Tianjin between 1902 and 1931, the only Belgian concession in China. Although its own concession had not been developed, Belgium had been very active in the infrastructure construction of Tianjin Huajie and other concessions, and can be called the “engineering captain” in the concessions of various other countries including the old city of Tianjin.

Quotes

 * Although China attracted Belgian investors and missionaries from the 1860s, it is especially after 1900 that major investments began to take place in various industrial, financial and commercial sectors, such as banking, railways, metallurgy and real estate. The most famous companies were the Banque sino-belge, the Compagnie financière belgo-chinoise, the Société belge d’entreprise en Chine, the Compagnie générale des chemins de fer en Chine and the cfeo. The Beijing-Hankou (present Wuhan) railway line, the mines of Lincheng, the trams of Tientsin and the steel mills of Hanyang were among the most successful results of the Belgian “informal empire.”
 * Ginette Kurgan-Van Hentenryk, Léopold II et les groupes financiers en Chine. La politique royale et ses prolongements, Brussels: Palais des Académies, 1972 (Mémoires de la classe des lettres, 2e série 61-2).


 * For three or four Chinese coppers, I could ride in a rickshaw from my home, in England, to Italy, Germany, Japan, or Belgium. I walked to France for violin lessons; I had to cross the river to get to Russia, and often did, because the Russians had a beautiful wooded park with a lake in it.
 * Hersey, “A reporter at large: homecoming. I: the house on New China Road”, New Yorker, 10 May 1982, 54, cited in Maurizio Marinelli, “Making Concessions in Tianjin: Heterotopia and Italian Colonialism in Mainland China.” Urban History 36, no. 3 (2009): 404