SWATOW
A445
time Bradley and Richardson moved to Double Island Swatow was a collec tion of fishing huts on a "mud-flat" and further to state that it is now, 70 years later, a thriving city with nearly a quarter of a millo inhabitants.,
Shortly after the signing of the Treaty of Tientsin Bradley & Co. moved up to Swatow proper, being the first foreign firm to become established there. In 1862 the British Government was granted a piece of land about a mile out- side Swatow but so strong were the demonstrations of the populace against it that the settlement project fell through. Foreign residences and offices, however, began to spring up at Kakchioh on the opposite side of the harbour and before the decade 1860-1870 was out, opposition had very largely died down and foreigners were living and trading freely in Swatow itself.
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The climate of Swatow is very salubrious. The town, however, has suffered from typhoons on many occasions. Fifty thousand lives were lost and very extensive damage to shipping and property was caused by one of these terrible storms which accompanied by a tidal wave, struck the port on the night of August 2nd, 1922. Seismic disturbances, also, have frequently been felt here. The most serious was that on February 13th, 1918, when, it is computed, over 2,000 people were killed and several thousand injured, while the damage to property was immense. The native population of Swatow was estimated at 14063 in 1929 and is now nearly a quarter of a million.
A Chinese syndicate, with a capital of $3,000,000, obtained the necessary sanction for the construction of a railway from Swatow to Ch'ao-chou-fu, and work was commenced on the line in 1904. The line, 28 miles in length, was. opened to traffic on November 25th, 1906. The contractors were Japanese, who supplied all material, the rails and engines coming from America and the carriages from Japan. The construction of the line brought about a great inflation of land values.
Swatow has an electric light plant and a new waterworks was completed early in 1914, the reservoir being at Ampou, about eight miles inland. In the middle of 1919 a telephone service was introduced.
Swatow is by no means slow in the race with other China ports for im- provement. Road making and road widening are being carried out rapidly, and the public park at the back of Swatow is being gradually improved. Three Fire Brigades-well equipped with modern apparatus-protect the town, twọ of these being financed by different charitable guilds. An Orphanage, organised after the Typhoon of 1922, a Poor Peoples Workshop and a Leper Station, besides the Mission Hospitals, are among the charitable institutions of the port.
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TRADE IN 1934
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Weather conditions were favourable to the production of the principal crops in the Swatow area: rice, sugar cane, and oranges. In some other respects, however, circumstances were not so satisfactory, particularly from the point of view of the import trade. Owing to the failure of many of the old- style native banks and lack of confidence in the various bank-note issues owing to a shortage in silver reserves, marked instability was again a feature of the local money market. Out of a total of 45 note-issuing banks, 15 became insol- vent during the year. Naturally, this state of affairs, despite an amelioration of the situation towards the end of the year, was neither helpful to local business nor to the making of contracts with outside markets; and to this adverse factor must be added the effect of the higher Import Tariff of 1934, plus the additional measures taken locally to restrict the trade in foreign merchan- dise in favour of provincial monopolies and native goods in general. The result was a 56 per cent. drop in the value of direct foreign imports and a further reduction amounting to over 22 per cent. in the total value of that portion of the trade of the port for which Customs statistics are available. The value statistics in question are as follows: direct foreign imports, 26.1