The Only Girl in Amoy: Gender and American Patriotism in a Nineteenth‐Century Treaty Port

In 1861, twenty‐year‐old Ruth Bradford accompanied her father to the Chinese treaty port of Amoy where he was to serve as American consul. Bradford recorded this trip in a diary kept from her departure from New York until her 1863 return. Drawing upon her diary, this paper explores how Bradford, as the only American woman in Amoy, refined her sense‐of‐self through interracial and cross‐cultural encounters with the settlement's Chinese and British inhabitants. The paper argues that through critical comparison with these communities, Bradford, like other nineteenth‐century American women in China, consolidated and articulated her gendered, racial and burgeoning patriotic national identity.

Barely two weeks in Amoy (Xiamen ), Ruth Bradford's first impressions betrayed apprehension about how she might fit into the small foreign community that had grown following the Chinese port's opening through the 1842 Treaty of Nanking.Bradford, aged twenty, and her brother Oliver had accompanied their father Rev. Arthur B. Bradford to Amoy to fill his post as American consul.The three left New York mid-September 1861 aboard the Julia G. Tyler and following an arduous journey reached Hong Kong on 17 April 1862. 3Foreshadowing her life in China, issues surrounding Bradford's gender soon emerged during the voyage.The male passengers hounded her, and while she handled herself admirably, she recognised the motives behind the attention, her confident manner towards them fuelling gossip and ribbing from the few women and older men on board.These gendered tensions would grow even more explicit in Amoy and become further entangled with issues of race, nationality and patriotism.
The themes of gender, race, nationality and patriotism are threaded throughout Bradford's diary, kept from her 1862 departure from New York until her 1863 return.Her entries map the self-assured unmarried woman's experiences in a foreign society and the ways these experiences tested and shaped her gendered, racial and national identity.As Ruth Watson notes, diaries reflect the past through subjective experiences, serving as aspirational spaces for 'self-fashioning'. 4Bradford's diary of a brief but formative period in her life, when compared with other women's writings from China's treaty ports and with Victorian gender norms in the metropole, provides an unparalleled example of how American women abroad negotiated colonial and metropolitan socio-cultural values.Her isolation in Amoy is vital to this account.Where American women in Hong Kong and Shanghai had recourse to their fellow nationals when faced with tensions within foreign society, Bradford was forced to tackle these tensions head-on and meditated upon doing so in her diary.As Joan Judge and Susan Mann have argued, such microperspectival approaches to history are well suited to teasing out sites of gender, social and cross-cultural tensions. 5The diary provides a means to fill lacunae in our understanding of nineteenth-century (semi)colonial culture and society. 6uided by the diary's content, this article questions how cross-cultural contact in (semi)colonial spaces such as Amoy provided a counterpoint against which women measured their national and gendered selves, both social constructs consolidated 'around ideological systems of "difference"'. 7To explore this question, the discussion links Bradford's experiences to those of the handful of American women who documented life in mid-nineteenth-century China and to research on metropolitan American Victorian society and culture to develop a deeper understanding of colonial society and transnational contact.The discussion is accordingly divided into three sections.The first describes Bradford's background, provides socio-political context and explores the demographic composition of Amoy's Western community.The second section discusses how gender and race functioned within a (semi)colonial space shaped by overlapping systems of governance and ambiguous systems of domination/subordination, and affected Bradford's capacity to participate. 8It further argues that her isolation, perspective on colonial conventions and relative freedom shaped how she understood both.The final discusses how Bradford consolidated ideas of patriotism, race and national identity through comparison, arguing that if these concepts were often analogous, they were not totalising, as cross-cultural rivalries tested whatever solidarity she possessed with the port's White inhabitants.
Bradford's diary is both specific to her circumstances and indicative of the broader relationship between contact, identity and national affirmation that occurred in liminal spaces such as Amoy.Her entries describe a two-year journey which few of her contemporaries could claim to have experienced the likes of, but also detail issues related to gender, interracial and cross-cultural contact, and patriotism familiar to other American women in China.Bradford's case nuances our understanding of the process Stacilee Ford describes where, for these American women, 'narratives of nation' informed, clashed or meshed with 'narratives of race, region, language, religion, and culture'. 9The following demonstrates that Bradford's identity as a White foreigner, as an American and as a woman, was framed through cross-cultural encounters within treaty-port society.Through both a close and comparative reading of Bradford's diary, I argue that contact with British and Chinese 'others', inspired nineteenth-century American women to consolidate and articulate a gendered and a burgeoning patriotic national identity.

From Beaver County to Kulangsu
Born in 1841 to Rev. Bradford and Elizabeth Bradford née Wickes, Bradford spent her childhood at Buttonwood, the family farm in Beaver County, PA. 10 Her father was a Presbyterian minister and noted abolitionist, helping to establish the Free Presbyterian Church, an anti-slavery institution that barred enslavers. 11Rev. Bradford's activities both reacted and added to the socio-political tensions spreading through many Pennsylvanian counties in the 1850s.Responding to a perceived loss of the 'American' way of life, the nativist Know Nothing party had gained prominence in Pennsylvania in 1854, with Beaver County among those that elected a Know Nothing majority that year. 12Concerns over immigration, Catholicism and abolitionism figured prominently in Know Nothing rhetoric and by 1855 debates about accommodating the slaveholding states' demands divided the party and Pennsylvanian communities. 13he party declined by 1858, but the moral panic upon which it had been conceived persisted.Nativist and pro-compromise sentiments compounded resentment building in Beaver County following the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, which required enslaved individuals who had escaped to free states be returned to their enslavers if caught, rendering local arguments over slavery especially volatile. 14Still, if Rev. Bradford's anti-slavery agitating risked angering the local community, his coming tenure in Amoy deepened his resolve, as his encounters with Chinese people and the missionary enterprise in China effected his disillusionment with the Christian institution which consigned 'the so-called "heathen"' to 'eternal perdition'. 15ev. Bradford's ideas concerning race and religion were imparted upon his children, as were the Christian and domestic values of Elizabeth Bradford to whom the responsibility for their home-schooling fell. 16Catherine Clinton describes how such home-schooling interwove ideas of a feminine domesticity with those of the 'cult of republican motherhood', prescribing mothers with the responsibility of conferring a US ethos upon their children. 17Bradford's commentaries on life in 1860s and 1870s China reflected both parents' influence as she attempted to incorporate abolitionism into her understanding of interracial encounters and her critiques of the Western 'civilizing mission' while consolidating her identity as a patriotic White American woman.Even her recorded distaste for her peers' frivolity would reflect a maternal influence, Bradford thanking heaven in her diary that her mother was, by comparison, 'an exception to women in general'. 18ware of the attention his work attracted, Rev. Bradford secured his posting as a low-level consul to Amoy from the newly elected Lincoln in April 1861, just days before the Civil War's outbreak.He, Bradford and Oliver sailed from New York the following autumn. 19Bradford's first encounters with China took place in the British colony Hong Kong, where she soon learned that strict socio-cultural mores replaced the lax gender protocols of ship-life.In one mishap, she received the American Tom DeSilver, with whom the Bradfords had made the voyage out, in her private parlour as the drawing room was 'too public'.Furious at the transgression, her father 'came down on [her] very hard' and made her cease contact with the man. 20Her father's response, conforming to Hong Kong's social norms, foreshadowed the tensions that Bradford's freedom in Amoy would produce.Had her mother been present, such freedoms would undoubtedly have been restricted.Indeed, when the American Sara Delano reached Hong Kong with her family the following year, her mother Catherine Robbins Delano née Lyman chaperoned her and her siblings, the girls only venturing out with an escort. 21To Braford, these first encounters with colonial society were stifling. 22ercifully, Hong Kong was short lived, and within a week, Bradford was steaming to Amoy aboard the Swatow. 23Her first impressions of Kulangsu (Gulangyu ), the small island across the harbour that housed the foreign community, were optimistic. 24Considered cleaner and more peaceful than Amoy proper, Kulangsu housed a sleepy community that had cropped up following Amoy's opening.By 1855, thirteen years after the Treaty of Nanking, the foreign community numbered only 34 individuals, growing to just 155 by 1865, two years after Bradford's return to Pennsylvania. 25At first, enterprising merchants and consuls rushed to exploit the port, but in 1853, anti-Manchu Small Swords rebels occupied Amoy. 26The rebel forces left the small Western settlement alone, and by December 1853, Qing forces had retaken the city. 27'Tranquility' was restored and Chinese government officials normalised trading regulations the following month. 28But while Qing forces occupied the land, piracy in the surrounding waters, reportedly led by rebels who had fled the imperialist forces, persisted into the 1860s. 29usiness slowly recovered, but such instability hampered the foreign community's development.Although open eighteen years, Amoy did not compare commercially to the flashier ports of Hong Kong and Shanghai, boasting 2,476 and 2,757 foreigners respectively in 1860. 30Kulangsu supported a small Chinese population (less than 3,000 in 1867), who were 'civil to foreigners as a rule', and was considered a safe place to walk 'day or night'.It was, however, socially 'limited', and its 2.85 miles circumference could be circled on foot in under an hour. 31The island's languid society and diminutive size soon tempered Bradford's initial optimism.
Nineteenth-century China's treaty-port and colonial life revolved around social institutions and public interaction.For Hong Kong's or Shanghai's American women, sporting clubs, philanthropic and social associations, and public events filled the leisure hours, mitigating the monotony of seeing the 'same people all the time'. 32Kulangsu, however, boasted few public institutions and the British church was in Amoy proper. 33Separated from the city by a narrow harbour, Bradford enjoyed limited public pastimes besides dining, visiting, yachting with her brother and 'clambering' over Kulangsu's granite boulders. 34At home, she passed time reading, studying French, playing US tunes on the piano, sewing, fawning over her dog and attempting to instruct the Chinese kitchen staff on US cuisine. 35he foreign community's demographic makeup was likewise constricting.The island had a dedicated missionary presence, which later letters suggest Bradford despised.Their work was celebrated as a model of successful proselyting in the USA, but besides a couple wives affiliated with their mission, few Western women inhabited the port. 36Bradford's diary named only four.Eleanor Jones and Agnes Carnegie were married to British doctors, and while the latter was too pious for Bradford, the former became a close friend. 37Esther Swanson, the wife of the English Presbyterian Church's British pastor, was too judgmental, and Bradford hardly ever wrote of Caroline Pedder, the Consul William Pedder's wife. 38The situation had barely improved five years later, The Treaty Ports of China and Japan crediting the port's anaemic social life to the 'small number of ladies' therein. 39Of the women Bradford named, she was the only American -rather one of few Americans at allin a predominantly British foreign society.Such imbalance impressed upon American women throughout China the differences between colonial and metropolitan society, but Bradford's isolation in Amoy would amplify her sensitivity to two axes: gender and nationality.Kulangsu's insularity shaped the White American woman's articulation of difference with the (mostly) male British and local Chinese communities; differences made more explicit through contrast with her cultural upbringing and the socio-political crises gripping the USA.

The only girl in Amoy
Bradford's sense of being the only girl in the world was a hyperbolic one speaking more to her racial and cultural isolation as an American woman than to Kulangsu's gender imbalance.By her own reckoning, there were Western women around, not to mention the elite Chinese women who paid her visits where both parties made little attempt to conceal their curiosity. 40As with the American Rebecca Kinsman's letters from 1840s Macau, however, racial and social distance between Western and Chinese people was emphasised through omission. 41In Kinsman's accounts, Chinese women appeared sparsely in calibrated anecdotes highlighting differences but were otherwise absent from her descriptions of Anglo-American society.Such omission was an important aspect of Bradford's diary.When writing of being the only girl in 'Amoy', she meant 'White Amoy'.
Still, the feelings Bradford's statement evoke -isolation, exceptionalism, objectification -reflect the ways gender and race shaped how she saw herself and how she believed others saw her.Bradford's writing reveals a conflicted relationship between joy over the freedom her independence granted and her aversion to reproach or unwanted attention that such independence invited from the port's married women, British bachelors and Chinese community. 42Although released from the maternal stewardship constraining the Delano girls in Hong Kong, Bradford's freedom amplified her selfawareness of race and gender, affected her distaste for colonial life's restrictions and emboldened her to test her new-found independence's boundaries.
Nineteenth-century treaty-port society's gender roles generally conformed to those prevailing throughout the British Empire and the British and American metropoles.Ascribing moral purity to women had been a common theme in late-eighteenthcentury American legal and cultural discourse, prefiguring the '"Victorian" morality' that became emblematic of nineteenth-century British metropolitan and colonial cultures. 43As Ruth Bloch asserts, their 'morality' gave women an air of inherent innocence that gender and imperial historians suggest made them ideal symbols for the supposed virtue of Western civilisation and culture. 44White women were therefore upheld as paragons of cultural and racial superiority, making their private and public conduct in colonial spaces matters of particular anxiety for Westerners. 45s in Britain and New England, the White woman's prescribed domain in the colonies was the domestic realm, 'synonymous' with femininity and associated with traits such as modesty, chastity, piety, compassion and virtue. 46Such traits acquired heightened importance within colonial settings, as the woman's management of the home represented empire in microcosm. 47Her mastery over non-White servants produced a 'form of domestic empire based on paternalistic premises and racial distinctions'; her efforts to cultivate a metropolitan lifestyle reflected the foreign environment's subordination. 48But if she professed mastery over her servants, she was also despondent without them.Bradford's 'Mr.Coolie', -'a handsome fellow, a Cantonese' -was her 'chambermaid, dressing maid, errand boy, and a good many other characters'.By her own admission, she could do nothing without him. 49he home was thus conceptualised as the woman's domain, but colonial social rituals meant it also served as a public space which callers, guests and servants transgressed.'If life [was] to be worth living', opined an 1873 China Punch article, 'residents in China must do the round of calls'. 50An earlier China Punch cartoon of the ritual, mocking an episode similar to Bradford's meeting with DeSilver, depicted a naive Chinese servant mistakenly showing a male caller into a woman's private quarters. 51he cartoon played upon three related tropes: that even at home, colonial women never secured true privacy; that Chinese servants were responsible for such transgressions; and that Chinese servants were oblivious to Western social conventions. 52 similar instance Bradford recorded demonstrates how these three tropes restricted women's personal freedom.Barely two weeks in Kulangsu, Bradford related how, while preparing to take a walk 'for once all by [herself]', the doorbell rang and her Chinese servant brought her the visitors' cards.Mad, Bradford threw the cards at her servant and 'wished the gentlemen in Guinea'. 53Yet Victorian ideals of propriety meant that temper, alongside vices of fashion and vanity, could cause middleclass New England women to forfeit respectability within the public eye, and so Bradford composed herself, went down and entertained her callers. 54Bradford suppressed her frustration, recalling metropolitan expectations of middle-class female propriety which equipped her to play the gracious hostess.
Yet excepting social duties associated with the home, the prevalence of Chinese servants unburdened White women in the treaty ports from domestic responsibilities.As a result, they were more conspicuous in public.Such publicness produced discord as to what the woman's new role in social spaces might be, as Elizabeth LaCouture's study of Chinese women in Tianjin suggests, encouraging women to remap urban space. 55This impulse was especially apparent in Kulangsu, where the lack of people to visit or things to do meant Bradford spent much time exploring the island alone; a liberty that the case of Delano suggests she would not have enjoyed in the larger ports. 56ut while colonial society provided women opportunities to unburden themselves from domestic tasks and participate in public life, Eadaoin Agnew argues that their visibility also constrained them. 57Such participation sparked fresh anxieties about White women's sexuality, conduct and safety.As Philippa Levine notes, race and sex were critically entangled beyond the metropole and, Eileen Scully argues, became wrapped in concerns over White promiscuity and Western prostitution which threatened to undermine colonists' moral authority. 58Any perceived transgression against the White woman's chastity risked tarnishing the 'moral and spiritual superiority' which they had been tasked with upholding. 59radford's increased visibility accordingly produced anxiety in two forms.The first -tied to Kulangsu's gender imbalance -was external commentary upon her publicness.Some comments, like her father's wishes that she meet other ladies more as she was becoming a 'hoyden … from living among only gentlemen', were good natured. 60thers, however, were barbed, directed at Bradford's departures from colonial mores.Responding to Bradford's public meetings with the port's British bachelors, Swanson and Carnegie presumed to play the part of her absentee mother, lecturing her 'on the subject of matrimony' as if she 'stood in need of it'. 61Both would 'hardly speak' with Bradford at a later meeting when she greeted them while heading to a late party at 'what they consider an ungodly place' where she was 'sure to meet only gentlemen'. 62heir snub riled Bradford, and while such comments failed to curtail her public activities, the island's British women made it clear her behaviours transgressed the conduct expected of White ladies in such ports.
The second form was Bradford's self-awareness of her gender and race, made explicit through the attention her quotidian activities attracted.In one entry, Bradford described walking to the coast to dip her feet in the sea.Preparing to shed her shoes and stockings, she turned to see 'three or four gentlemen' watching 'from the hill above'.In terms reproduced throughout her diary, Bradford commented upon being unable to turn around without finding 'two or three opera glasses and telescopes' trained on her. 63Various entries described Kulangsu's Chinese and Western inhabitants gawking at her. Bradford was more patient of attention from the former, for which the curiosity was mutual, and while the 'dense crowd' of Chinese gawkers that gathered around her in town made her nervous, she was herself guilty of staring at Chinese women 'so pretty' that she 'stopped and looked' for 'half an hour'. 64uch mutual curiosity was characteristic of Western women's experiences in China. 65In one instance, three 'very curious' Chinese ladies used the pretext of a visit to go 'all over' Bradford's house and 'even up on the terrace'. 66Gender functioned, here, as a means for these women to sidestep racial boundaries and explore the Western house.At a more formal tiffin, Bradford shared wine with 'Mandarin' guests, lamenting that she could not speak Chinese as she would 'have had quite a flirtation with the old chap' sat next to her. 67 Despite this language barrier, she avidly observed her guests' customs and decorum.Such private encounters provided both parties casual opportunities to satisfy voyeuristic urges and acquire cultural knowledge.Some public encounters with the Kulangsu's Chinese community were, however, racially charged, as both parties sought to make sense of the unfamiliar other.To Chinese onlookers viewing her with unease and curiosity, Bradford was an interloper who, by traversing the island's public spaces unaccompanied, became approachable. 68he Chinese 'crowd' that had 'surrounded' her compared their hands and skin tone, Bradford assuming they thought she 'was once their color' but had 'washed [herself] white'. 69The American Harriet Low's record of 1830s Canton describes how such interest could be so great that Chinese officials at that port worried about her impact on public order. 70Their caution was merited.In one episode Bradford related, Caroline and William Pedder -growing impatient waiting for a procession of one-thousand Chinese marchers to pass -'attempted, very unwisely to force their way through'.The procession attacked them, Pedder complained to the port's Chinese officials, and 'ever so many Chinamen' were to be 'publicly whipped'. 71Even as Bradford's encounters provided a forum for mutual comparison, the episode with the Pedders she described entrenched racial barriers and the potential violence of (semi)colonial encounters.
While mutual curiosity muted the awkwardness of her encounters with the Chinese community, Bradford was especially conflicted about attention from Western bachelors such as the American vice-consul Thomas Hyatt, the British 'Mr White' of the Imperial Maritime Customs, and 'E.T. Livingston' of Syme & Company. 72This attention could be negative, infringing upon her privacy as had the incident by the shore and muting her desire to exploit her freedom and explore the island.Such interest further fuelled unwanted gossip which, in an insular society, could damage a woman's reputation.
Yet Bradford also met the fawning with good humour and, as Sara Evans notes of metropolitan American women, exploited social gender mores to exert her agency when interacting with the island's Western bachelors. 73When out walking, she recorded dodging men 'determined' to meet her, leading gentlemen on horseback through 'short corners', around 'paddy fields and over rocks', which they endured because it was 'quite an event for them to take off their hats to the only young lady on the island'. 74She registered amusement with the 'patronizing, condescending way in which' men escorting her treated 'all the other men' they encountered. 75And when her brother pressed her to visit John Forster & Co.'s James Milisch and 'his bachelor friends at his bungalow', Bradford resolved to 'dress up', head over, 'astonish those bachelors, and have a big fuss made over [her]'. 76If Bradford's publicness invited scrutiny, the freedom her circumstances afforded provided opportunities to play within, and push the boundaries of, colonial gender mores.
Through such encounters, Bradford became self-aware of what it meant to be a White woman in a (semi)colonial society.Understanding the behaviours expected of her, she resented the port's restrictive social norms and her fellow women's moral judgements.She was likewise reminded of (semi)colonial gender imbalances which led men to commodify her company, and the attention her Whiteness drew from the Chinese public.Still, Bradford exercised control over her environment, engaging with it on her terms.Social pressures to conform and the stigma if she chose not to were milder in Kulangsu than in Hong Kong or Shanghai.If Bradford found personal and social fulfilment traversing Chinese spaces and meeting the port's men, what did it matter if the few women present snubbed her? Instead of restraining Bradford, the prescriptive nature of Western social norms developed within her a lasting distaste for what she perceived to be the frivolity and banality of treaty-port society's gendered expectations.
Bradford's later letters suggest that her perspectives on social gender roles survived her relocation to Shanghai and Hong Kong.Writing from the former in 1871, where she had moved with her husband Ira Crowell of Augustine Heard & Co., Bradford criticised the social stupor that the port's Western women fell into. 77She complained that these women had few pastimes besides spending their husbands' money and engaging in petty rivalries. 78Although few explicit references appeared in her letters, Bradford's critiques of Western society likely built upon the tense relationships her husband and her brother Oliver had with the wider community.Crowell, for his part, resigned from the fast-declining Augustine Heard & Co. in 1872, but continued to captain ships along the China coast. 79Oliver was a consular clerk in Shanghai where between 1872 and 1878 he racked up a series of charges including fraud, embezzlement and extortion before being impeached and sailing for the USA in May 1878. 80Her brother's inability to achieve (semi)colonial respectability likely compounded Bradford's earlier experiences, informing descriptions of what she considered a vapid Western society.
The amplified significance social decorum acquired in Shanghai further compounded the Bradfords' tense relationship with the wider foreign community.Far more cosmopolitan than Kulangsu, Bradford's near-contemporaries in Shanghai found the port's social conventions especially restrictive.The Beal sisters, daughters of the lawyer Thomas Prince Beal from Kingston, Massachusetts, both accompanied their husbands to Shanghai, Helen Beal arriving in the 1850s with Dr George Rogers Hall, while Elizabeth Beal accompanied Harry Warden of the American firm Russell & Co. in 1869. 81While the Beal sisters' experiences differed subtly due to their husbands' status and the different contexts through which they encountered treaty port society, they came from similar socio-cultural circumstances as Bradford, and shared many congruent ideologies and inclinations.
All three women were familiar, for example, with metropolitan versions of calling culture, and like Bradford, the sisters described hours spent entertaining callers as 'pretty dull'. 82These three women obliged callers as a matter of propriety, but Helen Beal's 1850s letters and 1870s satire from China Punch suggest women adapted the practice to serve personal tastes.Beal described how Shanghai women tweaked the ritual by sending their own cards without visiting; a fatal snub that forced the recipient to call upon the sender or lose face. 83A China Punch article lamented that it was certainly 'disgusting' for hapless gentlemen callers to glimpse a lady, novel in her hand, 'rushing out of the room on hearing the sound of the bell or gong', only to be informed that she had gone to play croquet. 84Both examples played upon the ease with which women exploited calling's formalities to exert control over the practice.
So while Bradford had found calling another tedious aspect of treaty-port life where it was improper 'for a lady to go out alone', at Shanghai she became far more forthright about her independence. 85Contrasting the stupor she associated with other Western women, Bradford expressed characteristic pride in the freedom and energy with which she engaged with Shanghai. 86Her letters preserved the spirit of her diary, and while her distaste for restrictive social mores jaded their content, she balanced social critiques with enthusiastic accounts of public exploration. 87Bradford's diary and later letters thus afford an alternative glimpse of colonial social mores.Her refusal to conform and her critiques in both word and action of gender norms confirm that while social and racial pressures worked to curtail public behaviours, their power was hardly absolute, and women such as Bradford had numerous opportunities to push back against restrictive social boundaries.
'Three cheers for America' 88 The other prominent axis through which Bradford's experiences in Kulangsu refined her identity as an American woman was patriotism, sharpened through racial and cultural comparison with the island's Chinese and British communities.Race especially remained a prominent point of comparison in Kulangsu and in Bradford's later life.Recent research suggests that the racial difference Americans encountered in nineteenth-century China pushed them to integrate with the British community through shared claims to Anglo-Saxon cultural traditions, mutual language and Whiteness. 89Still, Bradford's case, read alongside other American women's accounts of China, suggests a competing impulse whereby daily contact with the British revealed cultural, political, and religious incongruities, thereby solidifying patriotism.By identifying racial and cultural differences, these women thus consolidated their national identity.Throughout Bradford's diary and later letters, racial (and by extension cultural) comparison was a recurring theme.The pacing of Bradford's Cape Town entry, recorded during the outbound voyage, reflected her sense of distance between Black and White bodies.She fawned over White society's civility; the British colony's 'handsome buildings', the opportunity to 'put up [her] hair', the 'extra good dinner' at the 'very good hotel'.Her account of the Africans 'in their natural state', by contrast, was folded into descriptions of other such exotic 'things' as ostrich eggs and porcupine quills. 90Arriving in Hong Kong, 'troops of Chinese servants with long tails [queues]' serving dinner at the American consul Horace Congar's house similarly arrested her. 91t Kulangsu, she remarked upon the 'powerful' odour of Chinese crowds, which she felt Black crowds 'on a hot day' in the USA could not equal; a complaint she repeated often while in China.So long as Bradford was the observer in such situations, she was 'sufficiently amused', but when the dynamic was reversed and a curious Chinese public attempted to 'touch [her] with their hands', it was 'rather more than [she could] stand'. 92In contrast, Bradford found her personal servant -with whom she had a far more intimate relationship -and the house staff at Kulangsu 'indispensable', and she thought the Chinese women she encountered equal parts intriguing and beautiful. 93hrough such comparisons Bradford's journal reified the space between herself and Chinese or Black 'others', but her letters, like those of her contemporaries in Shanghai, also embellished differences for a curious metropolitan readership. 94Although Helen Beal sometimes described her servants as reliable, her 1850s letters were just as likely to profile her Chinese staff as thieving, opium-smoking hoodlums. 95Such letters adopted a patronising tone, employing a vocabulary common to master/servant relationships that reinforced the latter's 'subject position'. 96Beal employed terms such as 'ignorant' and 'stupid' when describing her servants, even mocking her staffs' religious practices as 'absurd' obeisance to 'some small god'. 97Her sister Elizabeth's 1870s commentaries could be similarly derisive. 98Such accounts informed metropolitan readers of a culturally backwards China inhabited by opium addicts, idolaters and the indolent.Highlighting these aberrations, the authors implicitly emphasised their superior culture.Although Bradford's accounts were less acerbic than the Beals, each point of difference these White American women recorded emphasised the racial and cultural divide between themselves and Chinese (or Black) 'others', entrenching their pride in the cultural and ideological systems of the USA.
It is significant that Bradford framed her commentaries on the Chinese through comparison with Black bodies and the abolitionist movement, given the paternal influence and the metropolitan instability which shaped Bradford's outlook. 99The Bradfords had been heavily involved in the anti-slavery movement, and as the Civil War unfolded abolitionism became an important vector in how Northerners perceived themselves.Further entrenching such influence was Rev. Bradford's radical adherence to racial equality, which would lead him to abandon the church in favour of Freethought philosophy.Bradford recalled how her father's abolitionist fervour was such that 'his conscience' would not even 'let him ride in a chair' borne by Chinese men in Hong Kong, as was the Western practice. 100For Bradford, the effect was contradictory, abolitionism providing her with moral superiority and patriotic pride vis-àvis her nation's unfolding conflict, even as her referential understanding of Black and Chinese bodies as lesser 'others' cemented her White identity.
In each of her framings, Bradford's fascination -sometimes frustration -with her new environment thus competed with the religious-abolitionist influence of her upbringing.Her comment on her father's rigidity respecting the sedan chair spoke equally to her impatience at waiting for a chaperone to accompany her out in a society where White women could not venture alone.Her account on the Chinese crowd's odour was partly a product of her anxiety over the public attention her gendered Whiteness attracted.And she was, of course, susceptible to contemporary vernacular, her later letters -like the Beals' -expressing an interest in pervasive cultural stereotypes, evolutionary theory and contemporary notions of scientific racism espoused through Thomas Huxley's 1863 Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature. 101n terms of Bradford's relationship with Kulangsu's British community, issues of race became further entangled with those of patriotism.For nineteenth-century Americans, national identity remained unproven, requiring 'constant and careful maintenance' and producing 'fraught debates' over their cultural and racial claim to a 'socalled Anglo-Saxon' heritage. 102Anglo-Saxonism provided a 'racial exceptionalist bridge' between Americans and the British predicated upon 'social, familial, intellectual, and literary networks' linking their two nations. 103Yet Anglo-Saxon racial theories were unstable, even if its saliency as a 'race' had become a familiar concept by the 1840s and enjoyed widespread appeal through the 1860s. 104While Americans in British colonies found solace in joining the British community 'on Anglo-Saxon terms', their cultural and political differences could also drive a wedge between these two White communities. 105f Whiteness bound the two communities, Bradford's isolation in Kulangsu heightened her sense of cultural difference from the British as much as, if not more than, it endeared her to them.Indeed, the (semi)colonial society acted as a site through which 'gendered and national identities were consolidated'. 106The 'spectacle' of empire and the 'habits of a resplendent [British] society', although familiar to Americans, signified the imperial dominion Americans had just cast off. 107While Kulangsu's British residents were 'pleasant enough', Bradford found them hard to like. 108In her opinion, the excessive 'politeness' of the British was 'oppressive'. 109Their manners masked a disposition she found 'hateful' towards the USA and the escalating Civil War; a perception which British posturing for the Confederacy during the conflict's early years justified. 110Bradford's Shanghai letters echoed these sentiments.Comparing British mannerisms to the 'social', 'hospitable' and 'hearty' Germans, she criticised the 'dash and swell' the former assumed in public. 111To Bradford, the British community possessed airs that were incompatible with the 'solid comfort' of Germans, or better yet 'a real live American' could one be found.Beal likewise found British 'ignorance' astonishing, while Helen Beal resented Queen Victoria's invocation in weekly British sermons. 112he critiques Bradford and her peers levied stemmed from their discomfort with British colonial culture and their nostalgia for metropolitan comforts. 113As a minister's daughter, the differences in sermons resonated strongest with Bradford.Bradford had little choice but to attend British service or forego church entirely.Although she participated, she cited only one good sermon in her diary -given by the American missionary Rev. Leonard W. Kip -while at Amoy. 114 The Beals, for their part, nested critiques within assurances that they remained proud Americans, upholding the republican spirit and lecturing the British, when necessary, about US culture and politics.The sisters found references to the monarchy uncomfortable, particularly in church, and even when complementing the British they included disclaimers that they were not growing 'anti-republican'. 115onging for metropolitan comforts compounded the dissatisfaction that these American women voiced about British treaty-port culture.Some desires that Bradford recorded were general pangs of homesickness which mirrored sentiments expressed by her contemporaries travelling west across continental America; longings to roll in the green summer grass of Buttonwood ('it isn't proper to do so here') and dreams of 'apple pie and cream for dessert'. 116She found herself playing 'Oh Susannah' and 'Fisher's Hornpipe' on the harmonium when she should be playing hymns. 117Other desires developed through comparison with British culture.Bradford's nostalgia for music from the metropole was equally a product of her convictions that 'English' pianos were 'not good', and that British women were 'very unmusical'. 118Her wish to read any 'good book', mother's letters, 'or even a newspaper', stemmed from her belief that any such source would provide superior moral guidance to British sermons. 119he most affective topic of comparison, however, was the Civil War.The conflict -and Britain's interest in it -figured throughout Bradford's diary, whether as accounts of 'Jeff Davis' chasing the Julia G. Tyler off the American coast, rumours at Kupang of Anglo-American war sparked by the Trent Affair in the Atlantic, or fears of encountering the Confederate privateer Alabama (built in Liverpool, no less) on the return journey. 120Susan-Mary Grant argues that prior to and during the early years of the Civil War, neither soldiers nor those at home expressed much patriotism; that local loyalties outweighed national ones, and that for some time following the conflict whatever concept of an 'American national identity' existed was divorced from that of 'American nationalism'. 121Bradford's diary, however, and the letters of her Shanghai and Hong Kong contemporaries, suggests otherwise.Contemplating Chinese racial 'otherness' or Anglo-American political and cultural incongruities, Bradford and her peers defended the virtues of 'America'.As with their countrymen in London, those in China developed 'their own ideology of nationalism', which they then fortified against cross-cultural contact's corrosive power. 122At the same time, the Civil War and Britain's feared interference in it inspired Anglophobia amongst Americans at home and abroad. 123In Bradford's case, the conflict and British contact together inspired an outpouring of patriotic sentiment.
The war, rarely mentioned outright, formed a patriotic undercurrent within Bradford's writing through which she celebrated her Americanness and, in some cases, lamented that it could not be celebrated loudly enough.She noted bitterly how 'glorious news from the war at home' caused the port's the British residents to 'grit their teeth'. 124Such comments encouraged a competitive mindset, and even in unrelated matters such as the suppression of piracy, Bradford wished some American gun boats might show up the 'cowardly English'. 125She met positive war news with enthusiasm, and even in the absence of political debates, her patriotism found a range of outlets. 126The eve of the glorious Fourth [of July]', 1862, was one such outlet through which Bradford expressed emotions ranging from patriotic pride to homesickness.More than anything, she wished she could celebrate back home, or at least hear a 'brass band play "Dixie"'.127 Her sentimentality for the de facto Confederate anthem seems odd, but Dixie enjoyed a 'fervid' popularity, gaining patriotic association through its use at Lincoln's 1861 inauguration and its widespread appeal in the north.128 The Fourth itself saw flags raised and rockets launched, but comparing it with Queen Victoria's earlier birthday, Bradford felt underwhelmed.129 Such views were inverted in Englishlanguage newspapers throughout China.Forgetting the efforts put into honouring Victoria's birthday, the British-run China Mail reprinted an article from The Times describing the 1862 Fourth as a celebration gratifying a 'most inordinate' and 'exacting' national vanity.130 Celebrations in the larger treaty ports following the Civil War would grow more elaborate, but to Bradford Kulangsu's patriotic showing was pitiable.131 Unsatiated by the Fourth, Bradford found other outlets for national pride.Five days later, she began sewing an American flag for her brother's boat to which she affixed twenty-one stars, a reference to the Union states which made her feel 'very patriotic'. 132The voyage of the Russell & Co.'s steamer Huquong between New York and Hong Kong the next month further stoked Bradford's national pride.133 The ship, which then made the Hong Kong-Shanghai trip in under sixty-six hours, was 'going to run' on the Yangzi, and Bradford was thrilled at how the British ('old "Johnny Bull"') bristled at the competition.134 The American steamer Firecracker made a faster run still between Singapore and Hong Kong in September -'three cheers for America, and a groan for John Bull' -and Bradford marked the man-of-war Wyoming's arrival a week later with the statement 'Viva la Amerique'.135 Such points of pride, stronger for their framing against the British, reveal a complex mixture of cultural longing, political anxiety and national insecurity informing Bradford's patriotism.
Treaty-port life amplified American women's awareness of their national identity; an awareness heightened, in Bradford's case, by her isolation in Kulangsu and the Civil War.This identity was cemented through the articulation of differences, whether racial between White Americans and Chinese people or cultural and political between these citizens of a young republic and their former overlord.Writing upon race became a means to assert their Whiteness and their cultural superiority through patronising comparisons with servants and the Chinese public.As they identified differences between themselves and Chinese people, nineteenth-century Americans in China turned to the British community, laying claim to a shared Anglo-Saxon heritage.American women's writings, however, demonstrate how encounters with the British on British terms could be as divisive as they were unifying.Close contact could repulse American women, who found aspects of British culture and politics unpalatable.This was especially true of Bradford, for whom there was little choice but to participate in British society.By registering her discomfort at doing so, Bradford's case exemplified a rising patriotism defined through the Civil War, nostalgic reference to the metropole, and against British politics, culture, and empire in China.

Conclusion
Rev. Bradford's tenure as American Consul was brief, lasting just under eight months.He and Bradford departed Amoy 4 December 1862 aboard the St Paul, leaving Oliver behind as vice-consul. 136The ship reached New York 23 April 1863 following an uneventful voyage. 137In total, Bradford had spent nineteen months abroad, eleven of which in transit.Soon after arriving in the USA, she married Crowell and returned to China, where they lived for many years.Her letters from this time reflected many sentiments first recorded in Kulangsu.The couple had no children, and are difficult to trace in the intervening years, as Crowell's work meant he and Bradford were often mobile.Excepting a brief gold-mining enterprise undertaken with Oliver in Idaho, 1880, Crowell continued to serve as a China trade captain until his death at Swatow (Shantou ), 9 July 1883. 138Bradford survived Crowell, passing on 14 April 1928 at the age of eighty-six, having spent the remainder of her life with family at Buttonwood. 139lthough her time in Kulangsu represented a brief episode of her life in China, Bradford's diary suggests it was deeply affective, shaping how she conceived of and presented herself.Cross-cultural and interracial encounters encouraged Bradford to refine her identity as an American woman, encouraging her to push back against prescriptive colonial gender norms, informing her aversion to the frivolity and performativity of treaty-port life, and helping foster her patriotism.More than an account of one woman's experiences, I have argued that Bradford's diary provides a crucial window into processes of identity formation, reflecting how encounters with Chinese and British 'others' enabled nineteenth-century White American women to consolidate and articulate a gendered and patriotic national identity.
From her arrival, Bradford struggled to reconcile Amoy's racial and gender protocols with her newfound independence.Although other Western women inhabited Kulangsu, their pious adherence to gender boundaries clashed with Bradford's desire to interact publicly with society.As an unmarried White woman in a largely male community, Bradford attracted both male and female attention, the former vying for her favour as the latter judged her conduct.She likewise garnered interest from the Chinese community, who took advantage of Bradford's publicness to satisfy their curiosity regarding Western bodies and culture.Attention from all parties, while potentially suffocating, also provided a means to alleviate boredom.Although frustrated by a lack of privacy, Bradford exploited the etiquette dictating 'proper' women's behaviour for her entertainment.Her nonconformity highlights a theme interwoven through contemporary satire and the letters of her peers that suggests social pressures on women in colonial society were not absolute.Those dissatisfied with the culture found ways to break with convention and dictate the terms through which they engaged with the public.
Bradford's time in Kulangsu additionally demonstrates the process whereby American women used racial and cultural comparison to inform patriotism and consolidate their national identity.Bradford's pride in her Americanness developed against her views of racially 'other' Chinese, culturally 'other' British, and the backdrop of the Civil War.Encounters with Chinese people, framed through comparisons to Black Americans, highlighted cultural peculiarities that rhetorically distanced her from the these racially 'othered' communities.Deployed to similar effect as her peers, Bradford's often-patronising racism implied Americans possessed a superior culture.Interactions with the British had a similar impact, and even as they celebrated the shared heritage of the Anglo-Saxon 'race', American women in China drew unfavourable comparisons to bolster their patriotic pride in US cultural and political institutions.
Bradford's diary serves as a focal point to locate questions of gender, race and national identity in treaty-port China within a broader transnational framework.Through Bradford's diary, the disparate histories of Beaver County, PA, Kulangsu, and the British Empire converge.Besides revealing how Bradford's gender, race and nationality became sites of social and cross-cultural tension, the diary indicates the varied contexts that underlay such tension.In its pages, Bradford grapples with the competing influences of metropolitan politics, (semi)colonial society and culture, her ideological upbringing and her sense of self as an American woman.Her eight months in Kulangsu provide a condensed example of how White American women abroad reconciled local and metropolitan interests, forming and reforming their identity in the process.By remaining sensitive to a wider historical context, analyses of sources such as Bradford's diary provide scholars the means to uncover the nuances of gendered, racial and cross-cultural interactions in colonial and imperial spaces.

Notes
Thomas M. Larkin is Augustine Heard Fellow at the University of Bristol (UK) and a member of the Hong Kong History Project.His current research concerns nineteenthcentury Anglo-American and Sino-American social and cultural interactions in China and the application of global-microhistorical and transimperial methodologies.