ABSTRACT
The political context of railway building in China in the 1890s China came late to the railway age, which really only began in the last decade of the nineteenth century. The reasons for this were political and cultural. China repeatedly had been humiliated both politically and militarily by Western powers since Britain’s victory in the First Opium War in 1842. While some Chinese officials recognised that modernisation was essential to regaining national dignity, others withdrew into an ultimately unsustainable veneration of China’s traditional culture and past, viewing Western innovations as culturally, economically and socially damaging. Even after Japan showed that modernisation was not incompatible with the retention of a strong sense of national identity from 1868, most Chinese officials, and certainly the government in Beijing, continued to favour a policy of cultural and technological conservatism and, as far as possible, isolation.
