Abstract

During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, foreign banks were a major presence within the Chinese banking sector. They financed China’s rapidly growing foreign trade, issued their own currencies and provided loans to the Chinese government that allowed China to finance wars, fund industrialisation projects and maintain political stability. However, they have previously either been neglected by the existing scholarship or simply viewed as another manifestation of Western imperialism. By following the history of one German bank, the Deutsch-Asiatische Bank (DAB, Chinese: 德華銀行) I explore how the interaction between German and other foreign bankers and Chinese officials, bankers and merchants led to the rapid internationalisation of Chinese state finance and the Chinese banking sector on the China coast.