Railroad Farce

Railroad farce The most famous "farce" in the history of China's railways is the Wusong Railway Incident in 1876. This farce can be called the absurd epitome of the collision of Chinese and Western cultures in modern times. In 1876, in the name of building an "ordinary road", the British company Jardine Matheson laid a 14.5-Kilometer railway from Shanghai to Wusongkou without telling the Qing government, becoming China's first operating railway. When it was first opened to traffic on July 3 of that year, local people were so frightened that they knelt down and worshiped when they saw the "steel monster" that breathed fire and smoke. There were even rumors that the train "sucks the souls of children." Officials reported that the train "shocked the dragon's veins and disturbed the ancestral mausoleums", and the tombs along the railway line were forced to be moved, which was considered to "damage Feng Shui". The Songjiang prefect even claimed that the train's "smoke damaged crops and caused drought and floods." On August 3, a soldier was hit and killed on the tracks, and people took the opportunity to gather and destroy the station. A British driver shot and killed one person, triggering greater riots. The Qing government bought the railway at a sky-high price of 285,000 taels of silver (approximately US$450,000 at the time), which was three times the construction cost. In October 1877, under the supervision of officials, the railway was demolished in public, and the rails were transported to Taiwan and thrown into Dagou Port (today's Kaohsiung Port) "to avoid future troubles." In 1897, the Qing government rebuilt the Songhu Railway on the same route. Even the locations of the stations were almost replicated. People at the time ridiculed it, saying, "If I had known today, why would I bother doing so?"