Tang Jingxing (18321892; ), also known as Tang Tingshu (), was a

Chinese Chinese can refer to: * Something related to China * Chinese people, people of Chinese nationality, citizenship, and/or ethnicity **''Zhonghua minzu'', the supra-ethnic concept of the Chinese nation ** List of ethnic groups in China, people of va ...

comprador A comprador or compradore () is a "person who acts as an agent for foreign organizations engaged in investment, trade, or economic or political exploitation". A comprador is a Indigenous peoples, native manager for a European business house in East ...

, interpreter, and businessman during the late

Qing dynasty The Qing dynasty ( ), officially the Great Qing,, was a Manchu-led imperial dynasty of China and the last orthodox dynasty in Chinese history. It emerged from the Later Jin dynasty founded by the Jianzhou Jurchens, a Tungusic-speak ...

. Born in Xiangshan,

Guangdong Guangdong (, ), alternatively romanized as Canton or Kwangtung, is a coastal province in South China on the north shore of the South China Sea. The capital of the province is Guangzhou. With a population of 126.01 million (as of 2020) ...

province, he studied in Robert Morrison's missionary schools as a boy and his classmates included

Yung Wing Yung Wing (; November 17, 1828April 21, 1912) was a Chinese-American diplomat and businessman. In 1854, he became the first Chinese student to graduate from an American university, Yale College. He was involved in business transactions between Ch ...

. Because of the knowledge of English he obtained employment in the

Hong Kong Hong Kong ( (US) or (UK); , ), officially the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China ( abbr. Hong Kong SAR or HKSAR), is a city and special administrative region of China on the eastern Pearl River Delt ...

colonial government between 1851–57 and 1857–61, he served the

Chinese Maritime Customs Service The Chinese Maritime Customs Service was a Chinese governmental tax collection agency and information service from its founding in 1854 until it split in 1949 into services operating in the Republic of China on Taiwan, and in the People's Republ ...

as interpreter and chief secretary. In 1861, he joined the Jardine Matheson Company, initially as a travelling salesman, visiting the various Yangtze River ports. In 1863 he was promoted and appointed Jardine Mathesion's Compradore in Shanghai. He was so successful in developing the company's trade he was soon made Chief Compradore responsible for all the company's compradores in other Chinese ports. Tang authored the work ''The Chinese Instructor'', a six-volume series of dialogues, published in 1862.http://www.uni-giessen.de/anglistik/LING/Staff/huber/Abstracts.pdf Tang is mainly known for his participation in a number of officially sponsored commercial projects during the last decades of the Qing dynasty, collectively known as enterprises under "official supervision and merchant management" (). Between 1873-84 he served as the general manager of

China Merchants' Steam Navigation Company China Merchants Group Limited () is an international state-owned corporation (SOE) of the People's Republic of China. The company is operating under the auspices of the Chinese Ministry of Transport. Founded in 1872 China Merchants Steam Navig ...

() in

Shanghai Shanghai (; , , Standard Mandarin pronunciation: ) is one of the four direct-administered municipalities of the People's Republic of China (PRC). The city is located on the southern estuary of the Yangtze River, with the Huangpu River flow ...

, after which he worked in the coalmines in Kaiping in

Zhili Zhili, alternately romanized as Chihli, was a northern administrative region of China since the 14th-century that lasted through the Ming dynasty and Qing dynasty until 1911, when the region was dissolved, converted to a province, and renamed ...

until his death in 1892. In Tangshan near Kaiping he was also a promoter of the

Kaiping Tramway Often described as China's first railway, the first railway to be built and survive in China was the Kaiping (開平) colliery tramway located at Tongshan in Hebei province. However, this was not the first railway in China. An earlier attempt to i ...

References

Sources

*Carlson, Ellsworth C. ''The Kaiping Mines, 1877-1912.'' 2d ed. Cambridge, MA: East Asian Research Center, 1971. Businesspeople from Guangdong Qing dynasty translators Hong Kong businesspeople Hong Kong politicians 1832 births 1892 deaths Politicians from Zhongshan Writers from Zhongshan {{PRChina-business-bio-stub