HCIAS Colloquium More than local news – the treaty port press of 19th century East Asia as a regional and global medium

  • Tuesday, 18. November 2025, 14:00 - 15:30
  • Neue Uni | HS 03
    • Andreas Eichleter, Center for East Asia Studies, Heidelberg University

Part of the lecture series: HCIAS Colloquium: Dialogues across world regions.

The arrival of Western imperialism to East Asia in the middle of the 19th century brought not only gunboat diplomacy, unequal treaties and imperial exploitation to the region, but new types of mass media in the form of newspapers. To maintain their familiar lifestyle, Western residents established their own newspapers and created a far-flung foreign-language press network from Hong Kong to Shanghai to Yokohama shortly after their arrival. Newspapers such as the North China Herald from Shanghai, China, and the Japan Weekly Mail from Yokohama, Japan quickly became invaluable means of information exchange and information distribution within the individual ports, but also between the Western communities in East Asia and beyond. For a while, these newspapers serviced the needs of the local communities, they also integrated into an emerging global news network facilitated by Western imperial expansion across the entire world, connecting East Asia, Europe and the Americas. Although contacts with other parts of the globe remained constrained by physical distance and lengthy travel times in the mid-19th century, the advent of the telegraph in East Asia by the early 1870s markedly improved the integration of these Treaty Port newspaper into the global news market. This new technology enabled them and their audiences’ timely access to news from home, but in equal measure also made their reports and stories about the Far East accessible to a wider audience in Europe and the Americas. 

HCIAS Colloquium 25-26
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    Neue Universität | HS03

    Grabengasse 3-5, 69117 Heidelberg

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All Dates of the Event 'HCIAS Colloquium. Dialogues Across World Regions Winter Term 25-26'