Newchwang  (Yingkou)

A Manchurian port on the Bohai Sea, opened as a result of the Treaty of Tientsin 1858. The most northerly port in China to be opened to foreign trade and closed by ice during the winter months. Foreign shipping could not reach Newchwang, 40 miles up the Liao river, and so the first consul, T. T. Meadows, selected in 1861 a more accessible riverfront concession area only 13 miles up the river, in which he could also establish the consulate (nevertheless always referred to as the Newchwang consulate). Meadows made a lamentably bad selection, laying out nine concession lots and a consular site along a length of river bank that proved subject to severe erosion. The consular site was the first to disappear within a few years, five others had gone by 1889, and the other four had been washed away by 1900. Meadows and his successors were therefore forced to spend the next ten years or so in primitive leased accommodation in a temple just behind the customs premises. This accommodation was condemned by both Crossman and Boyce on separate visits in the late 1860s, and in 1869 Boyce drew up a scheme for new consulate buildings close to the temple. London refused to authorise funding because it was awaiting a report from a Select Committee that was looking into the consular service, and the future of the Newchwang consulate was unclear.

In 1873, however, a site was bought from a Francis P. Knight, of Messrs. Knight and Co., comprising about four acres, two of which were enclosed by walling and included a house built in 1863. It lay between the Roman Catholic Mission and the Russo-Chinese Bank. Boyce extended and improved the house, built accommodation for the assistant and constable, and converted some of the old and partly mud-built buildings to stables and a courtroom. The residence conversion proved unsuccessful and a new residence was built in the compound in the mid 1870s: all of the buildings were of single storey.
Newchwang fell to the Japanese without resistance and was occupied for nine months in 1894-5. The Chinese lost effective control of Manchuria after the Boxer Uprising, and the consulate closed [?when]. The residence was let on annual leases from the mid-1930s until 1942, mainly to staff of the Yee Tsoong Tobacco Company, and was not re-occupied after the Second World War. The buildings quickly fell into ruin and the site was returned to the Chinese, who demolished the ruined buildings in 1950. The Treasury authorised its disposal, in the last resort as a gift, in 1962 (but it was still on the UK’s Property Services Agency books in 1977).