Building the City of Mammon

China, 1850. George Mayhew, the younger son of a Calcutta merchant family and a Royal Navy midshipman, finds that his enthusiasm for steam power has damaged his prospects in a service still governed by rank and tradition. He turns instead towards commerce and Shanghai, where British, American and French merchants are transforming a newly opened treaty port into a city of wharves, warehouses, roads and speculative fortunes. Establishing a hong gives George the chance to use his maritime knowledge, family connections and willingness to adopt new technology, but every transaction draws him deeper into the foreign trading system built around Indian opium and unequal access to the Chinese market.

Beyond Shanghai, the Taiping movement is becoming a revolutionary state and defeating the first Qing armies sent against it. The young Xianfeng Emperor inherits a government unable to control either the rebellion or the foreign powers pressing along the coast. George must build a business amid unstable authority, racial hierarchy, missionary confidence and the threat of wider war. The novel treats the creation of treaty-port Shanghai as both an entrepreneurial opportunity and an episode of imperial exploitation, showing how private wealth, steam shipping, land development and narcotics became inseparable from China’s mid-century crisis.