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baskets and other articles of utility for the use of the fair sex,” according to the Chinese Customs trade report for that year—and the region’s glistening, double-threaded Shantung silk. Chefoo’s main imports, however, were much the same as those of the other treaty ports: practical cotton and wool and the dreadful, inevitable opium. But by 1877, opium imports were on the wane. After steadily losing ground to improved domestic poppy cultivation and opium production in China, they had halved in just three years. Nonetheless they made up “nearly one third of the entire revenue for the year.”
    Most of the six trading firms operating in Chefoo when Charles and Alice arrived bought and sold whatever they could turn a profit on, as well as acting as agents for the bevy of insurance companies that underwrote shipping in China. There were about thirty full-time traders in Chefoo, and it took another twenty—and that was just the Westerners—in Chinese Customs to back them up. At the top of Chinese Customs’ hierarchy stood four British Mandarin speakers known as the Indoor Staff. Below them came the less genteel Outdoor Staff, who were concerned more with the physical business of moving boats in and out of the port. As the harbormaster and head of the Outdoor Staff, Charles Jennings had to walk a political and social tightrope between the two camps.
    Chefoo was home to one other big foreign industry in China: religion. To the Chinese, the missionaries were at least as big a part of the foreign occupation as the traders. There were missionaries throughout China. Unlike the business communities, which tended to stay inside the treaty ports, the missionaries traveled as far inland as they could. They lived with the Chinese, in their huts and villages. To many of the millions of Chinese who didn’t live near a treaty port the common colloquial term foreign devil simply meant “missionary.” Missionaries were the only foreigners whom they had heard of or seen.
    Within the treaty ports, the missionary communities tended to keep to themselves. In a way, the preachers and the traders were trying to do the same thing: make the most of the new mass market that China offered. They had both been given access to inland China by the same agreement—the 1860 Convention of Peking—that had brought the Second Opium War to a close. Neither, however, saw it like that. The preachers disapproved of the opium trade. And the businessmen thought that the missionaries simply stirred up trouble. As a rule, the rift ran deep. Although, in 1908, domestic political pressure would bring Britain to agree with China that the opium trade should be brought to a halt, the missionaries and businessmen in China would continue to live quite separate, parallel lives.
    The missionary community in Chefoo, on the other hand, was a little different. Almost as soon as the treaty port had been opened, two missionaries decided to set up a boarding school in Chefoo, to which missionaries isolated in inland China could send their children. The school campus sprawled along several hundred yards of the beachfront, at the far end of First Beach from Consulate Hill and the town center. In order to start up the school, the missionaries agreed to accept children from the business community, immediately breaking down the boundary between the two groups. Just as the foreign nationalities in Chefoo were jumbled up with each other and with the Chinese, so the missionaries began to mix in too. There were football and cricket matches between the school and the town—usually under the banner of the Chefoo Club, hub of the trading community’s social life. The trading firms lent boats for school trips to the outlying islands. There were joint picnics to the temple pagoda. And so it went on.
    Charles and Alice reached Chefoo just as the summer season of 1877 was drawing to a close. They moved into the harbormaster’s new redbrick house on the edge of Consulate Hill, where