After the Opium War, Shanghai was forced to become a treaty port, and many Westerners came to Shanghai to do business and live with their families, all of whom wanted a share of the corrupt Qing government.
However, due to the increasing siltation of the Huangpu River and the extremely shallow water level, it is difficult to transport, which makes it a headache for merchants. In order to solve this problem, Westerners proposed to build a railway from the Shanghai Concession to Wusongkou for transportation. Therefore, the British minister Ali Guo made a request to the Qing government's prime minister Yamen to build a railway between the Shanghai Concession and Wusongkou to solve the problem of inconvenient loading and unloading of goods on the bank of the Huangpu River.
Westerners thought that the Qing government would definitely support such a good thing, but the Qing government felt that building a railway would encroach on the fields and destroy feng shui, so it did not adopt the westerners' suggestions.
Seeing that they could not get approval, but the transportation problem had to be solved, the Westerners decided to cut it first and then play it out, and secretly built the railway. So britain and the United States jointly established the railway company "Wusong Road Company" and bought the land from Shanghai to Wusongkou, which is about 14.88 kilometers long and about 13.7 meters wide.
At first, they claimed to build an ordinary road, so Shen Bingcheng, a Shanghai Daotai, approved their application for land purchase. But in fact, they are ready to secretly build the railway.
Two years later, China's first railway, the Wusong Railway, was born under the joint planning of Britain and the United States. In 1876, the Wusong Railway began to be trialized, and when the train sounded, the British and American scams also missed the filling.
After learning the news of the construction of the railway between Britain and the United States, Feng Yanguang, the highest official stationed in Shanghai at the time, immediately negotiated with the foreigners and asked them to suspend the construction of the road.
However, at this time, the British expedition clashed with the Chinese in Yunnan, and the British used this as an excuse to blackmail China and ignored the various proposals of the Qing government.
In the end, the helpless Qing government, at the suggestion of Li Hongzhang, spent 285,000 taels of silver and paid three times to buy the Wusong Railway, and the storm between China and Britain was calmed.
However, what is unimaginable is that less than two months after buying it back, the Qing government ordered the demolition of the Wusong Railway.
As for the reason for the demolition, it is even more unexpected. The Qing government that bought the Wusong Railway was worried that foreigners would use the Wusong Railway to transport goods and evade taxes, especially after experiencing the Opium War, the Qing government was even more stretched for the harm of foreign products.
The even more worrying fear is that it will become a tool for the great powers to invade China. For all these reasons, the Qing government finally decided to dismantle the Wusong Railway. The first railway in Chinese history to be put into operation was thus dismantled by order of the Qing government.
It has to be said that the stormy Qing government had a lot of helplessness at the time of the world pattern, so it also made many absurd decisions, such as the transfer of the steamship China Merchants Bureau to the American foreign firm, and then spent a lot of money to redeem it, all of which made the Qing government that the building would fall worse.