Great fire of Guangzhou (1822)

In 1822 the Thirteen Factories, the foreign-trading quarter of Guangzhou (Canton), were destroyed by fire by accident. Seventeen factories had been maintained at the site until the great fire of 1822, which was the first of three destructions of the neighbourhood before its final loss in 1856.

Episodes

Background and detail

Background. Guangzhou, historically known as Canton, served as the primary port for Western trade under the Canton System. The Thirteen Factories, a neighborhood in southwestern Guangzhou, housed European trading houses. By 1770, the number of factories had grown to seventeen, a figure that remained stable until the great fire of 1822 destroyed them.

Consequences. The 1822 fire destroyed the factory buildings that had stood at seventeen since 1770, ending the configuration that had been maintained up to that year. The neighbourhood itself, established along the Pearl River from around 1684, was later rebuilt and destroyed twice more, in 1841 and 1856. The passages do not describe the immediate commercial consequences of the 1822 blaze.

People involved

Sources

Machine-drafted from the cited Wikipedia passages and checked by a reviewing model, not by a human editor. Every passage cites the revision it was written from; dates and places follow those passages.