Manias, panics, & land: The property bubbles of the great Chinese crash of the 1880s

Abstract

Historians researching China’s debt crisis of the early 1880s have largely focused on its stock market collapse of 1882-83. Yet the crisis was more than this—it was also a real estate crash. More precisely, the crisis entailed the bursting of two asset price bubbles in urban property: one in Hong Kong (1881), the other in Shanghai (1883). These boom-busts have long remained under-appreciated in both Chinese and global history. This article thus draws on what patchwork data exist, qualitative sources, economic theory, and global historical comparison to reconstruct their histories for the first time. That the crash was a property debacle in these globalising ports, not just a share selloff, suggests that it was no bout of speculation divorced from economic fundamentals, as some posit. Instead, the 1880s crash was a crisis that triggered a major depression, one inextricably bound up with late-Qing China’s integration into the global economy.