Li, Kan2020-09-082020-09-082020-06https://hdl.handle.net/11299/216136University of Minnesota Ph.D. dissertation. June 2020. Major: History. Advisors: Liping Wang, Ann Waltner. 1 computer file (PDF); vi, 265 pages.After the northern Chinese city of Tianjin was opened as a treaty port in 1860, the steamship, railroad, and electric tramway were introduced into the city in rapid succession. The adoption of modern transportation technologies enabled Tianjin to occupy a crucial position in the emerging national and global transport and trade networks, Tianjin thus became one of a few cities that made the transition from a traditional commercial city on the Grand Canal to a modern seaport and railroad hub. Instead of taking a city’s modernity for granted, this dissertation examines how the physical forms of modernity came into being in Tianjin by connecting these processes to the adoption of new technologies and the building of national and international networks of transportation. Studying Tianjin from this angle, this dissertation sheds light on why, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a select few cities thrived even as China as a whole was struggling economically and politically. While fundamentally transforming Tianjin’s status, these new transport technologies also led to unintended consequences, which revealed the contingencies in modernization and the complexity of the Chinese modernity. In order to make the port of Tianjin a high-capacity, reliable harbor for large steamships, the river connecting Tianjin with the sea was drastically reshaped during the first two decades of the twentieth century. These efforts, however, created environmental problems that eventually harmed the sustainability of the port. In the construction of the railroads connecting Tianjin with critical resources, the Qing officials demonstrated their ability in employing western capital and professionals while curtailing western intervention in the railroad planning. Officials and local elites dominated the urban planning of Tianjin, trying to divert the benefit of the railroads toward the Chinese administered parts of the city. At the turn of the twentieth century, a system of electric tramways was forced upon Tianjin mainly to display the superiority of western civilization and technology. Bearing the mark of imperialism and being far ahead of the actual demand for mass transportation, the tramway system met with enormous resistance. The protests to the tramway often utilized the modern media and the discourses of nationalism and sovereignty. Modernity means that even actions of anti-modernization had to speak the language of the modern.enrailroadsteamshiptechnologyTianjintramwaytransportationThesis or Dissertation