About Universal Circulating Herald

Universal Circulating Herald

The Universal Circulating Herald (循環日報, pinyin Xunhuan Ribao, in Cantonese Tsun-wan Yat Po) was an early Chinese-language newspaper founded in Hong Kong on 5 February 1874 by the scholar, translator and reformer Wang Tao. It is frequently described as the first Chinese daily newspaper in history — the first newspaper in late Qing China both funded and operated by Chinese — and as the first Chinese newspaper to propagate reformist ideas. Through its editorials Wang Tao argued that China's renewal required institutional and political change, not merely the military and technological devices favoured by the "self-strengthening" school, and in doing so he helped to invent the modern Chinese editorial and earned the title later bestowed on him by Lin Yutang: the father of the Chinese newspaper.

Wang Tao: the founder's road to Hong Kong

Wang Tao (王韜, 10 November 1828 – April 1897) was born Wang Libin in Puli Town, in Suzhou prefecture. His path to journalism ran through the missionary world. In 1862, after becoming entangled in the Taiping-era politics of Shanghai, he fled in disguise under British consular escort to Hong Kong, where he changed his name to Wang Tao. There James Legge, the principal of the Anglo-Chinese College, invited him to stay at the London Mission Society hostel and to assist in the translation of the Thirteen Classics — a collaboration that grounded Wang in both the Chinese canon and Western learning. In Hong Kong he also took on the job of editor-in-chief of a Chinese newspaper, the Hua Zi News — the Chinese Mail — which was the beginning of his journalism career.

Wang accompanied Legge to Scotland and spent time in Europe, returning to Hong Kong in the winter of 1870. He wrote two influential books, A Brief Introduction to France and an account of the Franco-Prussian War, gathering materials from foreign periodicals — works that introduced European politics to Chinese readers and rehearsed the comparative, reform-minded thinking he would soon bring to a newspaper of his own.

Hong Kong as a publishing refuge

The Herald existed because Hong Kong existed. Wang Tao had arrived in the colony in 1862 as a fugitive, escorted by the British Consulate after his brush with the authorities in Shanghai, and he understood exactly what the colony offered: a place beyond the reach of the Qing government where a Chinese writer could publish what the mainland would not tolerate. Four decades before the revolutionary press made the same calculation, Wang built his newspaper on that geography of refuge — buying a missionary press, raising Chinese capital, and addressing readers across the Qing empire from a jurisdiction whose censors were not the Qing's. The same shelter had protected the Chinese Mail, his first editorial home, and Hong Kong's freedom from Guangzhou's censorship was the precondition for both papers. The Herald's reformism was thus inseparable from its address: the first Chinese-run daily was possible only offshore, and its editorials travelled back into China as imports of a freer public sphere.

Founding the Herald, 1874

In 1872 Wang Tao bought the printing press of the London Mission in Hong Kong and founded the Zhong Hua General Printing House. On 5 February 1874, aged forty-six, he founded the Universal Circulating Herald. Eminent Chinese of the Ch'ing Period records that he launched the paper together with Huang Sheng, and that the future diplomat Wu Ting-fang (1842–1922) was associated with the enterprise. Hong Kong — a British colony beyond the reach of the Qing government — gave him a platform from which he could finally speak freely.

The Herald was a commercial newspaper in the Western form. Its first page featured business advertisements, while the second and third pages were dedicated to news. Wang Tao, inspired by Western newspapers, introduced an editorial column for commentary on current events — an innovation that became a defining feature of the Chinese press.

The editorial voice: reform, not just self-strengthening

During his ten-year career as editor-in-chief of the Universal Circulating Herald, Wang Tao penned close to a thousand editorials. In them he commented on current affairs, criticised societal problems, and called for the reform of the Chinese political system by adopting a British-style parliamentary monarchy. Where the self-strengthening school promoted purely military and technological devices, Wang argued for institutional change by the Qing government, and used the newspaper to advocate advanced ideas such as opening mines in China, building railways and establishing schools. These ideas are chiefly set forth in his collected writings printed at Hong Kong in 1882, and in the steady contributions he continued to make to Shanghai's Shen Bao — whose editor, Qian Xinbo, was his son-in-law — after his return to Shanghai in the 1880s.

Rivalry and the making of the Hong Kong daily press

The Herald did not develop in isolation. In 1874 it entered into a rivalry with the Chinese Mail, the other principal Chinese paper in the colony, and the competition led to both newspapers being published daily. Between them, the two papers established daily Chinese journalism in Hong Kong and demonstrated that a Chinese-run daily could survive commercially — the foundation on which the colony's later Chinese press, from the Kung Sheung Daily News to Ta Kung Pao's Hong Kong years, would build.

Influence on a generation of reformers

The reformist ideas published in the Universal Circulating Herald could have influenced Sun Yat-sen, who in 1890–1892 made reformist proposals to two progressive officials, Cheng Tsao-ju, who had served as Chinese minister to the United States between 1881 and 1885, and Zheng Guanying. Whether or not the line of influence was direct, the Herald stands at the head of the tradition of Chinese reform journalism that ran through the constitutional movement of the late Qing to the revolutionary press of the 1900s. Wang Tao's books, his record of a journey to Japan in 1879, and his many collections of essays and letters kept his voice in circulation long after his decade at the Herald ended.

Wang Tao the writer

The newspaper was only the most public part of Wang Tao's output. His 1872 account of the Franco-Prussian War ran to fourteen chapters; in 1875 alone he published a book of stories, accounts of Shanghai in six chapters, and reflections on contemporary affairs, foreign countries and the Taiping Rebellion in eight chapters. In 1879 he travelled to Japan and recorded his impressions in a three-chapter travel record, reprinted in Japan in 1880. His reform essays were collected in the twelve-chapter Taoyuan wenlu waibian, printed at Hong Kong in 1882, and his letters were gathered in further collections. This steady production — fiction, travel writing, history and polemic alongside the near-thousand editorials — made Wang the model of the modern Chinese man of letters, working through print in every genre at once, and it carried the Herald's arguments far beyond its own circulation.

Later history and archives

The Universal Circulating Herald outlived its founder by decades; reference works date the paper 1874–1947, a span that carried it through the fall of the Qing, the founding of the Republic and the upheavals of the war years in Hong Kong. The Hong Kong Public Libraries' Old Hong Kong Newspapers collection holds a digitised run of the paper covering 16 May 1874 to 30 January 1886, preserving its formative decade for modern readers. In 2024 scholars marked the 150th anniversary of the paper's founding, treating Wang Tao and his newspaper as unavoidable topics for anyone studying modern Chinese intellectual, political or journalistic history — recognition of the Herald's place as the point where the Chinese-run daily newspaper, and with it the Chinese editorial voice, began.