Talk:Shanghaiing

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

	This article is part of WikiProject Maritime Trades, a group of editors working to improve Merchant Shipping topics. To learn more or join the project, please visit the project page.
Start	This article has been rated as Start-Class on the assessment scale.
Mid	This article has been rated as mid-importance on the assessment scale.

	This article is part of WikiProject Organized Labour, an attempt to better organize information in articles related to Organized Labour. If you would like to participate, you can edit the article attached to this page, or visit the project page, where you can join the project and/or contribute to the discussion.	Organized Labour Portal
Start	This article has been rated as Start-Class on the quality scale.
Mid	This article has been rated as Mid-importance on the importance scale.
	If you have rated this article please consider adding assessment comments.

	This article is within the scope of the Military history WikiProject. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the project and see lists of open tasks and regional and topical task forces. To use this banner, please see the full instructions.
Start	This article has been rated as Start-Class on the quality scale.
Additional information and associated task forces: This article has been checked against the following criteria for B-Class status: Referencing and citation: not checked Coverage and accuracy: not checked Structure: not checked Grammar: not checked Supporting materials: not checked To fill out this checklist, please add the following to the template call: <!-- B-Class-1. It is suitably referenced, and all major points have appropriate inline citations. --> |B-Class-1=yes/no <!-- B-Class-2. It reasonably covers the topic, and does not contain obvious omissions or inaccuracies. --> |B-Class-2=yes/no <!-- B-Class-3. It has a defined structure, including a lead section and one or more sections of content. --> |B-Class-3=yes/no <!-- B-Class-4. It is free from major grammatical errors. --> |B-Class-4=yes/no <!-- B-Class-5. It contains appropriate supporting materials, such as an infobox, images, or diagrams. --> |B-Class-5=yes/no This article is not currently associated with a task force. To tag it for one or more task forces, please add the task force codes from the template instructions to the template call.

Contents 1 Seems a bit unlikely 2 Circularity? 3 Word Origin Incorrect 4 Not quite a B yet

[edit] Seems a bit unlikely

At first glance, it seems a bit unlikely that ships would shanghai someone who was not already a sailor -- even without salary, a landman would not likely be worth the food he'd eat on the voyage, and would get in everyone's way. How credible are the sources? David 03:53, 3 December 2005 (UTC)

Very credible. It did happen, & with a change in only a few laws it could happen again. And I say this not just because my grandfather was shanghaied to Alaska as a teenager. But if you don't want to believe this is true, nothing I can write will convince you. -- llywrch 22:14, 17 February 2006 (UTC)

Any idiot (excuse the term) can stow cargo and swab the deck. Obviously it'd be useful to have free labour able to do jobs like these. Joffeloff 18:54, 29 May 2006 (UTC)

The ledger book of James Laflin, a San Francisco shanghaier for over 50 years, indicates so-called "green horns," or men without experience on the sea, were frequently shanghaied. His ledger book for the years 1886-1890, a time when Laflin was a shipping master for San Francisco's whailng and sealing fleet, has been posted on Mystic Seaport Museum's website, and is available for online inspection. --Billpick 15:44, 28 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Circularity?

"Any friendless man in port cities ... was in danger of being "shanghaied", hence the English slang term." Is this a different slang term not documented here, or is it a circular reference?

• Well, "being shanghaied" is also generic American slang nowadays for any sort of trick. The usage is obvviously derived from this practice. I'll try to make it clearer.--Pharos 21:59, 20 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Word Origin Incorrect

"The word "shanghai" comes from the city of Shanghai, in China. This terminology originated because Shanghai was a common destination of the ships likely to use shanghaied labor, and because Shanghai (being distant) was an unfortunate destination to be shanghaied for."

This statement does not have any supporting evidence, and is incorrectly founded. There are 4 main accents in Mandarin Chinese, and while a word may have the same spelling, the accent completely changes the meaning of the word.

Shang(4th accent) Hai (3rd accent) means "on", and "sea", and is the name of the city, Shanghai, China.

Shang (1st accent) Hai (4th accent) means "to harm" in Chinese. They are completely different words.

Regardless, the word "shanghai" does not come from the city name. It comes from the term "going to sea" or the word "to harm" in Chinese. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 156.65.14.142 (talk • contribs) 20:38, 28 September 2006

Actually, I've come across two etmologies of this verb, only one of which has anything remotely to do with the city:

• It was taken from the nickname of one of the more notorious crimps, "Shanghai" Kelly of either San Francisco or Portland (both had a gentleman of that last name who made his living providing shiphands).
• According to Samuel Dickson, Tales of San Francisco (Stanford: University Press, 1957), pp. 386f:

One of the longest voyages San Francisco bottoms were called upon to make was from the Golden Gate to Shanghai. There was no direct passage; passengers bound for Shanghai had to travel around the world. In the natural course of events, any ship destined to make an unnaturally long voyage was said to be embarking on a Shanghai voyage. And when it became necessary to find sailors to man the ships by foul means, the conscripted sailor was, in the popular idiom of the day, "sent to Shanghai".

Does anyone still use the phrase "slow boat to China"? I suspect it means the same thing as this word originally had. So the Chinese port was associated with this nefarous practice only as part of a figure of speech. -- llywrch 16:41, 28 March 2007 (UTC)

Here's one explanation from The Straight Dope. Cheers. Haus^Talk 23:12, 4 April 2007 (UTC)

• I found 9 references supporting the city-name theory and 0 supporting the theory mentioned above. I have no opinion on what the actual truth is, only what is readily verifiable. So, IAW WP:VERIFY I commented out the alternate theory in the article. If we can find even a shaky source for it, I'm all for putting it back in. Cheers. Haus^Talk 00:51, 5 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Not quite a B yet

I moved it back down to "start-class," but expect to move it back up to B. There are some questionable claims, some pretty big omissions, and the language frequently takes a long walk off a short pier. Thanks for the assessment, though. Cheers. Haus^Talk 23:12, 4 April 2007 (UTC)

Hmm. One problem is that this topic is almost entirely covered by popular writers like Stewart Holbrook who had a tendency to never let facts get in the way of a good story. Obviously various labor unions would have the necessary collections and sources to flesh this out with verified facts -- but there was an awful lot of unwarranted romance associated with this practice due to (1) it happened to "someone else"; or (2) those who survived it had a tendency to look back on the experience as just one of those adventures of young adulthood. -- llywrch 16:28, 27 July 2007 (UTC)