What next? There are various ways you can either follow up and find out more about the details you have found, or look elsewhere if your search has not been successful. One source is our related Historical Photographs of China site which contains over 22,000 digitised historic photographs most of which came to the project from China families. The project’s Visualising China blog can also be useful.
See this page on China families for information about Hong Kong
See this page on China Families for information on Shanghai
Residential directories: this page here on China Families provides links to online copies of historical residential and business directories published between 1842 and the 1930s.
Information about access to historic newspapers published in China.
Yale University Library’s Divinity School Library has digitised a great deal of Protestant missionary material which is available in its digital collections, including 20 editions of the Directory of Protestant Missionaries in China from 1874-1920.
For information about the Chinese Maritime Customs Service see this page on its staff, and this page for links to further data
Shipping: there’s a lot of information that ships that operated in China before 1949, and since then, on Old China Coast Ships.