This dissertation is a historical study of the Chinese financial crisis of the early 1880s. It argues that the 1880s crash was not an exogenous shock from the Sino-French War (1883-1885) but an endogenous shock caused by the breakdown of the Qing dynasty’s then-burgeoning Sino-foreign financial system, centered in Shanghai. As such, what preceded the crash was a boom driven by macroeconomic fundamentals in the 1860s and 1870s—more specifically, an export boom in tea and silk and a concurrent boom in real estate in Shanghai and Hong Kong. What followed were asset price bubbles in both stocks and urban property. That the crisis was a stock market crash and a real estate collapse in tandem made it a crisis more akin to history’s Great Depressions and Great Recessions than to peripheral speculative episodes more divorced from fundamentals. This study also suggests that the 1883 stock crash ended Qing efforts at energy-intensive industrialization, souring domestic investors on public-private partnerships in coal mining. Those mines were formed under the aegis of the Self-Strengthening Movement, and were, until 1883, anything but the misguided ventures scholars once believed them to be.