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Stories
Long reads with sources: how the settlements grew, who ran them, and how the Bund, the lanes and the modern city came to be.
Topics
Several stories on one subject, meant to be read in order.
What Shanghai keeps: the Bund's two facades and the 64 roads风貌保护
The first facade · The second facade · The 64 roads
Three linked stories on what the city has decided not to change: the Bund's riverfront row, the blocks behind it, and 64 roads that may not be widened.
Merchants of Shanghai: the hongs, the Baghdadi families and the men who built on the Bund洋行与商人
The hongs
The foreign trading houses, their compradors, and the merchant families Shanghai still talks about: Hardoon, Sassoon, Kadoorie, Lester.
Shanghai Modern: the dance halls, records, films and neon of the 1920s–40s摩登上海
Night Shanghai · The four companies
The city's jazz age from the inside: where people danced, what they listened to, who made the songs and films, and what is left of it.
Who ran the Settlement: the vote, the money, the police and the courts工部局
Who could vote · The money · The police · The Volunteers · The Mixed Court · The gaol · May Thirtieth
Seven stories on who actually governed the International Settlement: the vote, the budget, the police, the courts and the crisis that forced change.
Services on the rates: how the Settlement got fire engines, water, light and schools市政公用
Fire · Water · Power · Trams · Rickshaws · Health · Markets · Schools · The band
Nine stories on what the rates bought: a fire brigade, piped water, electricity, trams, a health office, markets, schools and a band.
Where the lines ran: how the settlements grew, and how the French side was ruled租界沿革
How they grew · Boundary stones · Consul versus council · The French system
Four stories on the lines themselves: how the settlements grew from 830 mu, where the boundaries ran, and how the French Concession was governed.
The settlements: how they grew, and who governed
- 01
Barbed wire, 2,300 Volunteers, Japanese marines using Hongkou as a base, 70,000 refugees and 7,671 corpses: the 1932 war in the Council's own report.
- 02
Boundary stones and outside roads: where the Settlement ended, and where it didn't, 1893–1940
Part of: Where the lines ran: how the settlements grew, and how the French side was ruled
Forty stones set in 1893, a line the police could not see, forty-eight miles of roads beyond it: how the edge of the Settlement was marked and crossed.
- 03
Consul versus council: how the French Concession was governed, 1848–1875
Part of: Where the lines ran: how the settlements grew, and how the French side was ruled
A merchant's 2.4 mu, a council of five dissolved by its consul, the règlement of 1866, and the riot of 1874: the French Concession's first thirty years.
- 04
Every five years the police and tax office counted the Settlement: 1,666 foreigners in 1870, 29,947 in 1925, and Chinese from 75,047 to 810,279.
- 05
How Shanghai's foreign settlements grew, 1845–1943
Part of: Where the lines ran: how the settlements grew, and how the French side was ruled
How the British, American, French and International settlements grew from 830 mu in 1845 to 48,000 mu by 1914, boundary by boundary.
- 06
How the French Concession was run: the consul, the council and the règlement, 1849–1943
Part of: Where the lines ran: how the settlements grew, and how the French side was ruled
The other Shanghai: a concession run by a consul-general who chaired, convened, vetoed and could dissolve its council, under rules of 1866 kept to 1943.
- 07
The outside roads: how the Council built beyond its boundary, and who policed it, 1862–1934
Bubbling Well Road in 1866, 13 miles of outside roads by 1893 and 48 by 1932: how the Council built past its line, taxed there, and fought over the police.
The Council: votes, money, police and the courts
- 08
May Thirtieth and the three Chinese seats: the Council's own account, 1925–1930
Part of: Who ran the Settlement: the vote, the money, the police and the courts
What the Council printed about the shooting on Nanking Road in 1925, the strike, the demands, the inquiry, and how three Chinese members came to sit on it.
- 09
1,437 licensed opium houses drawn by lot in 1908, 180,666 taels of shop fees in 1916, and 7,996 arrests in 1934: the drug as the Council recorded it.
- 10
The Mixed Court: who judged the Chinese of the International Settlement, 1864–1927
Part of: Who ran the Settlement: the vote, the money, the police and the courts
A Chinese magistrate and a foreign assessor on one bench for sixty-three years: how the court worked, the 1905 riot, the 1911 seizure, the 1927 return.
- 11
The Municipal Police: from eight constables to five thousand, 1854–1932
Part of: Who ran the Settlement: the vote, the money, the police and the courts
Foreign, Sikh, Chinese and Japanese branches, the stations, the armed robbers of the 1920s, and a bill of 43 per cent of the budget, by its own reports.
- 12
The Shanghai Volunteer Corps: a town that armed itself, 1853–1942
Part of: Who ran the Settlement: the vote, the money, the police and the courts
Clerks with rifles, a Chinese company, a paid Russian regiment: the Council's militia as its reports count it, year by year, from Muddy Flat to 1932.
- 13
Ward Road Gaol: the Council's prison, from six cells to seven thousand prisoners, 1856–1932
Part of: Who ran the Settlement: the vote, the money, the police and the courts
How the Settlement went from locking prisoners in police-station cells to running the largest prison in China, counted in the Council's own gaol reports.
- 14
Part of: Who ran the Settlement: the vote, the money, the police and the courts
The Settlement's budget from $25,000 in 1854 to 15 million taels in 1932: who paid the rates, who bought the debentures, what the 1929 power sale bought.
- 15
Who could vote: the ratepayers' meeting, 1869–1941, and the jubilee of 1893
Part of: Who ran the Settlement: the vote, the money, the police and the courts
A city of a million run by a few thousand votes: the franchise in the Land Regulations, the polls, the meetings without a quorum, and the jubilee of 1893.
Services on the rates: water, light, schools and the fire brigade
- 16
How piped water came to Shanghai, 1875–1913
Part of: Services on the rates: how the Settlement got fire engines, water, light and schools
Until 1883 Shanghai drank settled river water. The Council's reports record the 1880 concession, the first taps, the bills and the shares it took in 1905.
- 17
Licensed to pull: rickshaws, wheelbarrows, sedan chairs and motor cars, 1874–1934
Part of: Services on the rates: how the Settlement got fire engines, water, light and schools
The Council licensed everything on wheels. Its tables count 31,439 rickshaw licences in 1887, 10,000 capped in 1924, five cars in 1903 and 8,073 in 1932.
- 18
Lighting the Settlement: oil, gas and the Council's own electricity, 1854–1935
Oil lamps at $12 a month in 1854, 530 gas lamps by 1882, arc lights on the Bund from 1883 and 5,641 electric lamps by 1934: how the Settlement was lit.
- 19
Markets and hawkers: how the Council tried to get Shanghai's food off the street, 1880–1932
Part of: Services on the rates: how the Settlement got fire engines, water, light and schools
From a market in the Nanking Road roadway to sixteen municipal markets and 26,000 hawker prosecutions a year: fifty years of housing the food trade.
- 20
Night soil and house refuse: the contract that paid the Council, 1875–1934
The Council sold its night soil to a contractor for 2,850 taels in 1880 and 136,500 in 1925, tipped refuse on creek banks, and built incinerators in 1932.
- 21
The Council's own power station, 1893–1929
Part of: Services on the rates: how the Settlement got fire engines, water, light and schools
Bought for 66,100 taels on a vote of 25 to 14, grown into the biggest plant in the Far East, sold for 81 million: the Settlement's electricity business.
- 22
The Council's schools: from a Eurasian orphanage to fifteen municipal schools, 1870–1932
Part of: Services on the rates: how the Settlement got fire engines, water, light and schools
What the Settlement thought it owed its children: a Eurasian school, a Public School taken over in 1893, a Chinese boys' school in 1904, the rule of 1911.
- 23
The first trams, 1905–1928: how the Settlement got moving
Part of: Services on the rates: how the Settlement got fire engines, water, light and schools
Refused in 1898, running by 1908 from the Bund to Jing'an Temple. The Council's files record the fares war, the accidents, the 1918 riot and the bus.
- 24
The Health Officer's year: smallpox, plague, cholera and the milk cart, 1871–1932
Part of: Services on the rates: how the Settlement got fire engines, water, light and schools
What the Council's doctors counted: free vaccinations by the thousand, the plague scare of 1910, cholera summers, adulterated milk and the death rate.
- 25
The Town Band and the Municipal Orchestra: music on the rates, 1879–1932
Part of: Services on the rates: how the Settlement got fire engines, water, light and schools
Twenty-one musicians from Manila in 1881, a German conductor in 1906, an Italian in 1919, and ratepayers who twice voted to keep paying for the orchestra.
- 26
We fight the flames: the Shanghai fire brigade from volunteers to professionals, 1866–1932
Part of: Services on the rates: how the Settlement got fire engines, water, light and schools
Merchants' clerks with a Meneely bell and a steam launch, fires that took houses by the hundred, and the day in 1919 the last 44 volunteers resigned.
- 27
A $500 burial ground of 1844, Pahsienjao full by 1917, a gas crematorium in 1925 and 122 mu bought at Hungjao: the Council's cemeteries in its own reports.
- 28
Where the Settlement's meat came from: the Council's slaughterhouses, 1883–1934
From the huts at Pahsienjao to the Fearon Road abattoir of 1893 and the four-storey works of 1933: cattle, butchers and inspectors by the Council's count.
The Bund and the river
- 29
Behind the Bund: the second facade, 141 buildings and 30 blocks waiting their turn
Part of: What Shanghai keeps: the Bund's two facades and the 64 roads
The grid of 1850s streets behind the Bund's riverfront row: who built there, why it was left behind, and how Huangpu now plans to renew it block by block.
- 30
How to read the Bund: one waterfront, three rebuildings, 1845–1948
Why the Bund's banks stand where they do, how to date a facade by its stone, and what the old directories say was behind each door.
- 31
Part of: What Shanghai keeps: the Bund's two facades and the 64 roads
How the row of banks on the Bund was protected, emptied of offices, bought back by banks, and freed from eleven lanes of traffic in 2010.
- 32
The Public Garden on the Bund: who was let in, 1868–1932
The Council's files on its parks: the petitions of 1881, 1885 and 1889, the weekly tickets, the rules in print, and the day in 1928 the gates opened.
- 33
A river bar with six feet at low tide, the Conservancy Board of 1905 that dredged it to 26 feet, and the Council's fifty years of bunding the Bund.
Streets and buildings
- 34
Behind the stone gate: how Shanghai's shikumen lanes were built, let and divided, 1853–2022
Refugee shacks, a fire rule and a property boom made the shikumen lane house. Then rents split each house among five families. What is left to see.
- 35
Hudec's American-style garden suburb on farmland outside the Settlement, J. G. Ballard's childhood home, and what is left on Xinhua Road.
- 36
Shanghai Art Deco: towers, cinemas and flats, 1929–1941
How Shanghai built its modern skyline in a dozen years: who paid, who designed, who built, and where to see it now.
- 37
The 64 roads that will not be widened: how Shanghai fixed the width of its old streets, 2002–2023
Part of: What Shanghai keeps: the Bund's two facades and the 64 roads
Why 64 of Shanghai's streets may never be widened, what the 2007 rule actually forbids, which roads they are, and what the sources disagree on.
- 38
The creek that became Yan'an Road, 1862–1916
The Yangjingbang divided the two settlements for sixty years. The reports record its drains, its night-soil boats, the votes of 1909 and 1914 and the road.
Trade, shops and nightlife
- 39
Night Shanghai: dance halls, jazz bands and the songs of the times, 1922–1954
Part of: Shanghai Modern: the dance halls, records, films and neon of the 1920s–40s
Where 'Ye Shanghai' came from: the dance halls, taxi dancers, Filipino and American bands, and Chinese pop records of Shanghai's jazz age.
- 40
The four companies: Nanjing Road's department stores, roof gardens and neon, 1917–1956
Part of: Shanghai Modern: the dance halls, records, films and neon of the 1920s–40s
Sincere, Wing On, Sun Sun and Da Sun: how four Chinese stores remade Nanjing Road, put amusements on their roofs and lit the street in neon.
- 41
The hongs: how Shanghai's foreign trading houses rose, changed and left, 1843–1958
Part of: Merchants of Shanghai: the hongs, the Baghdadi families and the men who built on the Bund
From 24 foreign firms in 1848 to 643 in 1911: how the hongs began in opium, moved into ships, mills and property, and left in 1954–58.
Modern Shanghai
- 42
Pudong: how the far bank of the Huangpu became half of Shanghai
The east bank from salt flats and wharves to Lujiazui: the ferries, the bridge never built, the 1990 decision, the land deals and the towers.
- 43
Puxi: how the old city on the west bank was planned, rehoused and given back its river, 1927–2022
The west bank beyond the settlements: the Jiangwan plan, the Suzhou Creek mills, workers' villages, thirty years of lane clearance and the river reopened.
- 44
Shanghai's railway stations, 1876–2027: from the Woosung line to Hongqiao, and where the trains go
A railway bought and torn up in 1877, two termini lost to war, one overcrowded station, then Hongqiao. Which station to use today and where it takes you.