How Shanghai's foreign settlements grew, 1845–1943

The short answer. The settlements began in 1845 as a strip of riverbank north of the walled city, rented to British merchants under rules that kept Chinese residents out. Within twenty years war and refugees had filled them with Chinese tenants, two councils ran them, and the boundaries were being pushed outwards. By 1914 the International Settlement and the French Concession together covered about 48,000 mu, roughly 32 square kilometres, and they stayed that size until the handovers of 1943. The map above shows each step; the roads that mark the old lines are listed at the end.

1843–1848: a strip of riverbank

The Treaty of Nanking (南京条约, Nánjīng tiáoyuē) of August 1842 opened Shanghai to British trade. The first consul, George Balfour, arrived in November 1843, and the port was declared open the same month. Balfour and the Shanghai daotai, Gong Mujiu (宫慕久, Gōng Mùjiǔ), then spent two years working out where foreigners could live.

The answer, published on 29 November 1845 as the Land Regulations (上海土地章程, Shànghǎi tǔdì zhāngchéng), was a piece of ground east of the Huangpu, south of the Lijiachang landing, which is today’s Beijing Road East, and north of the Yangjingbang creek, now Yan’an Road East. It came to about 830 mu, a little over half a square kilometre. No western line was drawn until September 1846, when a new road, Barrier Road (界路, Jièlù; today’s Henan Road Central), closed the rectangle at 1,080 mu.

Two rules shaped everything that followed. The Chinese side refused to sell land to foreigners outright, so merchants rented plots from Chinese owners in perpetuity, at an annual rent fixed at 1,500 cash a mu; Pott records that the first buyers paid 50,000 to 60,000 cash a mu for ground worth 15,000 to 35,000, the sellers knowing a captive market when they saw one. And the ground was reserved for foreigners: “native domiciles were forbidden in the then existing Settlement, or its further extension”, and Chinese owners could not rent to each other inside it. The rest of the 1845 regulations describe a very small town. Foreigners could hire watchmen but not police. A Committee on Roads and Jetties, “a committee of the merchants, nominated by the Consul”, was “vested with the control of the revenue and expenditure”, which came from the residents’ own contributions. Four roads were to run from the river westward, Kiukiang Road 25 feet wide and the others 20, and “a space of 30 English feet” along the bank was to be kept clear for the trackers who hauled the junks. The regulations could be changed only “by the consent of the British and Chinese authorities”.

The rectangle did not last three years. In March 1848 three missionaries were beaten at Qingpu, and the new consul, Rutherford Alcock, used the affair to demand more land. On 27 November 1848 daotai Lin Gui (麟桂, Lín Guì) extended the settlement north to Suzhou Creek and west to the Zhoujing creek, the line of today’s Xizang Road, making 2,820 mu.

1848–1849: Americans in Hongkou, the French to the south

The Americans never asked for a rectangle. Bishop William Boone of the American Episcopal mission had rented land across Suzhou Creek in Hongkou, and in 1848 the daotai agreed that Hongkou could serve as an American settlement. Nobody fixed a boundary; the area simply grew around the mission, a dock and a few wharves.

The French consul, Charles de Montigny, was more precise. After eight months of pressure he and Lin Gui exchanged letters on 6 April 1849 creating the French Concession: 986 mu between the Yangjingbang on the north, the city moat on the south, the river on the east and the Guandi temple at Zhujia bridge on the west. It was a wedge of ground between the British settlement and the city wall.

1853–1854: refugees and a council

In September 1853 the Small Swords (小刀会, Xiǎodāohuì) seized the walled city and held it for seventeen months. Chinese families fled across the moat into the foreign settlements, and the rule of separate residence collapsed. The consuls and the daotai tried to push the newcomers out; foreign landlords, who were building houses to rent to them, would not have it. By the end of 1853 more than 20,000 people lived in the settlement, almost all of them Chinese.

Governing that population needed more than a roads committee. On 11 July 1854 the land renters, meeting at the British consulate under the British, American and French consuls, Alcock, Murphy and Edan, adopted revised Land Regulations that the three had drawn up and the daotai afterwards approved. “The Committee on Roads and Jetties appointed by the Consul was dissolved and a Municipal Council for the Settlements was elected.” Its Chinese name, Gongbuju (工部局, Gōngbùjú), is the one most Shanghai residents still use. The powers were in Article X: the renters could “declare an assessment in the form of a rate to be made on land and buildings” and “wharfage dues on all goods landed”, and appoint “a committee of three or more persons to levy the said rates and dues” and sue for them. Pott names five members of the first Council, Kay, Cunningham, King, Fearon and Medhurst; the gazetteer’s count is seven. The first budget was $25,000, $14,000 of it for police; in November the renters capped what the new body could assess at $6,000. The Chinese newcomers, “barely 500 before the taking of the Shanghai city by the ‘Small Sword’ rebels, now exceeded 20,000”, paid “a house tax of 8 per cent” for the protection, and from 24 February 1855 “any native, before being admitted to the Settlement, must secure a licence”. The Hong Kong courts, Pott notes, did not recognise the Council’s legal existence for another twenty years; the land deeds were still sealed by the Chinese authorities, and the ground was still China’s. From this point on, nonetheless, the Council hired police, levied rates and treated the settlement as a town of its own.

1862–1893: two settlements, slowly bounded

The French left the joint arrangement in April 1862 and set up their own council, the Conseil municipal, in Chinese the Gongdongju (公董局, Gōngdǒngjú), whose decisions needed the French consul’s approval. On 21 September 1863 the British and American settlements merged under the Municipal Council; from 1899 the merged area was called the International Settlement.

The merger of 1863 was Edward Cunningham’s and consul George Seward’s work, and it came with a larger idea that Pott records: some residents “seriously contemplated the practicability of converting the International Settlement into a free city”. The British minister, Sir Frederick Bruce, killed it with a sentence, that the concession “was neither a transfer nor a lease of the land in question” to Britain. The same year, on 12 June 1863, it was agreed that the Council should collect from Chinese residents a 20 per cent rental tax, and the Mixed Court followed in 1864. The constitution was rewritten in 1866 by the land renters and the consuls “without previous consultation with the foreign Ministers in Peking”: the Council “was increased to nine members”, twenty-five renters could call a meeting, and voting by proxy was allowed. The ministers sanctioned the text only in 1869, and in doing so “eliminated the clause in regard to Chinese participation”, which is where the question of Chinese seats was first lost. A further revision, begun in 1879 and approved by the ratepayers in 1881, waited until 1898 for sanction “and then in a much modified form”. The edition the Council printed in 1907 has thirty regulations and forty-two bye-laws, and its first regulation is the boundary of 1899.

Hongkou’s boundary took another thirty years to settle. The line that consul George Seward proposed in 1863, from the Xizang Road bridge across to the old rifle range and on to a point three li up Yangshupu Creek, was argued over until 1893, when forty boundary stones were finally set on 10 and 11 June along more or less that line. The daotai approved the survey on 22 July 1893. The American section measured 7,856 mu and the whole settlement 10,676 mu.

1899–1900: the big expansions

The council’s largest gain took three years of diplomacy. It could not approach the Chinese authorities itself, so “a letter therefore was addressed to this Body on January 3rd, 1896”, the Consular Body, arguing that the Chinese population and “the number of mills, filatures, and other industrial enterprises” were growing faster than the Settlement. The Council then enlarged its ask to take in Jessfield Road, part of Baoshan county and ground across the river in Pudong, and ran into everyone at once. The owners of the Pudong land “objected to being deprived of the jurisdiction of their own courts”; the French minister protested that land the Council wanted was “already earmarked for the French Concession”, and the Ningbo guild’s riot of 16 July 1898, when the French demolished the walls of its cemetery and “twelve fatal casualties” followed, poisoned the air; the Chinese side was “unwilling to have any land in the Paoshan hsien included in the International Settlement, as it was very thickly populated”, and would not give up the railway station. The Chamber of Commerce met on 17 July 1898 and sent its chairman, J. S. Fearon, to Peking. When the British and French had settled their own quarrel, the British, French, American and German ministers sent identical notes to the Tsungli Yamen, and on 13 April 1899 the Yamen said “the Viceroy of Nanking had been instructed to act in accordance with the request of the Ministers”. Pott’s explanation is the plain one: after the war with Japan China “was too weak to risk giving offence to the foreign Powers”. Two deputies of the viceroy, one of them the American adviser John C. Ferguson, were “instructed not to include any land in the Paoshan hsien”, and the Council’s engineers walked the line with the Shanghai magistrate. The ratepayers adopted it unanimously on 29 June 1899; the Council heard in July that the extension was sanctioned; and Lord Salisbury, in a telegram Pott prints, had already made sure on 12 May that “nothing is said which would in any way pledge us to refrain from making further demands for extension”. On 8 May 1899, by the gazetteer’s date, the daotai’s proclamation extended the settlement east to Zhoujiazui, where Pingliang Road meets Jungong Road today; west along the Yangjingbang line to Jing’an Temple (静安寺, Jìng’ān Sì), then in a straight line to Suzhou Creek at Xinzha; and north to the boundary between Shanghai and Baoshan counties. The area went from 10,676 mu, or 10,606 by Pott’s table, to 33,503, more than three times its size: 2.75 square miles became, by the Council’s own summary, 5,584 acres, 8.72 square miles, with a land boundary of 11.18 miles instead of 6.43. A Municipal Cadastral Office was set up in 1900 to record who owned what. The regulations printed in 1907 open with the new line, “from the Temple of Agriculture in a northerly direction to the Hsiao Sha Ferry on the Soochow Creek”, surveyed “under the direction of the special deputies of H.E. Liu, Viceroy at Nanking”, and go on to give the Council what it had lacked: Regulation VI, to buy land “leading or being out of the Settlement” for roads and gardens, which became the warrant for the outside roads; three Land Commissioners to fix compensation; a 25 per cent premium on land taken for railways; the power to charge frontagers up to two-thirds of a new road; a cap on rates at one per cent of house rental and on dues at a tenth of one per cent of goods; a rule that Chinese graves on rented land were never to be moved “without the express sanction of the families”; a penalty of $300 or six months for breaches; and a last article requiring that any amendment be confirmed “by the Foreign Representatives and Supreme Chinese Government at Peking”.

The French moved at the same time. An extension agreed in June 1899 and proclaimed on 27 January 1900 took the concession west to Gujiazhai, today’s Chongqing Road, and south to the Datie creek, now the line of Zizhong Road and Taicang Road: 2,135 mu.

1914: roads beyond the line

Both councils had long built roads outside their boundaries, then policed and taxed the land along them. Between 1862 and 1925 the Municipal Council built 41 such roads over some 50,000 mu, and the French built more than twenty between 1900 and 1914. In 1914 the French turned the practice into territory. The government of Yuan Shikai, in return for the expulsion of revolutionaries from the concession, gave the Conseil municipal police and taxation powers over the roads it had built west to Xujiahui. The new boundary took effect on 14 September 1914, and the concession reached 15,150 mu, fifteen times its original size.

The Municipal Council had been trying the same move since 1908. That year, in a dispute with the Zhabei works bureau, it asked through the consuls “that all the lands lying between the Settlement and the railway line be incorporated within municipal limits”, because “the nominal boundary of the Settlement on the north is for practical purposes eliminated” and “land outside the Settlement boundary cannot be taxed, while land within can be”. The viceroy at Nanking refused: the grant of 1899, “over 21,500 mow” by his count, had been meant “an entirely permanent one”, and there would be no Baoshan land and no further extension. The Council came back on 21 August 1909 with the argument it would use for twenty years, that “out of 53,000 houses in the International settlement, only 3,000 were owned by foreigners, while 50,000 were owned by Chinese”, so that the Settlement was already a Chinese town whichever side of the line one stood on. The revolution of 1911 stalled it. In 1914, with the French precedent fresh, the Council reported “a change of opinion among responsible Chinese residents and officials”, a draft agreement before the Consular Body, “prospects of a satisfactory conclusion nearer than ever heretofore”, and the abolition of the Chapei Works and Tax Bureau from 1 December. The draft of March 1915 would have taken in everything between the settlement and the Shanghai–Nanjing railway. Residents of Zhabei protested, the European war took the ministers’ attention, the Beijing government declined, and the International Settlement stayed at its 1899 limits. The French convention, signed on 8 April 1914 by Yang Cheng and the consul-general Gaston Kahn and in force from 14 July, had meanwhile made the Great Western and Siccawei Roads the boundary between the two settlements, so that the Council’s own estates south of those roads, which it watered and policed, lay in the French Concession’s new zone.

Who lived there

The first census, in March 1865, found 2,297 foreigners and 90,587 Chinese in the International Settlement, and 460 foreigners and 55,465 Chinese in the French Concession. The Council’s own tables, printed in 1925, carry the series on.

Census	Foreigners	Chinese
1870	1,666	about 75,000
1880	2,197	about 108,000
1890	3,821	about 168,000
1900	6,774	345,276
1910	13,536	488,005
1920	23,307	759,839
1925	29,947	810,279

In 1925 the largest foreign community was Japanese, 13,804, against 5,879 British and 1,391 Americans. The Chinese figure had grown by 26,400 a year in 1910–15 and 27,880 in 1915–20, and by only 10,080 a year in 1920–25; the Council put the drop down to “passive hostility to the Council’s administration, following the May 30th incident”. The French Concession, with 2,405 foreigners and 146,595 Chinese in 1915, had 7,811 and 297,072 by 1925. By 1936 the International Settlement held more than 1.18 million people, and the French Concession nearly half a million. The foreign population was never more than a few per cent of the whole, but until 1928 it alone elected the councils.

What the land was worth tracked the same curve. The Council’s assessment of 1911 valued the Central District’s 2,220 mu at 66 million taels, about 29,800 taels a mu, against 11,000 in the Northern District and 4,000 or so in the Eastern and Western; in 1914 the Land Commissioners were awarding 26,000 to 45,000 taels a mu for Nanking Road frontages and 38,000 on Canton Road, where the owners asked 85,000; by 1925 the awards ran from 80,000 a mu on Museum Road to 120,000 at the corner of Nanking and Honan Roads, where the buyer had paid at a rate of 156,500, and the British Post Office’s 2.3 mu went for 293,000 taels. The 1845 renters had paid the equivalent of a few dozen dollars a mu.

1925–1930: Chinese seats

On 30 May 1925 police of the Louza station on Nanking Road fired on demonstrators, the May Thirtieth incident, and the settlement’s politics changed. In April 1926 the foreign ratepayers agreed to three Chinese seats on the Municipal Council; the three members took their places in 1928, and the number rose to five in 1930. The same year, 1928, the council opened its parks to Chinese residents from 1 June, ending a bar that had stood for decades. In January 1930 the council brought in a South African judge, Richard Feetham, who spent about eighteen months writing a report that defended the settlement’s legal position.

1937–1946: the end

After the fighting of 1937 the settlements were islands in Japanese-held territory. On the morning of 8 December 1941 Japanese troops crossed the Suzhou Creek bridges into the International Settlement; the French Concession, under Vichy, was left alone. On 11 January 1943 Britain and the United States signed treaties with the Chinese government in Chongqing giving up extraterritoriality and the settlements, and the Vichy government followed with a declaration on 23 February. In Shanghai itself the hand-over was staged by Japan and the Wang Jingwei government: the French Concession on 30 July 1943, the International Settlement on 1 August. After the war the Sino-French treaty of 28 February 1946 completed the legal return, and the settlements were folded into the city’s districts.

What the sources disagree on

The 1910 census is 13,536 foreigners and 488,005 Chinese in the Council’s tables; an earlier draft of this article, following a secondary source, had 13,526 and 488,035. The Settlement’s area before 1899 is 10,676 mu in the gazetteer and 10,606 in Pott, who also gives 5,084 acres for the extended area where the Council’s summary gives 5,584. Pott dates the French council to 13 May 1862 and the gazetteer to April; Pott names five first councillors and the gazetteer seven; Pott puts the 1845 western boundary at the Defence Creek, which the gazetteer’s 1846 Barrier Road contradicts. The 8 May 1899 proclamation is the gazetteer’s date; Pott has the ratepayers’ vote of 29 June and the July sanction and no proclamation date. The date of Seward’s boundary agreement, 25 June 1863, could not be confirmed in Pott. The Council’s reports for 1898 and 1899 are not on the Internet Archive, so the extension story is Pott’s.

Reading the lines today

Most of the old boundaries were creeks that were later filled and paved, so they survive as streets:

• Yan’an Road East and Central follow the Yangjingbang and its continuation, the line between the International Settlement and the French Concession from 1849 to 1943.
• Xizang Road follows the Zhoujing, or Defence Creek, the western edge of the British settlement from 1848 to 1899.
• Henan Road Central is Barrier Road, the western edge of 1846.
• Renmin Road and Zhonghua Road ring the site of the city wall, pulled down in 1912–14.
• Tianmu Road East, east of the old North Station, was Boundary Road, the northern edge of the settlement from 1899.
• Huashan Road is Avenue Haig, the western edge of the French Concession from 1914.
• Chongqing Road marks the French line of 1900, and Zizhong Road and Taicang Road its southern edge.