Licensed to pull: rickshaws, wheelbarrows, sedan chairs and motor cars, 1874–1934

The short answer. The Municipal Council licensed everything that moved on the Settlement’s streets, and it counted the licences. The tables in its annual reports are the best record there is of how a Chinese city got about under foreign management: 31,439 monthly rickshaw licences in 1887, 7,094 public rickshaws in the record month of November 1905, about 9,000 in 1913, capped at 10,000 from 1924 and still 9,990 in 1932; 81,489 wheelbarrow licences in 1905; 700 sedan chairs taxed into extinction after 1905; five motor cars in 1903 and 8,073 in 1932. The fees paid for the police. The rules, printed in a handbook in 1921, said what a rickshaw puller had to wear, how much he could charge for a mile, and that he must be neither old, nor dirty, nor an opium smoker.

1874: a Japanese import

The rickshaw, Pott says, came into Shanghai in 1874, imported from Japan, and “at first the ricshas were not very popular”. By 1887 the Council was licensing them by the month, and the police report for that year counted “31,439” licences issued during the year “against 29,113 in 1886, and 24,008 in 1884”, about 2,600 vehicles a month, plus “five to six hundred private jin-rik-shas” and “a good many sedan chairs”. The fees came to 34,041 taels, the largest item in a licence income of 96,495, larger than the 27,573 taels the opium houses paid. The police complained that “the natives are in the habit of making use of jin-rik-shas to carry all sorts of articles, including meat, fish, vegetables, and furniture”, so that “it is frequently exceedingly difficult to find a clean one”, and were told to enforce the rule “that only clean jin-rik-shas are allowed to ply in the Settlement”.

The wheelbarrow was older and cheaper, the freight vehicle of the Yangtze delta, and in December 1887 the Settlement licensed 2,305 of them against 2,897 rickshaws. The police rules of that year fixed its load at “600lbs. dead weight”, six half-chests of tea or two bales of piece goods, and its width at five and a half feet, because loaded barrows blocked the streets and “the coolies in charge cannot see before them”. The fee was 400 cash a month, and the Council’s budget for 1888 proposed raising it to 1,000.

1897: the wheelbarrow riot

Raising it was what caused the Settlement’s second riot. In 1897 the ratepayers authorised the Council “to raise the price of wheelbarrow licences”, and “when, on April 1st, an attempt was made to carry out this regulation, the wheelbarrow coolies went on strike, and for two or three days there were minor disturbances.” On 5 April “a mob from the French Concession crossed a bridge over the Yangkingpang, and, streaming into the International Settlement, started a riot.” The alarm bell rang, the Volunteers turned out, and landing parties came ashore from HMS Linnet, HMS Plover and USS Monocacy. The rioters were dispersed; then, “much to the indignation of the foreign community, it was announced on April 6th that the Council had backed down and agreed to a compromise”, and a largely attended meeting of residents complained that “the prestige of fifty years had been lost”. The daotai undertook to see the increased fee paid. Pott, who liked the Council, tells the story against it. The barrow men had found the Settlement’s weak point: a tax on the poorest trade in the city could be collected only with the city’s consent.

1905: a record month, and a tax on chairs

By 1905 the trade had grown past the Council’s wishes. “Public Ricshas,” the Overseer of Taxes wrote, “continue to grow in numbers and are now considerably in excess of public requirements. In November last 7,094 ricsha licenses were issued, the highest on record, against 6,849 and 5,766 respectively in 1904 and 1903.” Nearly 80,000 monthly licences were sold that year at $1.50 each. The report describes the trade’s structure. In six months “18 foreign-owned public ricsha services have been established, representing 652 vehicles”, with better vehicles and “a better class of coolies”, though their uniforms were “still far from satisfactory”; against them stood “185 native owners who together held 6,993 ricsha licenses”. The puller owned nothing. The licence was the owner’s, the vehicle was the owner’s, and the daily hire the puller paid was, as the police would explain in 1913, what set the number of rickshaws in the streets. Wheelbarrows that year took 81,489 monthly licences at 600 cash, and the Council noted that the copper cash had fallen from 840 to 1,060 to the dollar in eleven months, so that the barrow man’s fee had dropped by a fifth without anyone deciding it should.

The same year the Council taxed the one vehicle it had left alone. Sedan chairs were licensed from 1905 at $3 a quarter for a private chair and $6 for a public one, because, the Council explained, “every other description of vehicle in use in the Settlement is licensed, and chairs have hitherto escaped payment owing merely to the smallness of their number.” The daotai Yuan objected on 8 April 1905 that the new rule “is not contained or authorised in the fixed regulations and the fee is only imposed on Chinese”, that the bearers were “people of very limited means”, and that the licences should be cancelled. The chairman, F. Anderson, replied on 18 April that the Settlement was administered under the Land Regulations and that the Council “is acting within its authority in licensing all vehicles” on its streets; and the Council let slip its real purpose, which was “to induce native residents to discontinue the use of this medieval and clumsy means of locomotion, in the general interests of the Foreign Settlement.” About 700 chairs paid up, 4,826 taels in the year. The tax worked as intended. Chair licence revenue peaked at 6,690 taels in 1906 and fell to 363 in 1913; by 1925 the Settlement licensed seven sedan chairs, and the line vanished from the tables after 1928. Pott notes that the last customers were Chinese doctors.

1913: “the minimum sum per day on which a ricsha coolie can live”

The police report for 1913 is the Council’s fullest statement of its rickshaw problem, and it was written by someone who had thought about economics. That year the inspection staff “condemned” 5,000 rickshaws “of the old black pattern” and had them replaced with pneumatic-tyred vehicles, so that of “approximately 9,000” public rickshaws “not more than 100 of the old type” remained; private brass number plates were abolished, because Chinese owners abused the privilege, and every public rickshaw had to carry “the Municipal license plate exposed on the back panel”. Then the argument. “The supply of ricshas is undoubtedly considerably in excess of demand and a limit to the number is strongly recommended. The traffic problem in Shanghai turns mainly on the question of ricshas.” Why so many? “It is not strictly correct to assume that the supply of ricshas is regulated by the demand. The fact that there are as many licensed to-day, when the Tramway Company carries over a million passengers weekly, as there were before the Tramway Company existed, should be proof of this.” The real governor was “the minimum sum per day on which a ricsha coolie can live. If this happens to be 10 cents, then so long as ricshas can earn 10 cents profit, so long will they continue to be hired.” To let every rickshaw that could earn ten cents use the streets was “mere philanthropy”, and “that policy leads to congestion”. The remedies were widening the streets, “which is impossible”, new streets, “blocked by vested interests”, or a limit on numbers. The proof that the public did not need them all was “the quantity to be seen without work, even in wet weather”. Pott, writing of the same year, put the number of pullers at “more than 30,000”, three men to a vehicle in shifts.

The motor car was by then the other end of the same table. “These vehicles were first licensed in 1903 when there were 5 Cars in Shanghai,” the Overseer of Taxes recorded in 1913; Pott has the first two, Oldsmobiles, arriving in 1902 and the licensing office treating “the automobile as a form of carriage”. The quarterly average of cars licensed went from 19 in 1904 to 119 in 1908 and 342 in 1913, and the Council noted that although “receipts from pony and carriage licences have decreased, the deficiency is more than covered by the increase in motor car licences”. Public motor cars “more than doubled during the year, and now totals 41 as compared with 17 for 1912”; 467 Chinese chauffeurs were registered with the police; and the licence conditions were amended from 1 January 1914 against “high power head lamps, the glare from which dazzles other road users”. The carriage trade was dying: “proprietors, without exception, complain of bad business.”

1921: the rules, printed

The Council collected its licence conditions into a handbook in 1921, and the entry for the public rickshaw is a portrait of the trade as the Council wished to see it. The vehicle had to be “strongly built on the approved pattern, according to the standard ricsha kept for that purpose at the Hongkew Police Station”, kept clean and in repair, “provided with a waterproof apron”, and carry “a lighted lamp” between sunset and sunrise. The pullers were to be “strong, healthy and provided with uniform”, and “no old, dirty or opium smoking coolies or young boys” were to be allowed to pull. No coolie was to “tout for hire”: when not engaged “he stop at a waiting stand”. He could not “demand more than his fare, according to the tariff”, nor “refuse, without proper cause, to carry a passenger at any time within the limits of the Settlement”. Property left in the rickshaw went to the nearest police station; the licensee was “responsible for any theft committed or damage done through the negligence of the ricsha coolies”; and “immediate notice” was to be given to the police “of any death occurring on the ricsha”. The tariff was ten cents for a mile or less and ten cents for each further half-mile, or fifty cents for the first hour and forty for each hour after. The owner paid $2 a month for each public rickshaw; a private rickshaw cost $4 a quarter and its licence was good in the French Concession too.

The wheelbarrow’s entry was shorter: 0.50 taels a month, “no more than 450 catties or 600 lbs. dead weight”, and no cargo on Nanking Road “between the hours of 8 o’clock a.m. and 8 o’clock p.m.”, which is to say that the Settlement’s main shopping street had been cleared of the delta’s freight vehicle by the clock. Motor cars were taxed by weight, 7 to 20 taels a quarter for a private car and half as much again for a public one; the driver of a public car had to “keep a register wherein shall be entered the name and address of any person hiring the car” and give the police “the earliest information possible regarding any criminally suspicious conduct”; and the public car, freight and trade licences each carried the line “This licence is not available in the French Concession”, a reminder that a taxi crossing Avenue Edward VII crossed a frontier. The same handbook licensed food hawkers at $2 a month, “Hawking by women and children is not permitted”; dairies at $2 a quarter; foreign hotels at 90 to 200 taels a quarter; opium and noxious drugs, by then a pharmacy licence, at 5 to 50 taels; and brothels, but only those “that were in existence on December 31, 1919”, with at most ten women, none “in the vicinity of any school”, at a dollar a half-year, the Council having resolved in 1920 to license them out of existence by attrition. The brothel line in the revenue table runs 1,281 taels in 1920, 977, 634, 393, 201, and nothing in 1925.

1924: ten thousand, and no more

The limit the police had asked for in 1913 came in 1924. From 1 September that year “the number of public ricsha licences authorised for issue should be reduced to 10,000”. The Council’s report for 1925 claims two results. The limit had “curtailed to a considerable extent the objectionable practice of speculating in ricsha licences, which was prevalent prior to the enforcement of limitation”: a licence that was rationed had become a thing to be bought and sold. And it had produced “a marked increase of private ricsha licences, of which no less than 14,000 were issued during the year”, because a private rickshaw was not counted against the cap and could be worked for hire on the quiet. The Council also tackled the vehicles’ condition. Monthly inspection at a depot in Point Road was proposed, found “too frequent”, and settled at once every two months from 1 September 1925, with a result the Council was pleased with: “the forcible removal of licence plates in the streets for such defects was a sight of daily occurrence, but is now very rarely witnessed, except for breaches of the traffic regulations, against which ricsha coolies are inveterate offenders.” The police still thought 10,000 “in excess of requirements”. The same year the Council licensed bicycles for the first time, at $2 a year, and found 10,391 of them.

The pullers’ own view of these arrangements is in the police files rather than the licence tables. Pott records a three-day rickshaw strike from 3 December in about 1915 after the Council cut the licences and the rickshaw companies tried “to charge the coolies more for hire than before”, and the riot of 17 April 1918, told in the article on the trams, in which pullers resisting the new stands and the confiscation of their plates attacked the tramcars and two of them were shot dead. The licence was the owner’s; the plate, the uniform, the stand and the fine were the puller’s.

1932: the end of the table

By 1932 the Council had been licensing rickshaws for nearly sixty years and its police had not changed their mind. “Ricsha traffic continues to be an inconvenience, obstruction, and danger to all other traffic and its control, or even partial control, remains a problem with but one solution, a gradual reduction of numbers.” There were 9,990 public rickshaws, ten short of the cap; private rickshaws averaged 11,258 a quarter, “and there is no doubt that very many are being used for public hire contrary to their licence conditions”, though “in most cases the police have to witness the offenders actually touting for hire”; 345 private pullers were charged with it in the Central and Louza districts. “During the year 16,272 pullers were charged for various serious traffic offences whilst a very much larger number were cautioned.” Public carriages fell from 170 to 111, and the private car, which now paid 11 to 45 taels a quarter, had reached 8,073.

The ten-year tables show what the Council’s licensing had become. In 1887 all vehicle fees together were under 40,000 taels and the licence income 96,495. In 1913 licences brought 535,097 taels, of which public and private rickshaws gave 196,228, over a third, and opium shops 86,386. In 1932 licences brought 1,951,467 taels: rickshaws 436,995, a little over a fifth, wheelbarrows 60,389, and motor vehicles 661,742, a third of the whole. The opium line had ended in 1917, after a last year in 1916 in which the licensed shops paid 180,666 taels, and the handbook’s “noxious drugs” licence was its ghost. The rickshaw’s share of the Council’s licence money had halved in twenty years while the number of rickshaws stayed at ten thousand; the car had taken the money, and the street.

Two years later the Council tried to reform the trade itself, with a rickshaw commission and a scheme to break the owners’ hold over the pullers. Tim Wright’s study of 1991 concludes that the attempt failed because the owners had Chinese political backing and the economics of the trade were against the Council; a newspaper of August 1934 reported nearly every public rickshaw gone from the Settlement’s streets in a strike of riots and sabotage. The Council’s own papers for 1934 are not yet on the Internet Archive, and the story ends here.

What the sources disagree on

The first motor car is 1902 in Pott and “first licensed in 1903” in the Council’s report; both can be true. The licence counts before 1916 are monthly licence-months, not vehicles, so “31,439” in 1887 means about 2,600 rickshaws, and the two kinds of figure are kept apart above. The Overseer of Taxes’ arithmetic in 1905 contradicts itself, giving fees of 86,461 taels against 88,675 the year before and calling it an increase. The fee scales come from budget tables whose columns the scan has sometimes shuffled; the 1921 handbook, where each fee follows its own conditions, is the surest. The 1925 ten-year table and the 1932 one give the 1925 public rickshaw revenue three ways, 173,716, 178,307 and 178,716 taels. The 1874 date for the first rickshaws is Pott’s; a story that a Frenchman named Ménard brought them from Japan in 1873 circulates on the web without a source the article could check. The 1934 reforms are known here only from a scholarly abstract and a newspaper, not from the Council.

What to look for

The streets the licences governed are the same streets. Nanjing Road East, where no wheelbarrow could carry cargo by day after 1921, is a pedestrian street where nothing with wheels but the tourist train may go at all. The rickshaw stands the police fought the pullers to enforce in 1918 are gone without trace; so is the Hongkew station where the standard rickshaw was kept. The bridges over the Yangjingbang that the wheelbarrow men crossed in 1897 are under Yan’an Road East, and the creek is a sewer. What survives of the system is the habit of the plate: every vehicle in the city still carries one, and the city still counts them.