The creek that became Yan'an Road, 1862–1916

The short answer. Yan’an Road East is a creek. For seventy years the Yangjingbang (洋泾浜, Yángjīngbāng) ran from the Huangpu west to the Defence Creek, the British settlement on its north bank, the French concession on its south, eight bridges across it and the Settlement’s main sewers draining into it. The Settlement’s night-soil left the same way, in boats, to the farms up the creeks. The ratepayers voted to keep the creek in 1909 and to bury it in 1914; by 1916 it was a boulevard 110 feet wide, named for a dead English king. Xizang Road, Renmin Road and half the east–west streets of the old city have the same history. This article follows the creek through the Council’s drainage report of 1870, its health officers’ accounts of the night-soil trade, and the correspondence of 1914.

1862: cholera and refugees

Before 1862 the Settlement had no drains to speak of. The Council’s engineer of 1870 quoted a resident, Michie, on how it began: “There were no extensive drainage operations carried on here before 1862. The Cholera and the refugees came together that year.” The Taiping war had filled the Settlement with Chinese refugees, and a Defence Committee of residents, raised to protect it, took drainage in hand along with the barricades. “The public anxiety neither brooked delay nor deliberation.” The first drain was Fuhkien Road. The committee began it by “digging a deep trench from Creek to Creek which festered for months before the Council could get the drain built.”

The committee’s scheme, printed in the 1870 report, was ambitious for a town of a few thousand foreigners. Deep oval drains would run down the north–south streets, falling north to Suzhou Creek and south to the Yangjingbang. The Yangjingbang itself was “to be provided with suitable tide gates, that it may be made a reservoir of clean water, for the flushing of the whole system of main drains.” The cost was put at 132,800 taels for drainage and 43,000 for a water supply. There was a difficulty the committee noted and the Council would meet again: the creek was a Chinese waterway, and could be closed off “only twice a month for 6 or 8 hours at the height of the springs by permission of the authorities.”

The money was harder to find than the plan. The Council advertised a ten per cent “Shanghai Municipal Drainage Loan” of 132,000 taels. “The response to this appeal fell far short of their expectations, and a sum of only Ts. 20,000 was realized”; in all, 78,267.96 taels came in. Work went on “as far as the means at their disposal would permit”, against a shortage of materials and of “skilled and even ordinary labor”. By the autumn of 1863, 105 house drains had been connected to the mains in three months, and the Council had resolved that it alone should make such connections, charging the householder.

Three engineers, one creek

The 1870 report is a post-mortem by the Council’s Public Works Committee on eight years of digging, and it is candid. Three men had been in charge. Carlisle, inspector and then superintendent of public works in 1862–63, laid the first drains. John Clark, an engineer engaged in England, arrived to find “a desultory and unconnected series of drains” and in 1865 condemned the lot. His own “arterial” scheme, costed at over 260,000 taels, would have run two egg-shaped main sewers up Ningpo and Foochow Roads to a pumping station on Suzhou Creek, where the sewage “would, on its arrival at the well at the pumping station, have been raised by engines, deodorised, and sold.” It was a modern scheme for 1865, and it was rejected, because 65,000 taels had already gone into the drains Clark wanted to abandon. E. H. Oliver, who succeeded him, made do: he kept the old drains where he could and laid large mains down the principal north–south streets, falling from Kiukiang Road each way to the two creeks. The first egg-shaped brick sewer, on six-foot piles with granite slabs, went into Kiangse Road in 1869–70 and cost 23,020 taels; earthenware pipes worth £500 were ordered from Cowan and Co. of Blaydon-on-Tyne. By 1870 all the mains were complete except Szechuen Road and part of Hoopeh Road, and the Szechuen sewer, with its “undulating gradients”, “creates reservoirs of stagnant filth from the Canton Road to the Kiukiang Road”. Drainage had cost 113,387.02 taels from May 1862 to March 1870, and the committee reckoned 54,600 more were needed.

The creek’s part in the plan had failed. Flushing by the tide, the Defence Committee’s whole idea, depended on water rising high enough to run through the drains. Oliver found in 1868 that “a medium tide does not rise to anything like a sufficient height to even pass through” the flood gates, and told the committee in 1870 that “there were only three or four tides in the year that reached the summit of the drain.” A flushing reservoir he proposed in February 1868 was “thrown out at the Land renters’ meeting”. What the drains carried went into the creek at the sewers’ own pace, and the creek, which the tide could not scour, kept it.

The night-soil economy

The drains carried surface water and slops. What they did not carry, by rule, was human waste. The Settlement banned water-closets and kept the Chinese system of night-soil collection, and the Council’s health officers defended it in print for forty years, because it worked and because it paid. The ordure contractor paid the Council for the right to collect: $3,200 a month in 1899, $4,100 in 1902, $5,300 in 1905, $6,000 in 1908, $7,500 in 1910 and $10,050 in 1913. “There is a ready demand throughout the year for use in growing such crops as indigo,” Arthur Stanley wrote in 1909, “and were it not for its employment also in growing market produce for the table, which it is practically impossible to prevent, the method of disposal is more sanitary than any other and as regards the economy of nature nearly perfect.” His department removed 77,720 tons of it in 1909 and 91,414 in 1914, and abolished 1,298 night-soil pits and jars in 1909 alone. It left the Settlement in boats, and the boats used the creeks.

That is why the health officer, in the same 1909 report, laid down a principle: “the filling in or culverting of creeks that are accessible to all tides is seldom advisable.” The Yangjingbang and the Defence Creek were two of the creeks he meant.

1909: the ratepayers say no

The French had wanted a boulevard on the Yangjingbang since 1863, and had opposed dredging it from the start. In March 1909 the Settlement’s ratepayers were asked to culvert it, and refused. The vote itself is not in the 1909 report; it is known from the Council’s letter of 2 May 1914, which says the proposal “was lost by 411 votes to 811”. The 1909 report shows what the Council did instead: it budgeted, “for the third year in succession”, a quarter share of a reinforced-concrete bridge over the creek at the Bund, strong enough to carry tramcars and link the two settlements’ tram systems; and, with the French Council, it buried a smaller creek, the Chang Pang, in 4 ft 6 in concrete tubes from the Defence Creek to Manila Road. The method the two councils would use on the Yangjingbang five years later was tried first on its tributary.

The Defence Creek, on the Settlement’s western edge, had a shorter pedigree than the Yangjingbang. In 1861, with the Taipings expected, the ditch along the Zhoujing was dug out into a moat; the road beside it was Thibet Road, and the creek, with its bridges at Peking Road and Nanking Road, marked the limit of the Settlement until 1899. By 1909 it was a ditch that smelled, and the Race Club’s course lay along it.

1914: the French write again

The question came back on 20 April 1914, when the French Council wrote that the creek’s “continual silting” now almost stopped boats passing from the river to the Defence Creek, that the Whangpoo Conservancy’s dredgers, then at work in the river, could fill the bed with mud for ten tael cents a cubic yard, but only for a short time more, and that about 78,000 cubic yards would be needed. Its engineer, Wantz, offered two schemes: parallel sewers, one in each settlement, for 128,000 taels, or a single pipe four feet six inches across for 88,000. Covering the creek with a proper culvert he ruled out “because of its very great cost”.

The Council’s reply of 2 May 1914 is a study in municipal caution: “the Council is not a free agent in this matter”, because of the 1909 vote; but “conditions have changed during the past five years”, the project “is not financially of the magnitude which it then was”, and a special meeting might now agree. The Council then asked its officers, and their reports are the best description of the creek that survives.

The engineer, Charles Godfrey, reported on 9 May. “The creek is in a filthy condition.” Its bed had silted and was “covered with a filthy slime”, fed by straw thrown from the boats that moored in it, and in consequence “the outlets of most of the sewers from the Central District which fall in this direction are either partially or completely submerged.” Tidal scour on such a bed “is of little or no use and the sewers in consequence are deprived of the twice a day flush which they would otherwise receive.” Oliver’s problem of 1868 had become worse. Godfrey wanted separate culverts, 4 ft 6 in from Honan Road to the river, and put the Council’s share at about 104,000 taels, including half of a road 100 feet wide “which would provide for two 18’ footpaths and a metalled carriageway 64’ wide”. He added that if the Yangjingbang went, the Defence Creek should go with it, at 93,000 taels more. He also conceded the boatmen’s case: a closed sewer “would, no doubt, to a certain extent, be prejudicial to the removal of the nightsoil and would not be favourably regarded by the boatmen who make a practice of harbouring their boats in the Yangkingpang.”

Stanley, the health officer, put a figure on it on 29 April. The ordure contractor sub-let the Central District south of Hankow Road, and “all the ordure goes to the Yangkingpang”. Without the creek it would have to be carried to Suzhou Creek, and “the extra cost in labour for transport would amount to between Tls. 10,000 and Tls. 12,000 annually.” That was the price of a boulevard, in the currency the health department understood.

Two more parties had to be squared. The Race Club’s stewards, whose course drained into the Defence Creek, wrote on 20 May that they “can only consent to the culverting of the Defence Creek provided” the Council drained the course at its own expense, built and maintained a boundary and fence, and got the voting members’ agreement; on 19 June they offered to keep only a ten-foot strip. And the Council’s chairman, Pearce, asked the French consul-general for an assurance that the French would not run trams down the new boulevard and take the Nanking Road traffic; the French replied that no tramway would be laid “unless by previous arrangement with the Municipal Council and Ratepayers”.

The notice for a special meeting went out on 23 May: the Town Hall, Thursday 4 June 1914 at five, “to consider the question of converting the Yangkingpang and the Defence Creek into broad public thoroughfares”. The resolution, moved by Pearce, “was carried with but few dissentients”; the chairman’s letter to the French the next day says two or three, “in a meeting of 380”, with more than a third of the electors present or represented. The consuls filed no objection and approved on 17 July. The French Council wrote on 12 June that the Settlement’s assent “was an important factor in the vote” on its own side, and the Council replied on 22 June that “the Ratepayers have now become unanimous upon this much debated subject”. Hawks Pott, writing later, gives the date as 11 June and the vote as 200,000 taels; the Council’s own report has the June date and the smaller estimates, and the budget shows the money going out over two years: 70,000 taels for the Yangjingbang culvert and 58,000 for the Defence Creek in 1915, “the balance of cost, road making and so forth” falling on 1916.

The work

The French began laying their culvert at the beginning of November 1914, working from the river westwards. The Settlement laid its own tubes, four feet six inches across, cast by convicts in the gaol’s concrete yard, which the gaol’s report that September described as “congested with big sewer pipes destined for the culverting of the Yangkingpang Creek”; the gazetteer gives the main sewer as 1.35 metres. The Defence Creek was tackled first, from late October 1914, with the same tubes laid from the Peking Road bridge to the Loongfei bridge on reinforced-concrete foundations over piles of Fuzhou pine, backfilled with mud from Suzhou Creek; it had cost 17,987 taels by the year’s end, none of it in the budget. On 8 December 1914 the two councils fixed the width of the new road at 110 feet from the river to the Defence Creek. Both culverts were finished in 1915; every bridge over the two creeks came down except the concrete ones at Peking Road and at the Bund. Wantz, who had pushed the scheme through, died before the road was made.

Stanley’s warning came true at once. “The closing of the Yangkingpang disorganised the work of ordure collection from adjacent districts,” he wrote in his report for 1914, “leading to a strike of the coolies and serious inconvenience to the public.” He expected “careful organisation” to overcome “the difficulties of transport to the Soochow Creek”. The night-soil trade outlived the creek by a decade: by 1925 the Council’s own Public Works Department did the collecting, all but 92 cesspools in the Western District, which were to pass to the new sewage works there in 1926, and the engineers were calculating that sewage sludge held “two and a half times as much available Nitrogen” as the same bulk of ordure. The fly brigade, meanwhile, met “much sullen opposition on the part of the Chinese farmers, who breed flies in their ordure kongs”. The Council had learned the health officer’s lesson of 1909 in its own way: it was concreting the banks of Hongkew Creek between Hanbury and Yuhang Roads that year, not filling it, because the Settlement’s drains still ran into it.

A name

On 22 December 1915 the Council proposed to the French that the whole thoroughfare from the Bund to Manila Road be called Avenue Edward VII, after the king who had died in 1910, and the French Municipal Commission agreed the next day, glad, it said, to perpetuate the memory of “the illustrious sovereign”. The name was not new: a road called Avenue Edouard VII already ran west of the Defence Creek along the buried Chang Pang to Chungking Road, and the 1915 resolution extended it east to the river. The road opened in 1916 and, Pott noted, took some of the traffic off Nanking Road. It was the settlements’ first joint street; its two halves, policed by two councils, kept separate numbering and separate rules until the settlements ended. The Defence Creek became the widened Thibet Road, today’s Xizang Road Central. The French had already filled the moat of the walled city in 1911, laying a sewer 2.5 by 1.4 metres in it; that is Renmin Road.

What the sources disagree on

Pott’s date for the vote, 11 June, and his figure of 200,000 taels do not match the Council’s report, which has 4 June and separate estimates; the Council’s is the primary record and is used here. The 1909 vote survives only as the Council quoted it in 1914, “lost by 411 votes to 811”, and the 1909 report prints no debate, so the arguments the ratepayers heard that year are not known from the Council’s side. The 1870 drainage report gives no mileage of sewers; its schedule is illegible in the scan. And the 110-foot width agreed in December 1914 is wider than the 100 feet Godfrey costed in May; the budgets allowed for building the road “60’ to 85’ according to the widths actually available” and widening later, which is why Yan’an Road East still changes width block by block.

What to look for

Walk Yan’an Road East from the Bund and you are walking on the creek, with the former Settlement on your right and the former Concession on your left. The road’s width, and the way the side streets of the two settlements fail to line up across it, are the creek’s last traces. At the Bund end the river wall marks where the Yangjingbang bridge stood, the one built strong enough for trams; at the western end, where Xizang Road crosses, the two filled creeks met at Baxianqiao, the Bridge of the Eight Immortals, which gave the French Concession’s north-west corner its name. Fujian Road Central and Jiangxi Road Central run over the Settlement’s first drains of 1862 and 1869, still in the same alignments. Suzhou Creek, where the night-soil boats went after 1914, was never filled, and its banks are the concrete ones the Council began pouring in the 1920s.