The first trams, 1905–1928: how the Settlement got moving

The short answer. Shanghai’s foreign ratepayers turned down trams in 1898 and took seven more years to agree a concession. The cars finally ran in the early spring of 1908, from the Bund along Nanking Road to Jing’an Temple, and within a year had emptied the horse carriages off the popular routes. They did nothing to the rickshaw, which the Council’s tables show at a record 8,462 licences in November 1908 and whose pullers attacked the trams with iron bars in 1918. By 1911 the trams carried 27 million passengers a year, by 1928 128 million, most of them Chinese, most of them standing. The Council’s weekly Gazette for 1908 records the first year in detail: the argument over copper fares, the accidents, the fifteen cars blocking the Bund, and the fares war of the autumn.

1898–1905: seven years of no

When tramways were first put to a ratepayers’ meeting on 17 October 1898, the residents voted the idea down for fear of what rails would do to the carriages and rickshaws already in the streets. The Settlement then had no public transport beyond the licensed rickshaw, the wheelbarrow, the sedan chair and the hired carriage; the first two motor cars arrived in 1902. In September 1904 the Council invited tenders and got four, from Edinburgh, Brussels, Paris and a London company. On 17 May 1905 it chose the Edinburgh firm, Bruce, Peebles and Co., and when some ratepayers tried to tie the scheme to selling off the Council’s own electricity works, a special meeting on 6 June 1905 told the Council, almost unanimously, to get on with the trams.

The agreement

The contract printed in the Council’s report for 1905 is the Settlement’s first public-transport franchise. The company would build a metre-gauge electric tramway and run cars from six in the morning to ten at night, five to ten minutes apart. It would pay the Council five per cent of its gross takings. Fares were capped by section of a mile to a mile and a half: five Mexican cents first class and two second class, though a Council minute of 1908 quotes six for first class, and the two figures have not been reconciled. The power would come from the Council’s own generating station, which is why the Council had fought to keep it. The whole line had to be open within two years. After thirty-five years, and at seven-year intervals thereafter, the Council could buy the undertaking, which is the clause the Chinese gazetteer summarises as a thirty-five-year franchise. Two bridges had to be rebuilt to carry the rails, the Garden Bridge and the Zhejiang Road bridge, at an estimated £23,000; the steel Garden Bridge of 1907, today’s Waibaidu Bridge, is the result. Before the year was out the concession passed, with the Council’s consent, to a new company, the Shanghai Electric Construction Company, on condition that Shanghai residents could buy its shares.

Copper, not cents

The first thing the company and the Council argued about was money, and not the royalty but the coins. On 16 January 1908, with the cars weeks away, the company’s general manager wrote that clause 22 of the agreement fixed fares in Mexican dollar cents and that there was no such coin: “the absence in the local currency of Mexican dollar cents” meant the second-class passenger would pay in copper ten-cash pieces, and the company asked to charge three, five, seven and nine of them for the two-, four-, six- and eight-cent fares. It expected “about 50,000 to 60,000 passengers per day”, and reckoned it would lose fifteen per cent on the small money. A coupon system, it argued, would invite forgery, since it would be “quite impossible to properly scrutinize” sixty thousand tickets a day. The Council’s answer on 24 January allowed “three ten cash pieces for one section (second class) and two ten cash pieces for each further section”, but insisted on coupon books too: “tickets of a face value of two Mexican cents in books of 50” sold at “one Mexican dollar per book”, so that anyone who bought in advance paid the contract price. The arrangement was “provisional and tentative”. It was, in effect, a surcharge of a cent on the first section for anyone who paid in copper, and the Council’s budget for the year, published in February, counted on the company’s own estimate of “$1,500 and $2,000 per diem” in takings to produce 15,000 taels of royalty.

The second thing the Council worried about was the men whose living the trams would take. On 3 February 1908, on the police chief’s advice, it issued a Chinese notification: “certain evilly-disposed persons, chiefly of the mafoo and ricsha-coolie class, are conspiring together and holding meetings to arrange to create trouble against the Tramway Company.” One such meeting “is known to the Council to have taken place”. Stablemen “who think they will escape punishment because they are in the service of foreigners” were warned by name. “The tramways will in no way interfere with other trades, therefore let other trades not interfere with the tramways,” and rickshaw and carriage licences “will continue to be issued as usual.” The same budget admitted the other side of it: “the now imminent opening of the tramway cannot fail to influence the number of public ricshas.”

1908: the cars run

The day the first car ran is given three ways in the Council’s own papers, and they can be reconciled. The engineer’s report for February says “the cars have been running from the Bund to Jessfield Road, and in Carter Road and Avenue Road” before the month was out, and the police report for February calls “the inauguration of the tramway service” a feature of the month; that was trial running, with the junctions at Nanking and Chekiang Roads still being laid. The company’s first royalty return, printed in May, covers “receipts from March 5, the opening day, to the end of the March Quarter”, and came to $878; and the Waterworks Company, writing on 6 March about something else, began “As the tram cars have now started to run”. Public service, then, began on Thursday 5 March 1908. The Shanghai Concessions Gazetteer’s “March 1908” and the Chinese press’s 5 March agree with the royalty return. By the end of the year the system was complete except the Canton Road section, which the engineer thought too narrow for “rapid transit”.

The first accidents

The Gazette records the first fortnight’s trouble in the Council’s letter of 19 March. On the evening of 12 March “a collision between a fire truck and tram-car No. 39 was with difficulty averted, owing to refusal by the driver of the car to stop when so directed by an Indian Constable.” On 13 March an accident in Avenue Road, “witnessed by a tramway traffic Inspector but not reported to the Police”, injured two men, “one of whom had a leg broken”. The Council asked that drivers be told that negligence “will result in their being summonsed before the Mixed Court”. The fire brigade complained of the tramwaymen’s “disregard of the right of way” of its trucks after another incident on 24 March, and the police posted a notice that “tramcars in the Settlement are not allowed right of road over all other vehicles”. In May the Council’s minutes record that on 8 May “fifteen cars were standing on the Bund between the Foochow Road and Yangkingpang to the obstruction of general traffic”, and that the daily police reports contained “countless notes as to accidents, due in some cases to the car-drivers and in others to the notorious inattention of native pedestrians”; the Council “decides to take no proceedings against the Company at present”. The Waterworks Company had a different grievance: on 27 May it reported that “a considerable amount more than 5 percent of the total output of current is returning through the earth” and eating its mains, and asked that the trams on the offending section “be stopped running until the fault is put right”. The Council replied that a negative booster had cut the leakage below five per cent.

The regulations approved by the Watch Committee on 23 June, printed for two weeks as the concession required and posted in every car in English and Chinese, were the Settlement’s first traffic code for the machine age. A car “shall not be driven at such a speed as to become a danger to the Public”; cars “shall not come within eighty yards of one another”; no one was wilfully to let a vehicle “use the track of the tramway so as unnecessarily to impede the passage of a tramcar”. The company’s own bye-laws forbade passengers “to mount, enter or leave a car whilst it is in motion”, “to travel on the step or platform of a car”, to bring “any dog or other animal” or any parcel “exceeding 16-lb. in weight or one cubic foot”, and let the conductor refuse anyone whose clothing “might soil or injure the dress or clothing of any passenger”. That last rule, read against the second-class fares, was the one that sorted the passengers.

The fares war

By July the company had found the arithmetic did not work. On 21 July it proposed a new scale: shorter sections of half to three-quarters of a mile, first-class season tickets at $8 a month, and 164 changes of fare of which “101 are reductions and only sixty-three are increases”. “The emptiness of our first-class compartments shows that something is wrong,” it wrote; “the comparatively small number of passengers in proportion to the length of line, number of cars, and population shows that something is wrong.” The Council read the scheme as the opposite of a reduction. Its letter of 14 September said it was “reluctant to assent to a scheme for doubling, and in some cases trebling, the charge to 2nd-class passengers”, who were nine in ten of the riders, and when the company offered season tickets at $10 instead of $8 from 1 October, the Council called the offer “a retaliatory measure”. The company gave way on the seasons: $8 from 1 October, for which the Council thanked it on 24 September. It sold 334 in October and 385 in November. The larger scheme was still undecided when the volume closes.

The returns the company sent the Council each month show what it was arguing about.

Month, 1908	Passengers	Net receipts ($)	Car-miles	Loss by exchange
June	880,189	32,064	173,945	15.5%
July	891,708	31,692	169,743	17.4%
August	900,911	31,781	163,127	18.1%
September	898,517	31,612	169,250	18.5%
October	893,173	32,369	174,920	18.6%
November	885,230	32,846	169,702	19.1%

Thirty thousand passengers a day, half the company’s January forecast, and receipts flat at about $32,000 a month while the copper it collected lost a fifth of its value against the silver it kept its books in; “the increase in number of passengers has been counterbalanced by adverse exchange,” the company told the Council. The October return is the first to count the classes: 82,138 first-class cash fares and 45,454 rides on season tickets against 765,581 second-class. The company’s trouble was that the passengers it had were the ones paying two cents. The Council, for its part, agreed from 1 December to maintain the macadam beside the rails for 1.30 taels per fang a year, charged to the company.

What the trams did to the streets

The Council’s finance department counted everything on wheels, and its 1908 tables record the change. The trams, it wrote, had “almost monopolized” the traffic to Bubbling Well and to the Point. Public carriage licences fell from an average of 648 a month to 595; private carriages from 993 a quarter to 916; licensed ponies from 1,289 to 1,122. Sedan chairs dropped from 661 to 619, their remaining customers, the report noted, mostly Chinese doctors. Motor cars rose from 96 to 119. The rickshaw was unmoved: 8,173 public rickshaws a month on average, and a record 8,462 in November, which the Council put down to the flow of migrants from the countryside for whom pulling a rickshaw was the readiest living. Wheelbarrows, owned by the men who pushed them, still averaged 7,060 a month. The Shanghai Club stopped buying the Council’s rickshaw tickets in July; its members had taken to the tram.

The cars ran 1.5 million car-miles in 1908 and earned the Council 10,759 taels in royalty, two-thirds of what the budget had hoped. The French company opened its own line the same year, from Xinkaihe by the French Bund and Rue du Consulat to Xujiahui, and by the end of 1908 the two concessions had eleven routes and 93 cars between them.

1911–1918: standing room only

Hawks Pott, who watched it happen, wrote that the narrow gauge chosen for the narrow streets cut the cars’ capacity and forced the company to hitch trailers, that some Chinese riders were at first “suspicious as to the safety of riding in conveyances moved by the mysterious electric current”, and that “convenience and cheapness soon overcame their scruples”. In 1911 the trams carried 27,257,250 passengers, up from 18,751,215 the year before, and the police spent the year reporting overcrowding and stock “totally inadequate” to the traffic; six people were killed and 82 hurt getting on and off moving trams and other vehicles. The same report notes the first metered taxi-cabs in August 1911.

By 1917 there were fifteen routes, the newest from Bund South to Markham Road, worked by 90 tramcars, 70 trailers and 7 “railless cars”, the trolleybuses introduced about 1914 for cross-town traffic, which the company’s chairman said in 1916 had “been working continuously ever since” and “proved a success”. The trams carried 73,461,492 passengers in 1917 and 78,683,690 in 1918, roughly 200,000 a day, and the accident column of the police report had become a fixed item: “5 persons killed and 99 persons injured by improperly getting on or off tramcars in motion” in 1917, four and 127 in 1918. The rickshaw trade, capped at 8,000 licences, had a different problem: owners complained they could not find men to pull, because “labour emigration to Europe and the Near East”, the Chinese Labour Corps of the war, had taken them.

17 April 1918: the rickshaw men attack the trams

The warning of February 1908 came true ten years late. Early in April 1918 the police began enforcing new traffic rules that confined rickshaws to stands and forbade touting in the streets, and Chinese constables confiscated the licence plates of men who disobeyed. On the morning of Wednesday 17 April, the Council’s report says, “unusually large crowds were gathering in the vicinity of the Carter and Sinza Roads” from about eight o’clock, and by the time reinforcements reached “the few unarmed police then on duty”, “considerable damage had already been done to a number of tramcars in the locality of the Avenue, Carter, Sinza and Markham Roads”. Pott, who had the police evidence, describes Inspector Aiers finding a crowd at the junction of Avenue and Carter Roads “attacking a stationary tram with stones, sticks and iron bars” at about half-past eight, being beaten about the head when he intervened, and another car “containing passengers” attacked at the same junction “by 200 rioters with cross-bars, sticks and bamboos”; the crowd grew to about 700. The police fired, “wounding three of the rioters, two of whom subsequently died”. Pott says one man was killed; the Council’s own report, which has two, is the primary source. The Volunteers were called out from six that evening until six the next morning, and were not needed.

The Council’s explanation is the plainest statement in its reports of what the trams had done to the city’s oldest trade. The riot was “attributable to the resentment of the coolies at the more rigorous enforcement of the traffic regulations”, “precipitated by the seizure and confiscation of a large number of licence plates by Chinese Constables”; and “the attacks on the tramcars were due to the fact that, to the ricsha coolie, the tramcar is the only serious rival means of locomotion in the Settlement.” The rumour in the streets, Pott adds, was that the tramway company had got the new rules passed. The Council then did what it had set out to do: the stands were “largely increased”, and the plan “for the relegation of the ricshas to stands” was “gradually developed without further trouble or opposition on the part of those affected”.

1928: a hundred cars, a hundred trailers, and the bus

By 1928 the tramway company ran 100 motor cars, 100 trailers and 85 railless cars, and carried 128,325,243 passengers, against 93,807,706 the year before, “no strikes having occurred”. Trolleybus route 20, from Bubbling Well to Jessfield Park by Yuyuen Road, opened at the end of September; the track at the Nanking Road and Bund corner was realigned in August to ease the jam there. The bus had arrived too. Pott records the China General Omnibus Company starting “in August” of a year about 1924, with a prospectus promising “no overcrowding and every passenger was to be entitled to a seat”, rules “gradually relaxed” until “there came to be little choice between the bus and the tram”. In 1928 its fleet grew from 52 to 74, route 1 to Hongkew Park reopened in February and route 4 to the aerodrome began in July; the Council licensed 86 omnibuses against 18 in 1924, and from April charged the bus company a fee per mile run, which brought in 31,039.72 taels that year beside 138,271.43 taels of tramway royalty, thirteen times the royalty of 1908. The police counted 1,475 accidents involving trams and 503 involving buses. The strikes that year were other people’s: the French tramway’s 1,300 employees from 3 to 16 December, and the rickshaw coolies from 8 to 11 August.

The British company outlived the Settlement by a decade. Chinese Wikipedia, citing the city archives, records joint running with the French company’s lines from 18 December 1950, the requisition of the British company by the military control commission on 20 November 1952 and its renaming as the Shanghai Tramway Company on 9 December; the last tram line in the city, route 3 from Hongkou Park to Wujiaochang, was taken up on 1 December 1975.

What the sources disagree on

The opening date is February in the police report and 5 March in the royalty return; the article takes February as trial running and 5 March as the public opening, which is a reading, not a statement in the sources. The first-class fare cap is five cents in the 1905 agreement and six in a 1908 Council letter. Pott has one man killed on 17 April 1918, the Council’s report two; Pott dates the riot in a chapter on 1917–18 and the Council’s report for 1918 fixes the year. Pott’s dates for the trolleybus and the bus are not printed beside the passages, and are given here as “about 1914” and “about 1924” on the strength of the chapters they sit in. The passenger totals are the company’s own returns to the Council, which took five per cent of the receipts and had reason to check them.

What to look for

Nanjing Road East, the first line’s route, kept its rails until the 1960s; the wood-block paving laid between them in 1906 is long gone. Waibaidu Bridge still carries the heavier deck built for the trams in 1907. The Jing’an Temple terminus, where the Council built a public latrine at the company’s half-expense in 1908, is now the plaza in front of the rebuilt temple. The junction of Avenue and Carter Roads where the rickshaw men stoned the trams is the crossing of Beijing Road West and Shimen 2nd Road, a street of shops with no plaque. On the Bund the trams turned at Canton Road, today’s Guangdong Road; the realignment of 1928 is the wide corner there now.