The outside roads: how the Council built beyond its boundary, and who policed it, 1862–1934

The short answer. The Municipal Council’s roads did not stop at the Settlement’s boundary. From 1862, when the racing club built a carriage road out to the Bubbling Well and the Council laid Sinza, Jessfield and Markham Roads beyond its own line, it bought land from Chinese farmers “in strict accordance with Article VI of the Land Regulations” and made roads of it, then lit them, watered them, policed them and, from 1905, taxed the houses along them. There were 13¼ miles of outside roads in 1893, 30 kilometres by 1904 and 48 miles in 1932, and the whole Western District of today’s Shanghai between Jing’an Temple and Hongqiao grew along them. The Chinese authorities never accepted the arrangement; the Council never gave it up; and the question of whose police walked these roads was still unsettled when the Settlement itself ended. This is the story from the Council’s reports, Pott and the gazetteer.

1862–1866: the race road and the military roads

The first outside road was a sporting one. In 1862 the Shanghai race club, with money from the sale of its old course, built a carriage road from the Defence Creek west to Jing’an Temple, about 3.22 kilometres, first called Yongquan Road and then Bubbling Well Road. The same year, the gazetteer records, the Council laid Sinza, Jessfield and Markham Roads beyond its limits: the first “extra-settlement” roads, built in the Taiping emergency. Pott tells it from Jessfield Road: it “came into existence connecting with the Fan-wang-tu (Van-waung-doo) Ferry. Afterwards this road was kept up for a time by Mr. James Hogg, and later was taken over by the Council”, and took its name from Jessfield, the country place that became St John’s University. Bubbling Well Road followed in 1866, when the racecourse shareholders, finding the upkeep too dear, asked the Council to take it, and the ratepayers agreed. By 1880 “the footpath along the North side of the road has been completed, extending from the Defence Creek to the Well and forming pleasant and safe walk for pedestrians”, and the Council was already wondering “whether we might not ask for a certain amount along the Bubbling Well Road” in the next boundary extension.

1883–1893: ground rent, Sikhs and a committee of residents

The outside roads sat on Chinese land, and the Council paid for the privilege. In 1883 the ratepayers resolved, “by a majority of 102 against 93 votes”, “that the Council be instructed to pay the Chinese Government ground rent for the current year at the agreed rate of 1,500 cash per mow on all land for which they hold title deeds”, and the chairman, A. Myburgh, wrote to the senior consul on 19 April that it would. Policing came with a scare. “In August 1884, owing to the disturbed state of the country in this neighbourhood consequent upon the unsettled political relations between France and China, it was considered necessary to afford some protection to the residents outside the limits,” and sixteen Sikh constables were engaged “to police the Bubbling Well and other roads”, in Pott’s words: the first Sikhs in the Settlement’s force. When the war scare passed the ratepayers kept the patrol “on the understanding that at least Tls. 1,800 per annum of the cost of maintaining such force shall be provided by private subscription”, and for a decade a “Bubbling Well Road Committee” of residents collected it: $2,187 in 1887 “against $2,336 last year”, 1,475 taels from an average of 52 subscribers a month in 1890, 1,394 from 57 in 1893. The Gas Company wanted to light “the whole of this road” in 1890 and was told the ratepayers must decide. The Council was careful about what it took on: in 1893 it was “not prepared at present to take over the new road between the Sinza and Bubbling Well roads, as it is outside the Settlement, and no taxes can be collected from the occupants of the houses on it”. The same report measured what it had: “the total mileage of the Outside Roads is 13¼ miles”, 69,821 feet, of which Siccawei Road was 18,400 feet, Bubbling Well Road 11,302, Yangtszepoo Road 10,530, Carter and Markham Roads 6,628, New Cemetery Road 2,749 and the cross road to Jessfield 842.

1899–1905: the extension swallows the roads, and the Council builds more

The extension of 1899 took in most of them. Its southern line ran “along the line of the northern branch of the Great Western Road, and thereafter along that road to the Temple of Agriculture in the rear of the Bubbling Well village”, and Pott’s table gives the result: “Area in square miles 2.75 8.35; Area in English acres 1,768 5,084”. The Council at once began again beyond the new line. It bought the land for the North Soochow Road extension, Kuang Fu Road, “from the registered owners in the year 1900” and built it in 1902; in 1901 it built Hungjao, Rubicon and Brenan Roads, 20.92 kilometres, west of the Western District; in 1903 it extended North Szechuen Road to the rifle range; by 1904 the outside roads ran to 30.57 kilometres, more than the two settlements had owned before 1899. The legal basis was the regulation Pott quotes, Land Regulation VI, which let the Council “purchase land leading or being out of the Settlement, or to accept land from foreign or native owners upon terms to be mutually agreed upon”. The Chinese side disputed what followed from ownership. When its nursery land on Hungjao Road was bought in January 1903, “final payment has, however, now been made, owing to the Taotai’s direct refusal to issue deeds in this neighbourhood”; and when a Spanish consul declared in 1905 that his consulate “does not recognise any jurisdiction” of municipal police outside the limits, the Council replied that “the Municipal Police have never claimed or attempted to exercise any jurisdiction whatsoever.” It had, however, begun to tax. From 1 July 1905, under its agreement with the Shanghai Waterworks Company, “provision has been made for collecting the equivalent of half-rates from residents beyond Settlement limits”: water came only to those who paid.

1907–1914: “a very strong lever”

The daotai, Pott records, “claimed the right of Chinese police on the roads built by the Council” in 1907, and “in 1908 the Taotai protested against the filling of the Shanghai-Paoshan boundary creek and construction thereon of a road”. The Council’s reply to a protest of December 1908, about a road between Hungjao Road and Suzhou Creek three li long with “Municipal boundary stones with foreign letters on them”, stated its doctrine: “the road in question, with others in the district, are being arranged, as roads beyond the limits of the Settlement have been in the past, in strict accordance with the provisions of Article VI of the Land Regulations”, the Council “purchasing land leading or being out of the Settlement from the native owners upon terms mutually agreed upon, for the purpose of converting the same into roads”. The land was held oddly: “in former cases the Council has purchased the road-land direct from the native owners, and it is then excluded from consular title deeds”, or “the whole of the land was registered at the British Land Office, and thereafter transferred by deed to the Council to hold in trust for the public”.

The outside rate was the Council’s instrument, and it said so. Its letter of 7 July 1909 to the Waterworks directors explained that residents near the Settlement “while living in its vicinity and enjoying the advantages and facilities which such vicinity secured for them, were until 1905 exempt from any contribution towards its upkeep”, that the Council was now “taxing as many as 21 foreign and 424 native houses in the North Honan Road” alone, and that “the levy of this ‘outside’ rate is at present a very strong lever in the Council’s hands for bringing the extension of the Settlement about”. The houses multiplied: 275 foreign and 3,719 native houses outside the limits assessed in 1908 against 182 and 2,772 in 1907, about 10,000 taels from each class, “to the favourable conditions obtained by residents outside limits as to tramway transit and lower rates may be attributed the development”. “Land for about 4.75 miles of new road has been acquired in the Eastern and Western Districts” that year. The police asked in 1910 for “cycle patrols by selected Chinese Constables under the control of a Foreign Police Sergeant, with a view to constant supervision over outlying roads and residences”, and the ratepayers, in March 1909, had asked for “a less forward policy in the construction of new roads”. The mileage under the Council’s control was “a little over 110 miles” in 1911, 117 in 1913, 118 in 1914.

1917–1929: the special rate and the Great Western Road

The rate hardened into a system. In 1917 the budget levied the “General Municipal Rate at 6 per cent., on the assessed rentals of houses beyond Settlement limits, under provision of the agreement of July 1, 1905, with the Shanghai Waterworks Co., Ld.”, against 12 per cent inside; the agreement’s clause 4 “expressly provides that your Company shall not deliver water to any resident outside the Settlement, except during such time as he shall remain bound by agreement with the Council to pay the extra-Settlement taxation”, and “residents on the French side of the Great Western and Siccawei Roads are no longer bound to pay this tax” since the French extension of 1914. From 1 April 1923 it was a “Special Rate at 12 per cent” “payable by the occupants, quarterly in advance, under provision of the Waterworks Agreement 1905 and the Telephone Agreement”, and from 1 April 1929 14 per cent, with the Electricity Department’s supply added to the lever. The chairman H. G. Simms described North Chekiang Road in 1922 as “a Council road and thus subject to the jurisdiction of the Council, albeit beyond the limits of the Settlement boundary”.

The Great Western Road extension was the last large road built this way, and the most contested. “The construction of the Great Western Road Extension, which was commenced towards the end of November last, following upon purchase of the requisite land therefor,” drew a protest from the Chinese commissioner for foreign affairs in January 1923; the Council answered that “the land had been duly bought and paid for” under Land Regulation VI, and by that spring the road “has been raised and formed for a length of 2,100 feet west of Edinburgh Road”. The chairman told the ratepayers that, excluding the extension, “the Council at present owns 19¼ miles of roads in the Western District beyond the Settlement boundary acquired and laid out under the powers referred to”, and Pott, who gives the same figure, records that “in spite of protest and opposition on the part of the Chinese authorities, this work was carried to completion”. The road network kept growing, 139.327 miles under the Council in 1922, of which the Western District had 56.945, 166.502 in 1925, 173.570 in 1928 with 78.387 in the Western District and 54.22 miles of alleyways besides.

1925–1934: whose police?

After 1925 the roads were a question of sovereignty. The demands circulated in June 1925 included: “the Shanghai Municipal Council shall not construct roads beyond the Settlement boundaries. The roads already constructed shall be turned over unconditionally to the Chinese Government.” The Council went on calling Jessfield Road “a Municipal thoroughfare beyond limits”. On Kuang Fu Road the Chinese acted: “in October, 1926, Yen Ch’ung-yang, the former Chief of Police, assigned beats to his men and numbered the houses here”, and in December 1927 the Chinese authorities complained that the municipal police patrolled “a road in Chinese territory where they cannot patrol or interfere in the exercise of our sovereign rights”. The Council replied on 12 January 1928 that “an arrangement exists between the Consular Body and the Chinese Authorities that no change should be made in the status of any road beyond the limits of the Settlement until the whole question of such outside roads has been brought up for consideration”, and that it “is not prepared to relinquish its rights in respect to this road”. Its mounted police were kept in 1929 partly because they “provides a cheap and efficient means of patrolling the outside roads and environments of the Settlement”. The police described their beat in 1932 as “8.72 square miles and 48 miles of outside roads”. That year the Waterworks reported “the refusal of the Chinese authorities to permit roads to be opened for the purpose of laying any new mains” in the outside-road areas under the modus vivendi, and in 1934 the negotiations had stalled: “the failure to make faster progress must be attributed primarily to the great difficulty experienced in reconciling the divergent views of the Chinese and Japanese with regard to the composition and personnel of a special police force” for the outside-roads area, on which, the Council noted, the water, telephone and electricity franchises all depended. The roads were 183.028 miles under the Council by then, 81.678 of them in the Western District, and the question of who policed the ones beyond the line was never answered before 1937 made it moot.

What the sources disagree on

The Council’s 1893 table gives 69,821 feet for the outside roads, which is 13.22 miles, printed as 13¼; two of its lines are unreadable. The Western District mileage beyond the boundary in 1923 prints as “19)” in the Gazette and “1914” in Pott, that is 19¼ or 19½. Pott’s 8.35 square miles and 5,084 acres for the extended Settlement do not agree with each other or with the Council’s later 5,584 acres. The 1908 report’s “66 miles of new road” added in a year is implausible against the 4.75 miles of land acquired and is not used. The outside rate was not voluntary in any legal sense once water, telephone and electricity were tied to it; the Council’s own word for it in 1905 was “half-rates” and in 1909 “a very strong lever”. Pott dates the daotai’s claim to 1907 and the boundary-creek protest to 1908; the Council’s 1909 correspondence is the first in the reports available. Whether the road mileages of 1911–1934 include the outside roads the reports do not say; the police figure of 48 miles for 1932 is the only separate count after 1893.

What to look for

Nanjing Road West is the race road of 1862 for its whole length from People’s Square to Jing’an Temple; the temple at its west end was the “Well” the footpath of 1880 reached, and the Settlement boundary of 1899 ran just beyond it. Wanhangdu Road, the old Jessfield Road, still bends north-west from Jing’an Temple toward the campus that was St John’s University and the ferry it was built to reach. Yan’an Road West beyond Jiangsu Road is the Great Western Road extension of 1922–23, now under the elevated expressway. Hongqiao Road is the 1901 outside road to the hills, with the Council’s cemetery and nursery land along it. Guangfu Road on the north bank of Suzhou Creek is the road whose houses the Chinese police numbered in 1926; the old warehouses along it are later than the dispute. None of the Council’s boundary stones “with foreign letters on them” is known to survive on these roads.