The Public Garden on the Bund: who was let in, 1868–1932

The short answer. The small park at the north end of the Bund, today’s Huangpu Park, was laid out in 1868 on mud in front of the British consulate as a garden for the foreign community. For sixty years the Municipal Council kept Chinese residents out of it: by a constable’s say-so in 1881, by weekly tickets handed out at a committee’s discretion from the mid-1880s, and from 1909 by a printed rule. Chinese ratepayers petitioned against the exclusion in 1881, 1885 and 1889, each time in careful, reasonable prose, and each time the Council answered that the garden was too small. On 1 June 1928 it opened to everyone for ten copper cents, and 675,000 people went in before the year was out. The famous sign reading “No dogs and Chinese” never existed as one sentence. The two rules were real, and they stood on the same board.

1868: a garden on the consular mud-flat

The ground was not land at all when the Settlement began. Charles Darwent, whose handbook of 1904 is the best contemporary account, records that it formed by silt gathering round a small vessel that sank near the site of the later bandstand, in front of the British consulate. Under the Land Regulations of 1854 an accretion to the consular lots was ceded for public use. In 1862 the Recreation Fund Trustees, who managed the proceeds of the old racecourse, voted 10,000 taels to lay the ground out. In 1864 the Foreign Office agreed to its becoming a garden, on condition that it reverted to the Crown if it ever ceased to be one. In 1866 the Council filled it with mud dredged from the Yangjingbang, and on 8 August 1868 the garden was handed to a committee of management. Consul Winchester’s letter of June 1868 called it a recreation ground “for the use of the foreign community”, words the Council would quote back for decades. The cost to 1881 was 29,060 taels. The whole garden was about 28 mu, under two hectares, and Darwent called it “much too small, but invaluable”, a resort for “infant Shanghai” where the Town Band played at five in the afternoon in early summer and at nine at night in July and August.

By 1881 the garden cost the Council about 1,600 taels a year to keep, and the band that played in it, twenty-one musicians recruited in Manila under a bandmaster named Vela, cost nearly three times that. A new bandstand went up in the spring of 1889, and the band that year had twenty-five men, five of them newly arrived from Manila. The music mattered to what followed. When Chinese residents asked to come in, it was the band evenings they asked for.

1881: the complaint

In April 1881 a group of Chinese residents, among them Yung King-yen and Tong Mow-chee, wrote to the Council. They had gone to the garden; the police at the gate had refused them; no notice anywhere said that Chinese were excluded. The Council’s first answer, on 20 April, was conciliatory: the constable had made a mistake, and the police were authorised to admit “respectable and well-dressed” Chinese. Five days later a second letter closed the door again. The Council did not intend to recognise any right of Chinese residents to use the garden, which was, it said, of limited size. The exchange is printed in full in the Council’s report for 1881. It set the pattern: admission at the gatekeeper’s discretion, and no right.

1885: “the mere test of race”

On 25 November 1885 seven Chinese ratepayers sent the Council a longer argument. They began where the Council was weakest: the land had been granted for public recreation, and Chinese ratepayers, “represented by the amount of direct taxation”, contributed largely to the municipal government. They conceded the Council’s real reason, that “the small area of the ground” made some limit on numbers necessary for the comfort of those inside, and said they did not question the practical justice of that. What they would not accept was the method: “the exclusion on the mere test of race is untenable from grounds both of expediency and international courtesy.” Their Japanese and Korean neighbours walked freely into the Recreation Ground, while Chinese “from the accident of costume” were barred whatever their social condition. It was embarrassing, they wrote, to receive distinguished visitors from other provinces and have to tell them they could not enter the garden on the Bund.

They proposed three things. Passes for bona fide native visitors, granted by the Council, by a well-known resident or by a committee of respectable Chinese. Two or three days a week, Saturdays and Sundays, set aside for Chinese of known respectability. And the grass plots along the Bund, then fenced off with posts and chains, laid out as an extension of the garden and opened to the whole community.

The Council’s reply of 2 December 1885 was short. It sympathised with the feelings behind the request, but was “not prepared to grant the privileges sought for without an expression of their wishes on the subject from the foreign community”, and suggested the ratepayers’ meeting of February 1886. The decision, in other words, belonged to the foreign electorate, in which no Chinese ratepayer had a vote.

1889: the tickets

What came out of the 1886 meeting is not printed in the reports that survive, but by 1889 a system was in place, and the Garden Committee’s report for that year describes it with some irritation. “For several years a system of tickets of admission for natives to visit the Garden to view the plants and greenhouses has been in force,” it says, with few applications until the spring of 1889, “when, owing to a movement made by some influential Chinese, the applications for tickets rapidly increased until it was necessary to put a limit on the number of admissions.” The committee’s objections are worth quoting because they are the Council’s own: “The habits and customs of the natives though perhaps harmless, are not in accordance with Western ideas,” which had produced complaints from foreign users; and it appeared that “the Garden and Greenhouses were not the objects of the attraction, but the Music and the lights” at the band performances, when there was already hardly room for the growing foreign population. Tickets had been altered or reused after their dates expired. In all 185 tickets were issued in 1889, 65 of them in August, most “for self and friends”; one admitted eighteen people.

The “movement made by some influential Chinese” was a petition from Chinese merchants, forwarded to the Council by the daotai on 11 March 1889 and printed in the same report. It is the most direct statement in the files. The garden, the merchants wrote, was not a place of such extraordinary interest that they were impatient to see it; but “the site being on our Chinese ground, and that, nevertheless, although its funds are principally raised from Chinese, we Chinese cannot go a step into it, we consider to be an unfair arrangement, which conveys a reproach to us personally, and detracts something from the dignity of our country.” They asked for rules “similar to the rules for the Public Gardens at Hongkong and Singapore”. They had put the case to the Council’s chairman, who had said he “fully appreciated the justice of our remarks”; but the foreigners they had asked to speak for them at the ratepayers’ meeting had excused themselves “on a variety of grounds”. The daotai’s covering letter conceded the Council’s fear: if Chinese were admitted as a general rule, “all sorts of people would find their way in and trample everything in the Garden under foot”, so some selection was natural.

Chairman John Macgregor answered on 23 March 1889. The Garden Committee had “for some years past” granted “respectable Chinese, upon application, tickets which ensure admission available for one week at a time”; in that respect, he said, the petition of 1885 “has been granted”. The tickets were issued at the discretion of the committee’s members or the Council’s secretary. He then restated the policy in the words that governed it until 1928: the ground “was long ago specially set aside for the exclusive use of foreigners and is used mainly as a resort for Ladies with Children and their attendants”, and were Chinese admitted without regulation, “it might follow from the magnitude of their numbers that the Gardens, from their very small extent, would become quite useless for the purposes for which they were originally constructed.” He hoped the Chinese would use the privilege “with the moderation they have done in the past”.

1890: a garden “for all nations”, somewhere else

The Council’s answer to the pressure was a second garden. On 18 September 1889 a special ratepayers’ meeting resolved to turn a foreshore on Suzhou Creek, east of today’s Zhejiang Road bridge, into a park; its owner’s agents surrendered it as a gift to the public on condition that it was laid out as a garden and never built on. The 1890 budget put 8,000 taels into it, for a garden “open to all well-conducted persons, whatever may be their nationality”. The daotai, who had first objected that the foreshore belonged to the Chinese government, approved the regulations in July and asked for a Chinese version to be posted. On 18 December 1890 Macgregor opened it as a garden “for the use of people of all nations, Chinese and Foreigners alike”, and the daotai’s inscription over the gate, Huan Hai Lien Huan, wished the world’s peoples joy together.

It was a small garden, six to eight mu depending on which register you read, and it did not stay a garden for all nations long. Darwent in 1904 calls it simply “the Chinese Gardens”, opened “for the benefit of the Chinese of the settlement”. The superintendent of parks in 1909 called it “the resort of the coolie class who monopolise it and consequently the better classes do not frequent it”. The Council’s reports thereafter speak of “the Public Garden” on the Bund and, separately, of “the Chinese Public Garden” on Soochow Road, and the separation was the point.

The garden fills up

Meanwhile the Bund garden acquired its furniture. In 1893 the Settlement celebrated the jubilee of the opening of the port, and the Garden Committee built a circular tank during the festivities; the jubilee programme has the “Jubilee Fountain in Public Garden illuminated” at six in the evening, and the works report calls it a memorial of the jubilee. Pott later wrote that the fountain commemorated “the first Jubilee”, which readers have taken to mean Queen Victoria’s of 1887; the Council’s own report of 1893 is clear that it was the port’s. Darwent in 1904 found two fountains, one at the south end with two terra-cotta figures. The Margary memorial, raised by subscription in 1880 where the Bund divided into Soochow Road and the bridge approach, was moved to the north end of the garden in 1907. In 1909 a foreign contractor was allowed to supply paid chairs on band evenings, and in 1914 the superintendent was moving three to six hundred chairs a day between the parks to meet demand. He noted, with the Council’s rules in one hand and the mothers of Shanghai in the other, that “the regulations forbid Chinese amahs sitting on the chairs during a band concert”, that the order was not always obeyed because mothers of young babies wanted the amah and the baby beside them, and that he had solved it by supplying Chinese stools for the amahs.

The other parks, and the first printed rule

The garden on the Bund was never the Council’s only open space, and the exclusion travelled with the Council as it bought land. Darwent in 1904 lists a children’s playground between Boone and Quinsan Roads that was then called Hongkew Park and is the Quinsan Square of later reports, “a mere playground for children”; by 1914 it was entered by 800 children a day in summer. Beside the rifle range in Hongkou a new recreation ground of about 258 mu was being laid out in 1904 to a design by J. W. Stuckey, with a 40,000-tael loan from the Recreation Fund Trustees; the Council spent 10,000 taels raising and turfing part of it in 1905, and the layout, with a nine-hole golf course and a bowling green, was finished in May 1909. That is the Hongkew Recreation Ground, called Hongkew Park from the 1920s and Lu Xun Park today. Its superintendent thought it would “prove to be the most lasting memorial which the present Council has established”, and made in it, in the spring of 1909, “the first space set apart entirely for the use of children”. Its visitors went from 23,672 in the last half of 1907 to 58,633 in 1908 and 78,963 in 1909; 178,169 in 1914; and 354,917 in 1925.

Its regulations, approved in September 1909, are the earliest printed code in the Council’s reports that bars Chinese, and they say so without euphemism. Rule 3: “No Chinese are admitted except servants in attendance upon foreigners.” Rule 4: “No Indians are admitted unless respectably dressed.” Rule 5 kept out horses, ponies, vehicles and bicycles; rule 7 admitted dogs only “properly muzzled and led on leash”. Printed beneath them was a Japanese consular notification of 5 September 1903 requiring Japanese men entering the Public Gardens to wear foreign clothes or haori and hakama, a reminder that the gate was policed by costume as much as by race, exactly as the petitioners of 1885 had complained. A photograph of the Public Garden’s own board dated 22 June 1911, published by the historian Robert Bickers, gives the Bund garden’s rule in the same words.

The Council was buying other ground too. In 1909 it assembled Wayside Park strip by strip, a Land Commission award fixing 1,000 taels a mu where the Chinese owner had asked 2,200; in the same year it declined a park for the Western District because the expense “would not be justified”. That changed in 1914, when the Public Recreation Ground Committee and the Recreation Fund Trustees wrote on 7 March that about 120 mu at Jessfield, “formerly part of the Unkaza property”, opposite St John’s University, could be had for 123,000 taels. The ratepayers’ meeting of 20 March 1914 approved the purchase, the Trustees finding 20,000 taels of the price, and Jessfield Park was opened to the public the same year, before much had been laid out. Its provisional regulations barred motor-cars, carriages, rickshaws and unmuzzled dogs. They said nothing about nationality, and the park, which lay outside the Settlement on an extra-settlement road, seems to have been the one Council park where the question was left to the gate. By 1925 it had 218,480 visitors and a zoo the superintendent described as “an occasional monkey and a few birds”, which 17,626 people paid to see.

1917: the rules in print

The regulations that made the garden famous are known from a photograph of the notice board, dated 13 September 1917 and signed by the Council’s secretary. There were ten rules. The first said the gardens were reserved for the foreign community. The third required visitors to be respectably dressed. The fourth said dogs and bicycles were not admitted. Others covered perambulators, flower-picking, the bandstand enclosure, and nurses minding foreign children, who were not to occupy the seats during band performances. The rule about dogs and the rule about Chinese residents were separate lines on the same board, which is why the sign so many people remember, with the two joined into one insult, has never been found. Bickers and Jeffrey Wasserstrom, who went through the photographs and the files in 1995, concluded that the single sentence was an urban legend “which spoke to an essential truth”: most Chinese were kept out of the garden for some sixty years, and the story of the sign began to circulate around 1914, while the exclusion was in force.

1926–1928: the gates open

The May Thirtieth shooting of 1925 made the garden’s rule a political question rather than a nuisance. In 1926 the Council asked the Chinese General Chamber of Commerce to name three men to talk about the parks. On 13 April 1927 the foreign ratepayers resolved that Jessfield and Hongkew Parks, the Public Garden, the Bund lawns and foreshore, Quinsan Gardens and Brenan Piece should be “opened to the Chinese on the same terms as foreigners”, then added an amendment that nothing be done until conditions became normal; it was the year of the Northern Expedition, and the Council was, in Hawks Pott’s phrase, doing no more than conserving its position. On 18 April 1928 the meeting passed a similar resolution and gave the Council power to enforce new regulations from 1 June.

The regulations issued on 17 May 1928 said nothing about nationality. Everyone paid ten copper cents at the gate, or bought a season ticket for a dollar; children under twelve came in free with an adult; hawkers, beggars and the badly dressed were still turned away. The garden opened to the Chinese public on 1 June. On the Dragon Boat Festival that month 16,436 people passed through the gates in a day. Across all the Council’s parks the counts for June, July and August 1928 were 306,000, 420,000 and 319,000 visitors, against 18,000, 50,000 and 87,000 in the same months of 1927, a rise of more than tenfold in June alone. The superintendent complained that the Bund garden was at times “a seething mass”, closed the Garden Bridge entrance and the gate by the Peking Road jetty, and put a fence inside the wall to stop season tickets being handed through the railings. He also reported that the crowds behaved well and that few prosecutions followed. Between 1 June and the end of the year the Public Garden admitted 675,602 people, more than Hongkew Park or Jessfield Park. Hongkew Park let in Chinese tennis and football clubs for the first time. The 1890 garden on Soochow Road, no longer needed, was reported levelled.

After 1928: two million a year

Once the gates were open the parks became, by the Council’s own count, the most used thing it owned. In 1932 the superintendent recorded “approximately 2,100,000 visitors” across the parks, and called it a poor year: the fighting in Hongkou that winter had emptied the district, Hongkew Park was closed until 19 March, and its count fell by more than 400,000 against 1931. Even so, on Friday 29 April 1932 the park admitted 62,198 people in a day. Jessfield Park, now 291 mu, had 780,000 visitors in 1932, twice its total for 1929, and its approach path was congested at weekends; its best day was 15,327 on 29 May. The Council sold 51,039 park season tickets in 1932 against 67,696 the year before. The 1932 list of the Council’s open spaces runs to Jessfield, Hongkew, Wayside, Studley and Singapore Parks, Quinsan Square, children’s playgrounds on Yuyuen, Nanyang and Soochow Roads, and, still, a “Chinese Public Garden” among the minor spaces, which sits oddly beside the 1928 report of its levelling. The garden on the Bund, for which the whole argument had been fought, no longer had a count of its own in the report; it was one park among a dozen, and the band still played.

What the sources disagree on

The reports contradict each other on small things and are silent on large ones. The fountain’s date is 1893 in the Council’s report and “the first Jubilee” in Pott. The Soochow Road garden is 8 mu in Darwent and 6.2 in the land register, levelled in 1928 and listed in 1932. The ratepayers’ meeting of February 1886, where the foreign electorate presumably decided on the ticket system, is not in the reports that survive on the Internet Archive, so the Council’s own account of why it chose tickets rather than the petitioners’ Saturdays and Sundays is missing. No text of the Public Garden’s rules before 1909 has been found; the earliest printed code is Hongkew’s, and the Bund garden’s rule is known from photographs of 1911 and 1917. And the Council’s reports count tickets, chairs and visitors with great care, but never say how many Chinese residents lived within a walk of the Bund and could not use the garden at the end of their street.

What to look for

The park today is smaller than the 1868 garden: a proposal to widen the Bund by throwing a strip of the garden into the roadway, which Pott records foreign ratepayers resisting for the sake of the trees, went ahead in the 1920s. The Garden Bridge, now Waibaidu Bridge, still lands beside it, at the entrance the superintendent closed in 1928. The bandstand is gone, and the Monument to the People’s Heroes stands at the river corner near where the jubilee fountain of 1893 once played. Lu Xun Park keeps the 1909 layout’s lake and lawns under later planting, and Zhongshan Park the plane-tree avenues of the Hogg estate; Kunshan Park in Hongkou is still a small square with a playground, and Huoshan Park a pocket of green on Huoshan Road. The 1890 garden on Suzhou Creek, the one built to be for everyone, has no trace at all.