The Shanghai Volunteer Corps: a town that armed itself, 1853–1942

The short answer. For ninety years the foreign residents of Shanghai’s International Settlement kept a militia of their own. It began in April 1853 as a few dozen merchants’ clerks with borrowed muskets, fought one small battle on the mud west of the town in 1854, lapsed, revived with each alarm, and from 1870 belonged to the Municipal Council, which paid for it. By 1925 it mustered 1,438 men in companies sorted by nationality, from a Shanghai Scottish to a Chinese Company; by 1932 it had a regiment of paid Russian regulars and cost the ratepayers 405,000 taels a year. It was never a large force, and it was never tested against an army. What it did, repeatedly, was turn out when the Council feared disorder, and the Council’s reports record each time.

1853: armed neutrality

The Taipings took Nanjing in March 1853 and the foreign community in Shanghai, a few hundred people on a strip of riverbank, met to decide what to do. Meetings at the British and American consulates on 8 April resolved on a volunteer corps, and a general meeting of the whole community on 12 April adopted a policy that would define the Settlement for decades: armed neutrality, meaning that the foreigners would take no side in China’s wars but would defend their own ground against anyone. The new body called itself the Shanghai Local Volunteer Corps and asked a passing British officer, Captain Tronson of the 2nd Bengal Fusiliers, to drill it. The Corps later dated its foundation to 8 April; Pott, writing its history in 1928, preferred 12 April. The difference is which meeting one counts.

The emergency the Corps was raised for did not come. The one it fought came from the other side. In September 1853 the Small Swords seized the walled city, and the imperial army sent to retake it camped on the open ground west of the settlement, where the racecourse was later laid out. The soldiers robbed and beat foreigners who rode out that way. On 4 April 1854 Consul Alcock delivered an ultimatum: strike camp by four o’clock or be driven out. Landing parties from HMS Encounter and Grecian and the American sloop Plymouth, with the Volunteers under the vice-consul Thomas Wade, marched out that afternoon. The affair, the Corps’ own history says, “did not occupy two hours of active fighting”. The camp was burned. The numbers engaged are given as about 300 by the 1914 booklet and 380 by Pott, who quotes Captain Kelly’s count of 200 British seamen, 75 Americans and the Volunteers; two men were killed and fifteen wounded. The two Volunteer dead, J. E. Brine and Captain Pearson of the merchant ship Rose Standish, died of their wounds. The Battle of Muddy Flat, as it was named for the ground, is the only battle the Corps ever fought, and it fought it as an auxiliary to the navies.

Then it went home. The booklet is candid that the Corps “appears to have been disbanded after the battle of the Muddy Flat” and was not enrolled again until the Taipings came back in August 1860, when about 150 men were sworn in, and two companies of 80 by the end of 1861. Armed neutrality in practice meant that the Settlement defended itself when frightened and forgot the matter when not.

1870: the Council takes over

The massacre of French nuns and consuls at Tianjin in June 1870 frightened every treaty port. In Shanghai the Corps was “to all intents and purposes defunct”; the Council assumed responsibility for it that year, which Pott records as the moment the Volunteers passed under municipal control, the Council’s chairman deciding “all questions of organization”. A parade state in 1870 showed 405 of all ranks and arms, and the French Concession raised a separate company of 70. Members still bought their own uniforms, and an old debt to a Dent’s partner who had supplied them went unpaid for years. The flags carried that year were the old colours of 1854 beside new ones embroidered “1854 and 1870”.

Peace shrank the Corps again. At the end of 1878 a parade produced nine men, six of them officers. The rebuilding was the work of two brothers named Holliday, one of whom received a captain-commandant’s commission on 6 April 1879; at the first annual inspection by a regular officer, on 14 April 1883, 176 officers and men were on parade. The British government sent four Armstrong nine-pounder guns in 1886. A Portuguese company appears in 1884, a German company in 1891 when Prince Henry of Prussia visited, and in 1895 the Corps hired its first paid officer, Adjutant Mackenzie, the beginning of a line of seconded British regulars who ran it until the end.

The Council’s report for 1890 shows what the Corps was in a quiet year: 275 all ranks, or 250 without the band of 24, in a troop of Light Horse, an artillery company and three companies of infantry, inspected on 12 April by the general commanding the British troops in China, whom the Council had asked for a regular officer and two drill sergeants. It fired 74,413 rounds at the range that year, fought two sham battles against the crews of HMS Severn and Wanderer, and cost about 7,000 taels against municipal revenue of 391,545. The Council’s verdict was dry: the condition of the Corps “continues to be satisfactory, though the numbers are hardly as great as could be wished”, and the reason was that “perfect peace and good order” impressed newcomers “with the idea that the force is unnecessary”.

The report for 1887 shows the same force in a worse year. Major G. J. Morrison commanded; the total strength at the April inspection “was 271”, only “a little better than 1883, when the total strength of the Corps was 261”, and 245 at the year’s end. The inspecting officer sent from Hong Kong found “the numerical strength of the Corps has fallen off considerably since last year”, with 48 members absent on leave and 22 without it. No. 4 Company, whose officers had Portuguese names, “held a meeting at which it was agreed to dissolve the company” because it could not find recruits. An armourer from Hong Kong condemned and destroyed 673 old rifles, the stock not having been examined “since the Corps was re-organized in 1878”. The whole thing cost the Council 6,881 taels that year, for an armourer, a drill sergeant, uniforms, ammunition and the annual parade. The booklet of 1914 adds the one wartime touch of the decade: during the Franco-Chinese war of 1884–85 “a special infantry company of picked men” stood ready “to turn out whenever the fire-bell rang”.

Who served, and who commanded

The Corps was the Settlement in uniform, and the Settlement was sorted by nationality, so the Corps was too. Companies were raised by community: Customs men in 1900, when the Boxer summer pushed numbers from under 400 to the highest the Corps had seen and Count Waldersee reviewed the whole garrison on 22 September; Portuguese and Americans in 1906; a Chinese Company in 1907, which received a banner from the Manchu prince Zaixun in 1909 and opened its own headquarters on Bubbling Well Road in 1911; Japanese; later Italians, a Jewish company, a Philippine company, and a Shanghai Scottish in kilts. The muster roll of April 1914, printed in the booklet issued when the foundation stone of the new drill hall was laid on 8 April that year, lists Light Horse, artillery, engineers, A and B companies, Customs, German, American, Portuguese, Japanese, Chinese and Reserve companies, a “12-bore” company of shotgun-armed reservists, and the medical staff. The commandant was Lieutenant-Colonel R. N. Bray of the Duke of Wellington’s Regiment; his predecessors Mackenzie, Watson and Barnes had all been regulars on loan. The Council’s chairman held the title of Civil Commandant, which is how a militia could be kept answerable to a town council. The Chinese gazetteer’s description is accurate: a force of foreign residents, most of them employees of the trading houses, run on British army lines by a serving British officer and paid for by the Council.

The German company vanished with the war of 1914; by 1925 the Corps’ infantry was A, B and C companies, the last “composed chiefly of Scandinavian and Swiss subjects”, plus Customs, American, Portuguese, Japanese, Chinese, Shanghai Scottish and Reserve. The 1925 inspection put the active strength at 1,438 all ranks against 1,370 the year before and 1,285 before that, about 900 of them infantry; the Light Horse and an American troop, two artillery batteries, engineers, a maritime company, an Italian company, cadets, and a machine-gun company of 175 with its own armoured cars, numbered one to eight by the end of 1925, made up the rest. The Scottish had 127 on the active list “with a lusty reserve platoon of twenty-seven”. Turnover was constant: 311 members left Shanghai in 1925 alone, because the Settlement’s foreigners were transients on three-year contracts.

Called out

What the Corps did between inspections was turn out when the Council thought the police might not hold. The Mixed Court riot of December 1905, when crowds burned the Louza station, brought out the Volunteers and the ships’ landing parties. The commandant, Lieutenant-Colonel W. M. Watson of the West Riding Regiment, had the order to turn out at 9.20 on the morning of 18 December; the telephone exchange was occupied by 9.30 and “by 10 a.m. strong detachments” were in the streets. The naval brigade took the Northern and Eastern districts and the Volunteers “the Central and Western”, holding posts until the 20th and patrolling the outlying roads with the Light Horse until Christmas; “12 officers and 521 non-commissioned officers and men” turned out of a strength of about 650, and the Council minuted the “conspicuously excellent services rendered by the Volunteer Force”. The same year’s inspection found the four 9-pounders of 1886 “practically useless and worn out”, and the Corps cost 38,027 taels against an estimate of 29,772. The Settlement had learned what a riot cost. The plague riots of 1910, over house inspections, called out the entire Corps. It was under arms in the revolution of 1911 and again in the rebellion of July 1913, when the Council declared the Settlement and Zhabei off limits to both sides and the Volunteers marched in to occupy Zhabei for a time. The commandant’s diary of that mobilisation survives in the report: the order came at 3.22 on the morning of 23 July 1913 and the units were “practically in position” by five, with Maxim guns on the Bund, Chekiang Road and Yunnan Road bridges; on the 24th two guns and the Portuguese and Japanese companies held the Suzhou Creek line at Markham Road bridge; on the 27th the Light Horse, artillery, engineers, Customs, American and Chinese companies took part in “the preliminary operations for the occupation of Chapei”, and fifty men of A Company went to the Zhabei central police station the next day; the Japanese company was issued helmets “owing to the intense heat”. The Corps then had 59 officers and 976 other ranks, and its monthly strength through 1913 “has not fallen below 1,000”; 369 men had left in the year, 210 of them because they left Shanghai. It cost 42,491 taels that year, the mobilisation about 5,263 taels more in rations and transport. In the wheelbarrow riots of 1897, when the Council raised the licence fee on the barrow coolies and the coolies fought the police, the Volunteers took the coolies’ side far enough to threaten resignation in a body over the Council’s handling; the Council resigned instead.

The 1920s were the busiest decade. In the provincial war of September 1924 the Council declared a state of emergency on 9 September and mobilised the Corps; when a defeated army drifted toward the Settlement a company of Volunteers disarmed 2,500 soldiers at Jessfield railway station and the Chinese Company guarded them in Jessfield Park. In January 1925 the machine-gun and Japanese companies disarmed more, and some 3,000 were interned at Haig Road. On 30 May 1925 the police at Louza fired on the crowd on Nanking Road; the Corps was mobilised that evening, assembled at seven the next morning, and the Shanghai Scottish and A Company cleared Nanking Road on 1 June. Its commandant, Colonel W. F. L. Gordon, was put in command of all the Settlement’s defence forces on 3 June. The Corps stood down on 28 August after 89 days “in aid of the civil power”, having reached 1,360 all ranks under arms at its peak. The bill for 1925 was 116,854 taels, within an estimate of 132,270; the Council had spent between 101,748 and 119,746 taels a year on the Corps since 1921, and budgeted 146,850 for 1926, with 34,000 more for a permanent camp at the rifle range.

Paid soldiers

The next change was in kind rather than size. In January 1927, with the Northern Expedition approaching and before British and American regulars arrived to garrison the Settlement, the Council began paying Russian émigrés to serve full time: former soldiers of the White armies, stranded in Shanghai without a passport or a trade. The Russian detachment, the 1928 report records, “was first raised in January, 1927, and quickly reached its full complement of 250 of all ranks”; a police sergeant, H. H. Thieme, was transferred that March to be its second in command. The Council declared a state of emergency on 21 March 1927, mobilised the Corps and the police, asked the consuls for international troops, and put Colonel Gordon in command of “the Municipal Defence Forces of the Foreign Settlement”; Britain sent, in Pott’s words, “a defence force of 20,000 men, the largest Expeditionary Force she had ever sent as far as China”. When the crisis passed the Russians were cut to 125 in June 1927, then “in July, 1928, the Council decided that it should again be raised” and the second 125 were “very quickly obtained” from 1 August. Their commander reported that their “drill, training and discipline compare favourably with those of the Regular troops of any Army”, and the inspecting general in 1928 was pleased to see “the care taken of these men by the Municipality” in their barrack huts. Until 1928 their pay was hidden in the accounts under “Emergency Measures”, 109,753 taels that year against an estimate of 60,000; the 1929 budget brought them inside the Volunteer Corps line for the first time, at 150,250 taels of a total of 303,890. A separate volunteer Russian company was sanctioned in September 1928.

The 1932 report shows the result. The detachment had “two regular Companies” reinforced that year by a third, with the volunteer company under Captain Saveloff “incorporated so that the whole forms a Regiment”; time, the commandant noted, “is gradually eliminating the ex-service element which was originally so prominent”. Its regulars guarded Ward Road Gaol for the police department, which paid for them, and were withdrawn from it only during the emergency. They were the Settlement’s only full-time soldiers of its own, and they were the most expensive thing about the Corps: of the 405,190 taels it cost in 1932, 218,499 went on the Russian detachment, 130,181 of that in pay. The volunteer units alone cost 186,691 taels, little more than the whole Corps had cost in 1928; the Russians explain the rest of the rise from 155,648 taels in 1928 to 298,529 in 1929, 330,649 in 1930 and 428,216 in 1931. The 1933 budget asked for 285,760 taels for the Russian detachment against 266,270 for every other unit combined.

The Corps’ own officers thought it too small. On 1 January 1928 it had 1,761 of all ranks without the Russians and 1,663 at the year’s end, after 431 men had left Shanghai; the commandant, Colonel H. B. Orpen-Palmer, wanted “a minimum strength of 2,500 men, exclusive of reserves”. Major-General Wardrop, inspecting in April 1928, counted 1,130 on parade “out of a nominal strength of approximately 1,500” and judged that “not more than 70 per cent. can be reckoned on as available”; he told the Council that “every community in China must, in so far as possible, organize its own defence”.

The Chinese Company, meanwhile, was the largest single volunteer unit in the Corps. At the end of 1932 it had seven officers and 133 other ranks, against 93 Americans, 85 Portuguese, 98 Japanese, 79 Shanghai Scottish and 73 in A Company. The gazetteer’s judgement of the Corps, that it was a tool of the Council’s rule used against Chinese demonstrators, sits beside this fact without cancelling it; the Settlement’s Chinese employees and merchants served in it because it was the town’s militia and they were the town.

1932: the only real test

At four in the afternoon of 28 January 1932 the Council declared a state of emergency and mobilised the Corps and the police, hours before Japanese marines and the Chinese 19th Route Army began fighting in Zhabei, across the Settlement’s northern line. The commandant’s report is the Corps’ most detailed account of itself under strain. The Russian detachment took over its sector of the defence perimeter with four hours’ notice; the whole Corps was mobilised within six. During the first ten days it grew from 1,500 to 2,300 as residents who had never drilled came forward, and the commandant drew the lesson that it was impracticable “to rely on recruits who offer themselves after mobilization has been ordered”: they had no uniforms, no boots and no training; the infantry had been “at least 50% deficient” on the day of mobilisation and was still about a quarter short of establishment, some 400 men, at the year’s end. Units had to be taken out of the line “whenever the weather became even slightly inclement” because the recruits lacked boots and greatcoats, and the greatcoats proved “useless for wet weather”. Headquarters, with a staff “much too small even for normal peace time requirements”, was dealing with 23 units and “about 1,500 men” who came individually to its office. The rifle range was “occupied by the Japanese Naval Landing Party until the end of March”, so the year’s musketry could not be finished. Several officers and men who lived in the Hongkou and Dixwell Road districts, inside the Japanese sector, “lost everything they possessed, their houses having been looted”. The state of emergency was not declared at an end until 13 June. New units came out of the emergency: an American machine-gun company, an American reservists’ company, transport, signals, interpreter and air-defence companies, and the Jewish company, raised that autumn. At the end of the year the Corps stood at 191 officers and 1,943 other ranks, active and reserve, the largest it would ever be.

It was mobilised again in 1937, when the fighting came back to Zhabei and Hongkou and stayed; secondary accounts give the date as 12 August 1937 and the Council’s medal for the emergency covers 12 August to 12 November, but the Council’s reports for those years are not on the Internet Archive and the Corps’ part is not told here from its own records. The Russian unit became, by the same accounts, an auxiliary detachment of the municipal police in January 1941. After the Japanese occupied the Settlement on 8 December 1941 the Corps had no function and no master; it was disbanded early in 1942, by the Council’s own decision according to one account and by the occupation authorities according to another.

Strength and cost, as the Council counted them

Year	Strength (all ranks)	Cost (taels)	Commandant
1887	271 at inspection; 245 at year’s end	6,881	Major G. J. Morrison
1890	275	about 7,000
1905	about 650, plus 81 reserve; 533 turned out in December	38,027	Lt-Col. W. M. Watson
1913	1,035 (59 officers, 976 men)	42,491	Lt-Col. A. A. S. Barnes, then Major R. N. Bray
1925	1,438 active at inspection; 1,360 under arms at peak	116,854	Col. W. F. L. Gordon
1928	1,663 plus 247 Russians	155,648, plus 109,753 for the Russians	Col. H. B. Orpen-Palmer
1931	1,858 active	428,216
1932	2,134 (191 officers, 1,943 men), active and reserve	405,190, of which 218,499 Russian	Col. N. W. B. B. Thoms

The figures are not all on one basis: the 1925 inspection counted active members only, the 1928 commandant counted everyone on the books, and the Russian detachment sits outside the Corps’ total until 1929. What the table shows is a force that grew sevenfold and a bill that grew sixtyfold, the second mostly after 1927, when the Settlement began to pay soldiers.

What the sources disagree on

The founding date is 8 April in the Corps’ tradition and 12 April in Pott; the booklet’s own text gives both meetings. The numbers at Muddy Flat are about 300 in the booklet and 380 in Pott. Pott says nothing of the Corps in 1911 or 1927 and nothing of the Russians at all. The 1914 booklet dates the Portuguese company to 1884 in one place and 1906 in another, and the 1887 report suggests the explanation: a company with Portuguese officers dissolved in 1887 and was refounded in 1906. The American company is 1900 in the booklet’s Boxer passage and 1906 in Pott. The 1925 estimate reads 182,270 in the scan and 132,270 by the budget’s own arithmetic. For 1937 and 1942 the Council’s reports are missing from the Internet Archive and the article relies on secondary accounts, which disagree about who disbanded the Corps.

What to look for

The Corps’ battle was fought on the mud west of the 1848 settlement, where the racecourse was laid out a few years later; the ground is People’s Square and People’s Park. Nanjing Road East is the street the Shanghai Scottish cleared in June 1925. The drill hall of 1914 and the rifle range at Jiangwan are gone. Ward Road Gaol, which the Russian regiment guarded, still stands as Tilanqiao prison in Hongkou, the largest building the Council ever put up.