Ward Road Gaol: the Council's prison, from six cells to seven thousand prisoners, 1856–1932

The short answer. For its first forty years the International Settlement had no prison. Its police locked Chinese prisoners in station cells built for a dozen men and holding ninety, handed the serious cases to the Chinese authorities, and begged the Council for a gaol. The gaol it got, on Ward Road in Hongkou, opened in 1903 with 480 cells and held three men to a cell within five years; by 1922 it had 1,440 cells and had “reached the limit”; by 1932 it held 7,251 prisoners on one day in July, a third of whom had been admitted that year, and buried 282 of them. The Council’s gaol reports, written by its governors and health officers for the ratepayers, count the prisoners, the cells, the deaths, the licence plates the convicts made, and, year after year, the overcrowding. Today’s Tilanqiao prison is the building they describe.

1856–1890: six cells and a verandah

The first foreign gaol in Shanghai, Pott records, “was erected on the grounds of the British Consulate, in 1856”, and “in 1868 a new British gaol was erected on Amoy Road”; both were consular gaols for British subjects. Chinese offenders “were handed over to the Chinese authorities”, which meant, after 1864, the Mixed Court, whose cells the Council paid for under the court’s rules. The British assessor at that court, Chaloner Alabaster, wrote in 1866 that imprisonment as carried out there “is, as carried out, almost a farce”. The Council’s own prisoners, men serving short sentences from the Mixed Court, were kept in the cells of its police stations, and by the 1880s those cells were the Settlement’s disgrace. In 1885 the police could still write that beside “the dens” of the Mixed Court and the Chinese city “the Municipal Gaols are palaces”. Two years later the assessor Carles sent the consul-general a description of Hongkew station: “six cells for Chinese prisoners, capable of holding about 12 men each”, which had lately held over ninety, while the Mixed Court yamen “was frequently full to excess”. He listed the consequences: sentences cut short for want of room, no separation of first offenders from “habitual criminals”, “extortion and bullying are common in the prisons”, and the risk of cholera. The Council’s answer, on 2 December 1887, was that its new station would give “accommodation for about 130 prisoners” at three stations, and that the alternative, sending prisoners into the Chinese city, would “expose them to barbarities against which we have no opportunity of protesting, until after the event”. The greatest number confined on one day that year was 139, on 17 December. The weekly average in the station gaols was 77 in 1884, 95 in 1887, 114 in 1888 and 119 in 1890.

In 1890 the police captain stopped asking for cells and asked for a prison: “up to the present day no gaol exists in which discipline” could be kept, “over a hundred prisoners are collected in six cells and the verandah in front of them”, beri-beri had appeared among them, and “the question arises as to whether the time has not arrived for building” one. Twenty-nine prisoners had escaped on 20 August. The Council took seven years to answer. In 1897 it leased the north wing of the British gaol on Amoy Road, “transformed into a prison for the accommodation of 400 prisoners” in “42 cells, each measuring 13 ft. by 10 ft. by 7 ft. 9 in.”, and ran it on the Hong Kong model: “one of the rules was silence”, cold baths twice a week in summer, mat-making, carpentering, stone-breaking and tailoring, and three meals a day of eight ounces of rice with oil, salt and tea, congee at noon, fish in the evening and “6 oz. fresh meat” once a week. It was the first time the Settlement had fed and worked its prisoners by a rule.

1903: four hundred and eighty cells

The gaol the Council built for itself went up on Ward Road in Hongkou, on ground bought beyond the built-up district. Kotenev, the Mixed Court’s historian, gives the date: “On May 1st, 1903, the new buildings of the gaol were completed”, planned after the Council had consulted the prisons of Montreal and Singapore, with 480 cells of eight and a half feet by nearly nine, the short-sentence men still being left at the stations. The Council’s health department, looking back in 1913, dated the move to the years after 1899–1901, when beri-beri in “the old Gaol” had reached 134 cases in a year and “the new Gaol, presumably vermin free, was then occupied”. A Shanghai newspaper’s account, from the city archives, has building begin in 1901 at 147 Ward Road and the prison open in 1903; Wikipedia has 117 Ward Road and the first prisoners entering their cells on 18 May 1903. The address differs because the road was renumbered; the year does not.

In 1905 the gaol held “450 per day” on average, and it already had the shape it would keep. A female block had been built “at the suggestion of the Mixed Court Magistrate”, and “on the 4th January the first female prisoner arrived”; a quarrel with the Chinese authorities over who had custody of Chinese women followed, and thereafter the women went to the Mixed Court’s own cells. Two padded cells went in for “lunatic convicts”. The convicts made “10,912 yards of coir matting”, 1,005 pairs of shoes and 1,692 tons of stone chips, and dug the ditch for the Ward Road extension outside their own wall. Convict industry showed a profit of 8,600 taels, “the highest figure yet recorded”, but the Council admitted that “the self-supporting system” of prison labour “appears to be no nearer attainment”; housing Chinese prisoners cost about 30,000 taels a year and 12,600 in interest on the buildings. The gaol’s medical officer had already noticed “a considerable mortality caused by consumption”, and gave known consumptives “a special diet”. Tuberculosis would be the gaol’s killer for thirty years.

1908–1913: three to a cell

The Council’s gaol filled as fast as it was built. In 1908 the ground bought the year before was “surrounded by a 17 feet wall with look-out towers at each corner”, and the accommodation had been “recognised as insufficient, so much so that it is necessary to confine three prisoners in each cell in four storeys of the two blocks”. In 1909 the Council asked the ratepayers for “Cell Block.—To accommodate 500 convicts”, a laundry, a bath-house and a second cookhouse boiler, and said plainly that three in a cell “militates against health, cleanliness and discipline”; its 27 Indian warders were lodged in Chinese houses outside the wall, and the Council’s view of them was that “the class of material” available “is poor”. The same year it introduced a mark system of remission, six marks a day earned against a sentence, up to “the maximum remission of one-fourth”, for sentences of two years and over; in 1911, 73 men went out under it and 15 came back.

The report for 1913 counts the gaol at the end of its first decade: a daily average of 998.66, 1,667 admitted, 372 of them from Ningbo, 219 from Jiangbei and 166 from Shanghai, and 28 dead. The Indian warders’ quarters inside the gaol had burned down in 1912. The boys were got out: a Reformatory at Alcock and Tongshan Roads “opened on April 28, 1913, and 64 boys previously confined in the Gaol were transferred”, to be taught cleanliness, drill, carpentry and shoemaking by a Chinese doctor and volunteers from the Chinese YMCA. The convicts’ labour had become a department of the Council: 176 a day worked outside over 307 days, breaking stone at the Ewo Road yard and raising the Public School’s playground with mud, and 186 inside, for a net profit of 17,657 taels; a printing press “to be worked by prisoners” had been provided for in 1912, and the gaol’s concrete-ware men made sewer pipes for the Council until the yard was “congested with big sewer pipes destined for the culverting of the Yangkingpang” in 1914 and the warders could not be spared. The police department, which arrested the men the gaol held, did not think it severe enough: it asked in 1913 for the cat and the bamboo to be brought back, because the gaol, “by reason of its healthy routine and regularity of food supply, has no terrors for the criminal classes”. The health officer’s figures suggest otherwise. Beri-beri had come back with 78 cases in 1909, “when the Gaol was found infested throughout with bugs”, and the west block had to be rebuilt inside with smooth walls and cement skirtings to get the vermin out; and “tuberculosis was again the main cause of death, most of the cases having signs of the disease on admission”. In 1914 the Council found a way to save food: “convicts when unemployed are given, under medical supervision, two meals per day instead of three”, from 20 September, extended in November to Sundays and holidays.

1922: the limit, and past it

The war years doubled the gaol. The daily average was 1,002 in 1914 and 1,771 in 1917, when 104 prisoners died, and the Council built a new wing. By 1922 it could list its capacity exactly: the old wing’s blocks A to E held 520 cells and the new wing’s F to I 920, “with this additional block the limit of available cell accommodation has now been reached”. The daily average that year was 1,556, already above the 1,440 cells; 62 prisoners died; the printing department “dealt with more Municipal orders than ever”, and one man hanged himself with a towel.

The Council then bought the gaol it had leased. On 31 March 1925 it agreed to pay the British government “Shanghai Tls. 304,774.00” for the Amoy Road gaol and its 24 mu, took it over on 1 April, and by 21 August had moved its foreign convicts there from Ward Road: 132 “foreigners not recognised by any Consulate in Shanghai”, Russians for the most part, were admitted that year, with the consular prisoners following. At Ward Road itself the new juvenile block finished on 25 May was put to another use. The gaol held 120 Chinese under sentence of death, waiting to be handed to the Chinese authorities, who alone could execute them; in September 47 were sent to the military at Longhua, “12 were executed”, and 35 came back on 15 October, and the juvenile block “has since been used for the location of prisoners awaiting execution; there being no other suitable accommodation”. The daily average in 1925 was 2,145 and the maximum 2,820; 5,180 men were admitted, 997 of them from Jiangbei. The health officer’s report on them is the Council at its most complacent and its most honest. Thirty-four died, 22 of tuberculosis, “15.5 per thousand is a very satisfactory rate”, half of them “within three months of admission”, which is to say they came in dying; 2,854 convicts weighed over three months “gained a total weight of 28,305 lbs., an average of 9.9 lbs.”; and some sick prisoners “do not even want to leave the Gaol”. The convicts that year made 4,500 uniforms for the Chinese constables who would arrest their successors, 1,274 police truncheons and 6,500 pairs of chopsticks, and their labour cleared 21,860 taels against 75,993 spent on their food.

1928: “surpassed all others”

The gaol’s population then went up like a graph of the city’s. “The year 1928 surpassed all others as regards the number of prisoners,” the Council wrote: 7,103 passed through, the daily average was 3,460 Chinese and 60 foreign, the maximum 3,984, and two five-storey reinforced-concrete blocks of “460 cells each” were going up inside the wall. The health department described what that meant. The gaol infirmary had “about 80 beds” for 4,000 prisoners, “three-quarters” of its patients tubercular, “the greatest congestion of all the hospitals”; “the wards are hopelessly overcrowded”; the prisoners’ ward of the police hospital “could easily be filled with cases from Ward Road Gaol, which is in a hopeless state of congestion”. Fifty-eight died, 43 of tuberculosis, 16.4 per thousand. The governor’s remedy for discipline was hunger: “the introduction of Low Diet as a form of punishment” was credited with a quieter gaol, and the amended dietary gave “a considerable saving in food”, the monthly weighings showing, the medical officer said, no loss that could be attributed to it. Only 739 of 1,281 available convicts could be worked, “for lack of workshop space”. The staff who held four thousand men were “1 Assistant Gaoler, 3 Head Warders, 20 Havildars, 8 Naiks, 165 Warders, 10 Cooks”, Sikhs and Muslims from the Punjab, and from 10 October 1928 the paid Russian detachment of the Volunteer Corps stood guard on the walls. The courts had changed too: the Mixed Court had become the Provisional Court in 1927, and of “about 58” men it had sentenced to death “so far only one has been executed”, 44 of them waiting in the juvenile block at the year’s end; “seventy-eight Chinese arrested for serious crimes committed in the Settlement” were executed that year by the Chinese authorities outside it.

1932: seven thousand

The number of prisoners rose from 6,745 on 1 January 1932 “to 7,251 on July 29, 1932. This is the highest number of prisoners ever recorded in this Gaol.” A Chinese government amnesty promulgated on 24 June released 1,983 of them between 16 July and the year’s end, and 251 were back inside by December. “282 prisoners died in Gaol”, 191 of them of tuberculosis, a death rate of 31.02 per thousand on an average population of about 6,700, double the rate the health officer had called satisfactory seven years before; 2,547 opium addicts were treated. The Council was building as fast as it could, “the kitchen block has been enlarged to twice its original size”, two more cell blocks, a workshop block, a laundry, a hospital and an administration block, and the health officer still wrote that “in spite of further accommodation and the Amnesty, the gaol contained throughout the year many more prisoners than it should”. The convicts, 1,209 of the 2,835 available, made boots, did “a considerable amount of printing and bookbinding for the Council” and stamped out 85,294 licence plates, the plates every rickshaw and car in the Settlement carried. The Russian regiment guarded them for 38,089 taels; 186 Indian warders, 26 havildars, 10 naiks and 9 cooks ran the inside; gaols and reformatory cost 872,324 taels, 236,347 of it food, about 130 taels a prisoner a year. Across the Settlement at Amoy Road the foreign gaol held sixty to ninety men in tailoring, bookbinding and printing, and the health officer thought it “more remarkable as an enforced health resort than as a place of correction”. Twenty-one men were under sentence of death at Ward Road on 31 December.

The gaol in numbers

Year	Daily average	Cells	Deaths	Note
1887	95 (weekly, station cells)	about 130 places planned		139 on the worst day
1897		42 cells for 400 (Amoy Road wing)
1905	about 450	480 (1903)		first woman admitted
1908	732 to 926 in the year	three to a cell	25
1913	999		28	64 boys moved out
1917	1,771		104
1922	1,556	1,440, “the limit”	62
1925	2,145		34	15.5 per thousand
1928	3,520	2 × 460 building	58	16.4 per thousand
1932	about 6,700; 7,251 on 29 July	two more blocks	282	31.02 per thousand

The gaol grew fifteenfold in thirty years while the Settlement’s population doubled, because the Settlement’s courts were sentencing more men to longer terms: in 1928 the gaol began the year with 52 men serving life and ended it with 146, with 451 serving ten years or more in January and 734 in December. The ten-year averages run 1,568 in 1919, 2,116 in 1925, 4,422 in 1929, 5,067 in 1930, 6,300 in 1931. Ward Road was the largest prison in China by any count, and the press of a later generation called it the first in the Far East; the Council never used the phrase, and its reports read as the record of an institution that could not build cells as fast as its courts filled them.

What the sources disagree on

The opening is 1 May 1903 in Kotenev and 18 May in Wikipedia; the address is 147 Ward Road in the Chinese press and 117 in Wikipedia; the first cells are 480 in Kotenev and 450 in Wikipedia. The 1925 daily average is 2,145 in that year’s report and 2,116 in the Council’s later series; the 1932 average is 6,695 in the governor’s table and 6,737 in the health report; deaths in 1928 are 58 in the text and 59 in the table. The Council’s reports for 1897–1903 are not on the Internet Archive, so the building of the gaol is told from Kotenev and later references. Whether convicts worked in the Council’s concrete-ware yard after 1914 is not stated; the yard and convict labour were kept as separate accounts. No execution inside the gaol is recorded in the Council’s reports before 1932; the men it held under sentence of death were executed, when they were, by the Chinese authorities at the Arsenal or Longhua, and the gallows later shown to visitors belong to a later regime. The claim that the gaol was the largest in the Far East is a press and museum claim, not the Council’s.

What to look for

Tilanqiao prison on Changyang Road, the old Ward Road, is the building the Council put up: the blocks of 1903, the five-storey blocks of 1928–32 and the seventeen-foot wall with its corner towers, in use as a prison until 2013 and now closed, with a museum of the prison’s history inside the gate. The Amoy Road gaol near Xiamen Road is gone. The Reformatory at Alcock and Tongshan Roads, today’s Zhoushan and Tongshan Roads, is gone. The Hongkew police station, whose six cells held ninety men in 1887, stood on Wusong Road; the Mixed Court on Zhejiang Road North, whose cells held the women, has a successor building on the site. The licence plates the convicts stamped in 1932 are collectors’ items.