Where the lines ran: how the settlements grew, and how the French side was ruled

Every “former French Concession” café and every heritage plaque on the Bund stands inside a line that someone once argued over. This topic is about the lines themselves: where they ran, how they moved, and why the two sides of the Yangjingbang creek ended up governed in two different ways.

How they grew is the base map. It starts with the Treaty of Nanking in 1842 and the Land Regulations of November 1845, which set aside about 830 mu of riverbank for British merchants, and follows each extension from there — British, American, French, and finally the combined International Settlement.

Boundary stones walks the edges: the markers that fixed where the Settlement ended, and the roads the Council built past them into territory it did not control.

Consul versus council and the French system cross the creek. The French Concession looked like its neighbour, but it answered to a different master: its council sat under the French consul, and the two clashed. The first story covers the showdown of its early decades; the second, the règlement under which the Concession was run.

Read these four first and the rest of the site falls into place: the historical map shows every boundary in this topic drawn over today’s streets, and each settlement has its own page under the foreign settlements.