Virtual Shanghai

The online resource Virtual Shanghai (www.virtualshanghai.net) is an intriguing treasure trove of old photos, maps, documents, films and specialist information relating to historic Shanghai, and includes a blog.

Of the five port cities in China, Shanghai was the most prosperous due to its superb geographical location, capital edge and marginal interference from the Chinese government. Trade and businesses boomed, and by 1850 the foreign settlements housed more than 100 merchants, missionaries and physicians, three-quarters of them British. In 1844, 44 foreign ships made regular trade with China. By 1849, 133 ships lined the shores and by 1855, 437 foreign ships clogged the ports.

Foreigners were divided into three concessions. The original British Concession was north of Bubbling Well Rd (now West Nanjing Rd). The American Concession began life in Hongkou District after Bishop William Boone had set up a mission there. These two concessions later joined to form one large area known as the International Settlement. The French, meanwhile, set up their own settlement south of the British one and to the west of the Old Town, in an area which is still referred to by English speakers as the French Concession.

From regulation to sanitation, everything in Shanghai was vested in the foreign oligarchies of the Municipal Council and the Conseil d’Administration Municipale, a pattern that was to last as long as the settlements. It was not until the early 1920s that Chinese and Japanese residents (eventually the two largest groups in the settlements) were allowed even limited representation on the council.

From the start, Shanghai’s raison d’être was trade. Still sailing to the West were silks, tea and porcelain, and 30,000 chests of opium were being delivered into China annually. Soon great Hong Kong trading houses like Butterfield & Swire and Jardine & Matheson set up shop, and trade in opium, silk and tea gradually shifted to textiles, real estate, banking, insurance and shipping. Banks in particular boomed; soon all of China’s loans, debts and indemnity payments were funnelled through Shanghai. Buying and selling was handled by Chinese middlemen, known as compradors (from the Portuguese), from Canton and Ningbo, who formed a rare link between the Chinese and foreign worlds. The city attracted immigrants and entrepreneurs from across China, and overseas capital and expertise pooled in the burgeoning metropolis.

Foreign ideas were similarly imported. By the 1880s, huge numbers of proselytising American Protestants were saving souls in Shanghai, while the erudite Jesuits oversaw a flourishing settlement in Xujiahui, called Siccawei (or Zikawei).

Gradually sedan chairs and single-wheeled carts gave way to rickshaws and carriages, the former imported from Japan in 1874. Shanghai lurched into the modern age with gaslights (1865), electricity (1882), motorcars (1895), a cinema and an electric tram (1908), and its first bus (1922).

The Manchu in Beijing gave only cursory glances to the growth of Shanghai as all eyes focused on the continued survival of the Qing dynasty, under threat from a barrage of insurgencies that arose from within the rapidly radicalising confines of the Middle Kingdom.

Shanghaied

If New York was so good they named it twice, then Shanghai was so bad they made it an undesirable verb. To shanghai, or ‘render insensible by drugs or opium, and ship on a vessel wanting hands’, dates from the habit of press-ganging sailors. Men, many of whom were found drunk in ‘Blood Alley’ (off modern-day Jinling Rd), were forced onto ships, which then set sail, leaving the comatose sailors no choice but to make up the deficient crew numbers when they sobered up.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-14