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CityReads│Why did Shanghai become the key to modern China?
Rhoads Murphey, 1953. Shanghai: key to modern China, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Shanghai and the pattern of its development between 1843 and 1943 have been modern China in microcosm. In the city China for the first time learned and absorbed the lessons of extrateerritoriality, gun-boat diplomacy, foreign "concessions", and the aggressive spirit of 19th century Europe. There more than anywhere else the two civilizations came together: the rational, legal-minded, scientific, industrialized, efficient, expansionist West, and traditional, intuitive, humanist, agrarian, inefficient, seclusionist China. The sequel, and China's response, began primarily in Shanghai, and then modern China was born. Shanghai provides a key to what has since happened and is still to happen in China. The city of Shanghai, born out of Western commercial enterprise and organized in its economic life largely along Western lines, was in effect superimposed on a peasant civilization. On this agrarian base, it erected first a trade which reached to all parts of the globe, and subsequently a manufacturing complex which put it among the leading urban industrial centers of the world. Toward the close of the first century since its opening to foreign trade in 1843, Shanghai accounted for half of China's foreign trade and half of its mechanized factories. The city's four million people formed one of the first five or six metropolitan groupings in the world, and Shanghai was well over twice the size of each of its nearest urban rivals in China, Peking and Tientsin. This book is divided into two parts. The first, “The Setting”, deals with population, site characteristics, locational qualities, historical development, and political characteristics, all in relation to China as a whole. The second part, “Key Functions”, is far more significant. Murphy presents an insightful analysis of the ways in which Shanghai has operated within the Chinese political economy. Its location at the mouth of the vast Yangtze basin and the associated convergence of river transport toward the city have made it both entrance and exit for Middle China, the most densely populated and productive part of China proper. The physical advantages of Shanghai’s location made it the major point of contact between China and the West. The most important thing about Shanghai was its relation to China; and that the city contained the seeds of great change for the entire country.
Chinese Shanghai had risen as the port of Suzhou, from a small fishing village at the junction of Suzhou Creek and the Huangpu River. When silting, and presumably advance of the coastline, made maritime access to Suzhou impossible by the 11th century A.D. Ships began to dock at Shanghai, or Hudu as it was then called and in 1075 an official was stationed there to administer the customs. In 1279 the town, now called Shanghai declared itself independent of Suzhou. It was however still too small in the 13th century to be mentioned by Marco Polo. The city walls were built in 1544 following the sacking and burning of the city in the preceding year by Japanese pirates. Shanghai County
By the beginning of the 19th, Shanghai was the principal port of the Yangtze basin, and was also the center of the coastal trade between north and south China. Shanghai before 1843 had grown primarily on the trade of its immediate delta hinterland: tea, silk, and rice and on its key position in the coasting trade which enabled it to act as an entrepot and to distribute goods received by sea within the densely populated delta. But the wider water network, both sea and river, of which it stands at the focus was not fully exploited. It remained for foreign traders and foreign economic organization, implemented by the steamship, to realize the geographic potential of Shanghai’s location. In 1812 the official gazetteer of Shanghai estimated the population of the county, which included an area of about 400 square miles, at 528,000. Despite its commercial prominence, it did not seriously rival the older delta cities in size because they were in varying degrees administrative centers, a function which Shanghai has always lacked beyond its own metropolitan limits. It was administration more than commerce that was the consistent basis of urban existence and growth in the bureaucratic framework of traditional China.
At Shanghai, there were three independent political units. First, the original Chinese city, which was governed by the local Chinese county authorities until 1928, when the Nationalist Government established the Municipality of Greater Shanghai, totaling 320 square miles, most of which remained open rural country. Second, the so-called International Settlement, which had originally been British and which was opened to all foreigners in 1854. This was the largest and most populous political unit, and it included the city's commercial core, most of its manufacturing, and most of its shipping frontage. Third, the French Settlement usually miscalled the "French Concession". The population of both foreign settlements was overwhelmingly Chinese. Source:virtualshanghai.net
Several difficulties accounted for the inaccuracies of population estimation. First it was Shanghai’s role as a haven of security for Chinese (and, during the 1930s, foreign) refugees during periods of political unrest, and its subsequent loss of most of this floating population when order has been restored. The city has also contained a large but unmeasured population of homeless Chinese and of Chinese families living in boats moored on the numerous creeks which dissect the city. An accurate census of the foreign residents in the foreign settlements was not taken until 1870s. It was not until 1928 that the Shanghai Municipal Council began a yearly census for the entire city. Until 1895 Shanghai remained almost exclusively a trading city, with a consequent population which never exceeded half a million. Industrial development added to Shanghai’s population some three millions during the first world war. It is probable that the total population rose to well over four million by 1941 and that it dropped to the 1936 figure during the period of Japanese occupation after 1941. The influx of returning Chinese refugees beginning in 1945 probably boosted the population to its highest total, between five and a half and six million. In 1936 the foreign total of 60,000 had as its most important constituents 20,000 Japanese, 15,000 Russians, 9,000 British, 5,000 Germans and Austrians, 4,000 Americans, and 2,500 French. Shanghai remained a Chinese city, still politically dominated by the handful of foreigners, but economically more and more maintained by the Chinese. Populationin major Chinese port cities in 1936
Source: estimatedby Lynne Pan
Yangtze River is silt-laden and is extending its delta. The site of Shanghai would have been on the seacoast about 500 BC. Shanghai has served as Suzhou's port since about the 5th century. The material on which Shanghai rests is totally unconsolidated and presents serious problems for building. An average vertical section shows silt from the surface to about 20 feet, sand to 300 feet, and gravel mixed with sand and silt to about 1000 feet, where some consolidated conglomerate is reached. These problems have been overcome, at considerable expense, by floating the taller buildings on concrete rafts in order to provide a stable foundation adequate to support structures which would otherwise sink into the alluvium.
The trade of the Yangtze basin requires a major outlet to the sea, and Shanghai, despite its poor site, offers the only practicable deep-water harbor near the mouth of China's greatest trade highway, the Yangtze River. From 1920 to 1936 Shanghai remained 6th or 7th among world ports in terms of annual net registered tonnage entered and cleared. Disadvantages as a harbor： The tidal inflow from the Yangtze which brings in relatively fresher water also brings in and deposits large amounts of silt. Shanghai maintains its position as a port from the Yangtze estuary only by constant dredging. On the outside of the sharp bend in the Whangpoo (Huangpu) at the mouth of Soochow (Suzhou) Creek the currents maintained a depth adequate for sailing ships of the 19th century, and in 1842 there was a channel in the Huangpu between Shanghai and the Yangtze estuary with a minimum navigable depth of about 15 feet. By 1905 silting had reduced this to 10 feet, and in that year dredging work was begun by the Huangpu Conservancy Board. Shanghai in 1936 (the last year of regular dredging operations), was the shallowest as well as the most confined and awkward harbor among leading Far Eastern ports. Advantages as a harbor： Shanghai is the northernmost port on the China coast to be free from ice at all seasons in most years. This gives it an advantage over the two leading ports of north China. Location 14 miles up the Huangpu gives the harbor protection from typhoons, which are a significant menace to shipping in all south China ports during late summer. Fog adequate to delay shipping in the harbor is quite infrequent. Shanghai is flat and it has a more favorable climate than rival south China ports. To recap, the advantages of the city’s location have greatly outweighed the disadvantages of its site and have made extensive dredging worthwhile. The growth of Shanghai must be regarded as an illustration of the extent to which the advantages of an exceptionally favorable location can overcome the disadvantages of an unfavorable site.