CityReads│What Was Shanghai Like Before 1843?

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What Was Shanghai Like Before 1843? 

Disputing the view that Shanghai was little more than a fishing village before becoming a treaty port in 1843, historian Linda Cooke Johnson shows that Shanghai had already become a major commercial port many years earlier. Shanghai is indeed a port city with a 1,000-year history.

Linda Cooke Johnson, 1995. Shanghai: from market town to treaty port, 1074-1858，Stanford University Press.

Most of the work that has been done on the history of Shanghai has concentrated on the modern, post-treaty-port period. The history of Shanghai has been the subject of many and varied interpretations, which split along external and internal—Western and Chinese—lines. The most pervasive and conventional Western view is that Shanghai was only a small fishing village prior to its opening to the West in 1843. Or, at best, in the words of a travel guide written in the 1860s, an “insignificant third-class Chinese city”prior to the arrival of the British.

In her book, Shanghai: from market town to treaty port, 1074-1858, historian Linda Cooke Johnson, debunks “the Fishing Village Myth” and examines the development of the town and city of Shanghai within the Chinese historical context prior to arrival of Westerners in 1843. She traces Shanghai’s history from the period when it was only a market town, through its continued development as a local port, county seat, and center of cotton production, up to the city’s opening as a treaty port. She focuses on the city’s history prior to foreign influence.

Before 1843 Shanghai was a wholly Chinese town—although one of the twenty largest cities in China, it was hardly a fishing village. In the Tang dynasty, Shanghai was a small fishing village. The classical appellation of Shanghai is Hu, alluding to Hudu, a pre-Tang village in the fens alongside the Songjiang River, held by local traditions to be the predecessor of Shanghai. The earliest reliable mention of Hudu, the village that preceded Shanghai, comes from the Tang period.

Topographically, the whole region was much closer to the sea at that time, and Hudu must have been situated just behind the coastal dunes in the marshy backwaters near what was then the mouth of the Songjiang River. The village took its name from the fishing stakes (hu) the villagers set out in the shallows of Hudu (Fishing-stake Sluice), a ditch that drained the fens. The history of the village of Hu is obscure, but a town called Shanghai emerged at some point during the Tang dynasty.

The image of Shanghai as a fishing village wasa nachronistic even under the Song dynasty. By the later part of the Song dynasty, Shanghai became an important commercial port. Shanghai flourished during the Yuan dynasty. An empirical look at the city’s history as a county capital since the early part of the Yuan dynasty alone should dispel the fishing village myth.

The sandy alluvial land in the eastern part of Shanghai, which had been poorly suited to rice, proved ideal for cotton. Cotton replaced food crops in the eastern parts, while rice grown in the western was traded for cotton. Handicraft industry developed in both east and west as cotton was spun and woven in peasant households and small workshops. As a result of the rice and cotton exchange, the local economy diversified and became commercialized. Beyond this local trade, cotton cloth was then sold to brokers and merchants, who in turn marketed the cloth throughout the empire, creating a nationwide market for cotton cloth from Songjiang.

Shanghai Market Town in the Early Yuan Period

In the Ming era, Shanghai was a major center of cotton production serving the entire empire.

Shanghai in the Late Ming Wanli Period 

Under the Qing dynasty, Shanghai again became a commercial port city of substantial importance in the economy of the lower Yangtze macro-region. From the Kangxi reign (1662-1723) on, Shanghai regained its earlier functions as a coastal port, in addition to being a center for cotton production. It served as the port for Suzhou, where silk and cotton fabrics, paper, and other handicraft items were manufactured. Increasingly, over the course of the eighteenth century, Shanghai became engaged not only in Chinese internal and coastal trade but in commerce destined for international markets as well. 

Shanghai xian and Its Market Towns Under the Qing Dynasty

An astonishing variety of products passed through the port at Shanghai in the High Qing period judging from the lists in Shanghai daguan zeli, the customs handbook for the year 1785. Included were all sorts of wearing apparel, from sable furs to straw hats and shoes; tea for local consumption or to be exported on northern shipping routes; wine; tobacco; foodstuffs, including beans, rice, sugar, beef, ham, fungi of many sorts, both ocean and freshwater fish, fruits, and vegetables; many varieties of cotton, ranging from unprocessed raw cotton bolls to thread and yarn to finished fabrics of a wide range of grades and weights; silk of all kinds, from silkworm eggs to the finest finished damasks; paper of many varieties manufactured at Suzhou; candles; cooking and lighting oils; leather goods; lumber and bamboo in bulk; manufactured articles of wood, bamboo, metal, and so on; gold; jade and fine jewelry; items made of bone, horn, feathers, and fur; medicines of many kinds; coal; charcoal; and “stinking mud” shipped north as ballast and sold as fertilizer.  Imported goods such as paper from Japan, Japanese knives, foreign yarns, and luxury items such as birds’ nests for gourmet soups were taxed at a much higher tariff than locally produced imports of exports. By the opening decades of the nineteenth century, before the first treaty-port foreigner ever set foot in the town, Shanghai was numbered among the twenty or so largest cities in China.

Shanghai and Its Guilds, c. 1858. 

Throughout its nearly 1,000-year history, however, it was only a lowly county capital in the bureaucratic hierarchy of imperial China. Shanghai had no history of government or administrative prominence. Its highest governmental rank has been as a lowly county seat. But Shanghai has been and is a first-class commercial city. 

Shanghai Maritime Commerce

Rhoads Murphey has estimated that trade at Shanghai as reported in the 1832-34 period made the city already one of the leading ports of the world, with a volume of shipping equal to or greater than that of London in the same period.

Geology and geography of the Yangtze Delta and Shanghai’s urban development

Shanghai was the latest in a series of Yangtze Delta port cities. The city owed its primacy to the combination of an advantageous location, strong commercial interests, and favorable government policies, but above all, to the contrary ecology of the delta region, where rivers frequently changed course, harbors were created and as quickly silted up, and the river built its delta rapidly seaward for millennia.

The configuration of the Yangtze River Delta has varied over the past twenty thousand years according to the sea level, and as sediment deposited by the river has extended seaward. Archaeological discoveries of burial sites in Qingpu indicate that some areas west of Shanghai were dry land approximately 4,000 years, probably small islands in marshy fens. By about 2,000 B.C., during the Shang dynasty, the site where Shanghai stands today was in all probability still covered with water.Over the past 2000 years, the delta has moved progressively eastward owing to sediment deposited at the mouth of the river. The land area of the present city of Shanghai was only created by the extension of the delta seaward in the past 1,200 to 1,500 years.

A seawall, known as the Hanhai dike, was built around 713 A.D. to protect the new lands. This dike helped stabilize the marshy region where Hudu was situated, and even more important, it reinforced the division between the salt-saturated lands to the east, where agriculture was impossible, and the fresh watershed to the west, where agriculture could be developed.  In 1172, a second seawall was built, known as the Lihetang dike. The construction of dikes played a major role in stabilizing the soil and preventing a backwash of salt water from the coast.

Through natural processes, aided by the construction of dikes, canals, and sluices, the land around present-day Shanghai was created, extended, protected, drained, and made suitable for agriculture and urban development.

Qinglong town: the earliest Shanghai port

Beginning under the Tang dynasty, when Hudu was still only an insignificant village, and lasting well into the twelfth century, the market town of Qinglong was the region’s principal commercial port. Any history of Shanghai would thus be incomplete without a discussion of Qinglong, its immediate predecessor as the principal port of the Songjiang region.

Qinglong zhen flourished from the Tang dynasty to the Song. Originally a village and local market, Qinglong was officially established as a market town in the Tianbao reign period of the Tang dynasty (742-56). It was situated west of Shanghai, in modern Qingpu, adjacent to what at that time was a broad and protected harbor at the confluence of the Qinglong and Songjiang rivers.

Fish, salt, and rice were the principal products of the area; rice production increased as the fens were drained and turned into agricultural lands. Advances in ship construction and technology during the Sui and Tang dynasties made long-distance shipping more convenient and dependable. Shipping from inland waterways had access to Qinglong via the Yangtze and Songjiang rivers and canals. Coastal and seagoing ships called at Qinglong.

Qinglong enjoyed commercial success during the Tang and Southern Song era as an inland port for local produce and commerce from the Lake Tai region and as a coastal port for southern routes to Fujian, Guangdong and even Japan. 

Shanghai Museum is currently presenting an exhibition of its latest archeological discoveries from the historical site of Qinglong town in Shanghai. The exhibition is being held at Hall No 3 on the fourth floor of Shanghai Museum and will run till the end of May. Qinglong town is the earliest town and historical port in Shanghai established during the Tang Dynasty (746). Shanghai is indeed a port city with a 1,000-year history . The discovery washes away the notion that Shanghai was just a fishing village before opening its port to the world in 1843.

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But the shifting sands of the delta, which had created the estuary and given Qinglong its harbor, could also obliterate it; in spite of repeated efforts to dredge the harbor, the silting up of the Qinglong river signaled doom for the town. The Songjiang River had shifted its channel and carve a new bed away from Qinglong. By the opening of the Southern Song era, commercial traffic was beginning to treat Shanghai as the port of choice. The Yuan administration responded to the growth of Shanghai by opening a second shipping office in Shanghai town, which was officially designated as a market town in 1074. In 1292, Shanghai town served as the county seat of Huating county. As qinglong lost its river, its harbor, and its commerce, Shanghai town profited.

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