Shanghai: history and heritage

About Shanghai: history and heritage

By the ULTIMATE Shanghai Editorial Team

Shanghai means “upon the sea”, and its fortunes have always come from the water. A cotton and fishing town on the Huangpu, walled against pirates in 1553, became a treaty port after 1842, the most cosmopolitan city in Asia by the 1930s and, after 1990, the skyline of Pudong. The Bund and the towers facing it across the river tell that story in a single view.

At a glance

Population: 24,870,895 (National Bureau of Statistics of China, seventh national census, 2020), China’s largest city.

Peoples: Han Chinese from across China, with Shanghainese, a Wu Chinese language, still spoken by many older residents.

“Upon the sea”: Shanghai’s fortunes have always come from the water.

Shaped by: the Song and Yuan dynasties (county seat from 1292), the Ming walls (1553), the treaty port and concessions (1842–1943), and the opening of Pudong from 1990.

The walled town

Shanghai grew as a market town in the Song dynasty and became a county seat in 1292. In 1553, against raids by pirates, it was walled; the line of the walls survives in the ring road around the old town, and the Yu Garden, created in the sixteenth century by a Ming official, is its most famous survivor.

The treaty port

The Treaty of Nanking of 1842, which ended the First Opium War, opened Shanghai to foreign trade. British, American and French settlements followed; the British and American ones merged as the International Settlement, while the French Concession, with its plane-tree avenues, became the city’s most elegant quarter. Along the river the Bund filled with banks, trading houses and hotels in neoclassical and Art Deco styles.

The Paris of the East

By the 1920s and 1930s Shanghai was the most cosmopolitan city in Asia, a centre of Chinese cinema, publishing, jazz and fashion. Its people lived in shikumen, stone-gated lane houses that blended Chinese courtyards with Western terraces; Xintiandi and Tianzifang preserve them.

A refuge

In the late 1930s and early 1940s some 20,000 Jewish refugees from Europe found safety in Shanghai, one of the few places that would take them without a visa. The Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum in the former Ohel Moshe Synagogue in Hongkou tells their story.

Pudong

From 1990 the farmland of Pudong, across the river from the Bund, was developed into a new financial district. The Oriental Pearl Tower (1994), the Jin Mao Tower, the Shanghai World Financial Center and the Shanghai Tower (2015), China’s tallest building, now face the Bund. Shanghai hosted the World Expo in 2010.

Our advice: walk the Bund at dusk as the lights come on across the river, explore the old town and Yu Garden early in the morning, and spend an afternoon in the plane-tree streets of the former French Concession.

Sources

Population: National Bureau of Statistics of China and Shanghai Municipal Bureau of Statistics, Seventh National Population Census (2020). History: Shanghai Museum; Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum; Shanghai Municipal Administration of Culture and Tourism; Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Shanghai”.

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