A Short History of Shanghai
From The New York Times, full article HERE
- Shanghai means the "City on the Sea."
- Until 1842 Shanghai's location made it merely a small fishing village.
- After the first Opium War, the British named Shanghai a treaty port, opening the city to foreign involvement.
- The village was soon turned into a city carved up into autonomous concessions administered concurrently by the British, French, and Americans, all independent of Chinese law. Each colonial presence brought with it its particular culture, architecture, and society.
- Shanghai had its own walled Chinese city, but many native residents still chose to live in the foreign settlements-- thus began a mixing of cultures that shaped Shanghai's openness to Western influence.
- Shanghai became an important industrial center and trading port, it attracted business and Chinese migrants.
In its heyday, Shanghai was the place to be -- it had the best art, the greatest architecture, and the strongest business in Asia. With dance halls, brothels, glitzy restaurants, international clubs, and even a foreign-run racetrack, Shanghai was a city that catered to every whim of the rich. But poverty ran alongside opulence, and many of the lower-class Chinese provided the cheap labor that kept the city running.
- The Paris of the East became known as a place of vice and indulgence.
- In the 1930s and '40s, the city weathered raids, invasions, then outright occupation by the Japanese.
- By 1943, at the height of World War II, most foreigners had fled and the concessions had been ceded to the Japanese, bringing Shanghai's 101 years as a treaty port to a close.
- 1949 the Communist Party established the People's Republic of China, after which the few remaining foreigners left the country.
- The decades from 1950 to 1980 passed by with one Five Year Plan after another, marked by periods of extreme famine and drought, reform and suppression.
- In 1972, Premier Zhou Enlai and U.S. president Richard Nixon signed the Shanghai Communiqué, which enabled the two countries to normalize relations and encouraged China to open talks with the rest of the world. Twenty years later, the 14th Party Congress endorsed the concept of a socialist market economy, opening the door ever wider to foreign investment.
- Today Shanghai has once again become one of China's most open cities ideologically, socially, culturally, and economically, striving to return to the internationalism that defined it before the Revolution.
Revised by Kristin Baird Rattini
The Bund
The group of European buildings on the Whampoa (Huangpu) River.