Shanghai as a treaty port

Shanghai's defining historical period is the century of foreign concession from 1843 to 1949. Before that it was a regional trading port in the lower Yangtze. After 1949 it became the modern PRC megacity. The treaty-port century in between is the layer that shaped the modern city's character.

The treaty system

The 1842 Treaty of Nanjing, ending the First Opium War, opened Shanghai (along with four other ports) to foreign trade. The British Concession was established in 1843; the American Concession in 1848 (later merged with the British to form the International Settlement); the French Concession in 1849.

For 100 years, Shanghai had three layers: - **The walled Chinese city** (the modern Old Town near Yu Garden) — Chinese-administered. - **The International Settlement** (north of the Old Town, including the Bund and Nanjing Road) — administered by a foreign-elected Municipal Council with substantial autonomy. - **The French Concession** (west of the International Settlement) — administered separately by the French.

Each had its own police, its own laws, its own legal system. The non-Chinese-administered portions accepted Chinese residents but operated under Western legal frameworks. The hybridity produced both genuine prosperity and a particular kind of moral ambiguity that defines pre-1949 Shanghai.

What was built

The 1900-1937 boom transformed the riverfront. The Bund's neoclassical and Art Deco buildings — Customs House (1927), HSBC Building (1923), Peace Hotel (1929), Bank of China (1937) — were built by some of the largest foreign firms operating in Asia.

The French Concession, west of the Bund, was built up with European-influenced apartments, churches, schools, and the famous plane-tree-lined streets. The shikumen lane houses — a Shanghai-specific Chinese-Western hybrid housing form — multiplied across both the International Settlement and the Concessions.

Shanghai's population grew from 250,000 in 1842 to 5 million by 1947. Substantial Chinese capital and Chinese culture moved here from across the country, alongside the foreign communities.

The cultural moment

Pre-WWII Shanghai had a substantial intellectual and cultural scene: - **Lu Xun**, the founding figure of modern Chinese literature, lived and wrote here. - **Eileen Chang**, novelist of late-1940s Shanghai life. - **Republican-era cinema**, centred at the Mingxing studio and others. - **Foreign-language press** (the North China Daily News, the Shanghai Mercury). - **Cabarets, jazz clubs, and the 'Paris of the East' nightlife** that fills the cultural memory of the era.

The cultural mix was unique in Asia at the time.

The dark side

Shanghai was also: - **The opium trade's main entry point**. - **A criminal underworld centre** (the Green Gang, the Big-Eared Du / Du Yuesheng). - **Sex work and gambling on a substantial scale**. - **Substantial poverty** alongside the foreign-resident wealth. - **The site of the 1932 Japanese attack** that destroyed the northern Hongkou and Zhabei districts. - **The Japanese occupation** from 1937 to 1945.

The post-1949 PRC narrative emphasised these aspects of the era; the post-1990 commercial-revival narrative has somewhat romanticised them. Both elements were real.

The Jewish refugee chapter

Between 1933 and 1941, around 20,000 European Jewish refugees fled to Shanghai — one of the few cities in the world that didn't require an entry visa during the Holocaust years. The Hongkou neighbourhood became the 'Shanghai Ghetto', concentrated by the Japanese occupation in 1943. The Jewish Refugee Museum at 62 Changyang Road (former Ohel Moshe Synagogue) documents this.

What's still visible

Bund row — the 22 substantial early-20th-century buildings on the Huangpu west bank are largely intact, mostly converted to high-end commercial use.

French Concession — Anfu Road, Wukang Road, Yongkang Road, Xinhua Road, Donghu Road. Plane-tree streets, Norman-style apartment buildings (Wukang Mansion is the iconic example), restored shikumen lane neighbourhoods.

Tianzifang — restored 1930s shikumen alley with cafes and design shops.

Xintiandi — upmarket reconstructed shikumen with luxury retail.

Shanghai History Museum at People's Square — the institutional documentation of the era.

Sun Yat-sen Memorial Residence at 7 Xiangshan Road — the founder of the Republic of China lived here briefly in 1918.

Site of the First CCP Congress (1921) — the founding meeting of the Chinese Communist Party in a French Concession shikumen, now a museum.

How to read more

• Stella Dong, Shanghai 1842-1949 — the standard popular history.
• Eileen Chang, Lust, Caution and other short fiction — the literary record.
• Lu Xun, the founding texts of modern Chinese literature.
• JG Ballard, Empire of the Sun — childhood memoir of the Japanese occupation.

Why the era matters now

Shanghai's modern character — the cosmopolitan tilt, the international comfort zone, the architectural mix, the substantial Chinese-foreign intermingling — descends directly from the treaty-port century. Other Chinese cities had foreign concessions (Tianjin, Guangzhou, Xiamen) but Shanghai's was the largest, longest-running, and most culturally formative.

When current visitors say 'Shanghai feels different from other Chinese cities', this is what they mean. The 1843-1949 layering created a city that the post-1949 PRC took 40 years to suppress and the post-1990 reform era spent another 30 years partially revivifying.