I

EVOLUTION OF A CITY

FROM time immemorial the Yangtsekiang has deposited at its mouth quantities of silt borne downward from the far West on its mighty yellow tide. Little by little, water gave place to mud flats, and mud flats to green fields. On this alluvium a handful of fisher-folk settled a thousand or so years ago, and from their straggling village gradually evolved the Shanghai of today. Shanghai means “Mart on the Sea,” but the city is now sixty miles inland. The Whangpoo River, a branch of the Yangtse, that flows past it, has during the past fifty years narrowed one-third, and only by constant dredging is the channel kept open.

For many years the obscure fishing-station gave no promise of its future greatness; but all things come to them that wait, and Shanghai’s prosperity began when an official in charge of shipping and customs was stationed there in 1075. Five hundred years later, the place had blossomed out into a kind of Oriental Athens, celebrated for its musicians, poets, prose writers, and statesmen. It gave birth, also, to women of repute, praised far and wide as models of virtue and filial piety. The city, like human beings, had its vicissitudes. Again and again, it was infested by Chinese and Japanese pirates, swept by typhoons, inundated by torrential rains. Although in the latitude of Savannah, Georgia, one piercingly cold winter it was almost buried under snow, the river covered with ice, and men and animals frozen to death.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century Shanghai’s population was estimated at over half a million, and her star was in the ascendant. A forest of masts from a thousand quaint junks, each gaily painted to represent a fish, with staring eyes—for how, say Chinese mariners, can a ship see where to go without eyes?—thronged the anchorage. Shanghai was the busy seaport for the central provinces reached by the Yangtse and for points up and down the coast. Long before ever a foreigner settled within her borders her commercial possibilities had been largely realized and her position as “Queen of the Sea” assured.

In 1842 occurred the great epoch in her history, when with four other cities she was forced by Great Britain to throw open her gates as a treaty port. The first Occidentals to reside within the city were the British Consul and his suite. The most pressing business that confronted the resident British was to secure land for a permanent foreign settlement. They soon discovered that it was one thing to select the site but quite another to get it. The territory chosen lay to the north and west of the Chinese City and for the most part consisted of cultivated fields, dotted here and yonder with a village, and always and everywhere graves, rising in pyramidal grass-grown mounds. As usual, the chief difficulty was over the graves, which the purchasers agreed should remain undisturbed. When finally the British were in complete possession of the land, they decided the struggle had been even more severe and nerve-racking than the capture of the City. The French followed close on the heels of the British, demanding from the Chinese a concession of their own, something that the Americans a little later, with less friction and noise, simply quietly appropriated.

In 1848, five years after the opening of the Settlement, it is recorded that the foreign population numbered over one hundred, including a few women. How imagination takes wings to itself and pictures the conditions under which the community lived at that time! There were no hill resorts to flee to for a refreshing breeze in summer, no electric fans to temper the heat, no ice-cooled drinks, no screens to shut out the flies and mosquitoes. A stroll on the street was robbed of its pleasure by lack of sanitation, and a ramble even in the near suburbs almost unendurable because of the excrement used on the fields as a fertilizer. Cholera, plague, and other Oriental diseases waxed rampant, and in the first foreign cemetery many a tiny mound watered with tears wrung from aching hearts, told an eloquent story of young lives sacrificed to make possible the Shanghai of to-day.

An outstanding event in the history of Shanghai was the investment of the city in the early 60’s by the T’aiping rebels, those fanatical hordes that for fourteen years kept the country in a ferment, and well-nigh overthrew the Manchu dynasty. As the excited rebels advanced from the west the populace around fled before them to Shanghai. In the original Land Regulations drawn up by the foreigners Chinese were forbidden to reside in the Settlement. The panic-stricken refugees, however, could not be restrained. They camped first on the outskirts, but soon afterward pushed in and overran the Settlement without let or hindrance. Shacks were built to house them. They went up by the hundreds, like mushrooms, in a night, and real estate speculators reaped a rich harvest, for often the refugees were people of wealth and paid handsome rentals. Many of these same speculators, who, carried away by their good fortune, continued to build at a mad rate, suffered heavy losses, and some even bankruptcy, when at the close of the Rebellion the crowds began emptying out as fast as they had poured in. One reason for the wholesale exodus of the Chinese was their dislike of the sanitary regulations at that time in force in the Settlement, and they were in great fear lest the foreigners might gain sufficient control over the Chinese officials to put the same hated rules into operation in the interior cities. Though so many refugees returned to their homes just as soon as it was safe to do so, large numbers remained, enjoying the protection offered them in the Settlement. Efforts were made from time to time to eject them, but without avail, while others gradually drifted into this desirable haven. Thus began what Shanghai has ever since continued to be, an asylum for the lawless from all parts of China. The class of respectable unfortunates is also numerous. A Chinese “Who’s Who” for Shanghai, if accurately compiled, would astonish the reader with its list of half-forgotten, erstwhile famous personages, deposed officials, bankrupt aristocrats, antiquated scholars, men who figured prominently in the affairs of the world, but, having lost “face,” favor, and fortune, find the cosmopolitan metropolis a safe retreat in which to end their days.

“First things” always possess a peculiar interest, and of these Shanghai can lay claim to her full share. The first railroad ever laid in China ran between Shanghai and the forts at Woosung, twelve miles distant, where the Whangpoo River joins the Yangtse. The two men sent out to survey the line had a hard time of it and one of them was nearly killed by the infuriated people, who declared he should not desecrate the graves of their ancestors that lay in the path of the proposed road. This line was completed in 1876, but it was destined to a short existence. The stealing of window-glass and the blue silk window curtains by Chinese passengers, unable to comprehend their utility except as a means to fill their pockets with coveted cash, was a small matter. The road roused the deep-seated resentment of all classes, and from the first was doomed. The grand finalé came when a group of Shanghai officials perfunctorily inspected the entire line from their sedan-chairs, scorning to stoop to the indignity of riding on the train, and gravely pronounced it a menace. Soon after this the rails were tom up and it was long before others were laid in their places. But the world moved even under the reign of the Manchus, and before their sun had set the shriek of the locomotive was heard many times every day between Shanghai and Woosung, while in the “most pro-foreign city in the world” sedan-chairs are almost as great a novelty as trains were formerly.

It seems strange that it should have been during the stressful period of the T’aiping Rebellion that one of the greatest boons China ever fell heir to was conferred on the distracted nation. That was the inauguration in Shanghai of the Imperial Maritime Customs, called by one writer “the most telling Western leaven ever introduced into China.” The story of the Customs service under the Chinese is one long, tiresome record of failure, graft, and loss, and it was not till 1854, when the management was assumed by foreigners, whose probity became at once the wonder and delight of the natives, that a change was effected. Guided through half a century by the master hand of Sir Robert Hart, to whom must also be given much of the credit of the National Chinese Postal System established during his incumbency, the work has gone on growing steadily and yielding an increasing revenue. It is eminently fitting that a statue of Sir Robert in characteristic pose, should recently have been unveiled in the Bund Park close by the Custom House.

Shanghai has not yet reached the zenith of her prosperity. The Customs receipts last year were larger than ever before. Twenty and more vessels bound for as many different ports often leave her docks in a single day. Never was there as much building in progress, especially of Chinese houses. The Western traveller who looks out upon the wide Bund, flanked by handsome foreign buildings, with automobiles and carriages speeding to and fro, almost wonders whether he is not arriving at a European capital instead of a city in China. The native population has grown to over a million. Of the twenty-one thousand resident foreigners, including Japanese and East Indians, about five thousand are British and fifteen hundred Americans. The city is a political theatre where plots are hatched and reforms initiated. It is the national headquarters of missionary work, the chief seat of commerce, the home of progress, in short the nerve-centre of China whose influence reaches out to the remotest corners of the land. Shanghai faces problems and dangers peculiar to the Orient, but her future is bright with the promise of boundless development.