Excerpt from Shanghai Architecture by Anne Warr

Shanghai is a city built on trade with an architectural legacy unlike any other. It is a city of contrast and paradox. Notorious in the 1990s for having the world’s largest agglomeration of construction cranes it is, nevertheless, one of the few cities in the world where a majority of the buildings of the 20s and 30s have not been pulled down.

Stop for a moment before an apartment building in the former French Concession and look beyond the wires and air conditioning units clinging to the exterior. Gradually you will see the sleek unencumbered lines of an original Art Deco building and realize that all around you, beneath the electronic cobwebs, are the bones of the old foreign city.

Then, for contrast, enter the business districts of Puxi or cross the river to Pudong and you are engulfed by one of the most phenomenal building sprees the world has ever seen. This is the new Shanghai, displaying every architectural cliché of the last few decades. It has more skyscrapers than New York and a public transport system fast overtaking that of metropolitan London. And all of this has been achieved since 1992.
The new airport, completed in 1999 and served by the lightning-fast Maglev train, is already being expanded. Eleven new towns, with accommodation for over a million residents, are close to completion on the city’s periphery, whilst further out, the world’s largest container port has been constructed on an island 30km offshore, linked by a six lane bridge. Over its history, each of the city’s distinct phases left an imprint on the built form. It is all here from the temples and gardens of the walled city to the Tudorbethan villas and faux French châteaux of the foreign settlements. That is not to mention the Art Deco apartment blocks, the Jewish ghetto, the Sino-Soviet Friendship Hall and the burst of Post-modernism in the 1990s.

Today, Shanghai is the largest city in the most populated country on earth. It is the economic powerhouse of China if not the world, with a GDP equivalent to half the total economy of India. The sheer size and speed at which the city has expanded, is breathtaking. Strategically located at the mouth of the Yangzi River, Shanghai is foremost a trading city. The exchange between China, at the centre of the world, and foreigners from the rest of the world, forms the city’s raison d’être, its essence. It was trade that shifted the balance of power in dynastic China, ignited revolution, unseated an emperor and unleashed fundamental changes that haven’t stopped.

Early trading history and the first Shanghai
Shanghai’s success as a trading city comes from its location on a bend in the Huangpu River, which flows into the mighty Yangzi. The confluence takes place right at the mouth of the river’s delta with the trading world beyond.

‘Shang Hai’ means land above the sea, and it was to Shanghai that goods from the Yangzi valley were brought for trade including rice, corn, silk, cotton, tea, and porcelain. The proximity of Japan meant that Japanese came to trade as early as the 7th century AD. However, it was the increasingly aggressive raids by Japanese pirates which forced the merchants to build a protective wall in 1554.

The wall, eight metres high and roughly circular in shape with six gates and four water entrances, enclosed an existing urban community. The city plan had evolved informally, based on trade and business, not needing to follow the rectangular layouts reserved for imperial government. The city wall not only consolidated the existing administrative unit within, but also defined a large ship-building and warehousing area outside. The architecture of the city was unified by a simple palette of materials: white-washed walls, timber framing painted red, and grey roof tiles, very much like the surviving water towns of Zhujiajiao, Zhouzhuang, and Tongli which surround Shanghai. The temples and public halls became vivid markers in the city, the only ones permitted to use brightly glazed tiles in reds and greens.

At the heart of the city was the City God Temple surrounded by a flourishing community of guilds trading in rice, cloth, salt, beans, etc. Many of these guilds included merchants from other parts of China. Business was undertaken in teahouses, such as the Huxingting, where the cloth merchants met. In 1760 a group of guild merchants purchased and donated the Yu Gardens to the City Temple. The gardens’ pavilions and halls then came to be used by the numerous mercantile groups and trade guilds that occupied the surrounding streets; the ‘Hall of Happiness and Longevity’ becoming the ‘Three Corn-Ear Hall’ for rice and bean merchants to pray for a rich harvest. The symbiotic relationship that developed between the City God Temple, trade guilds, and Yu gardens encapsulated the essence of the Shanghai to come, with its blend of religion, business and pleasure.

 Old city walls c. 1820

For three centuries, the city walls provided Shanghai with the security to prosper. The variety of produce was staggering as shown in the Shanghai Gazetteer Wanli of 1588 which listed 60 different types of cotton, cotton thread and cloth. By the early 18th century, Shanghai was a major trading port with a population of 50,000, and a customs house, first built in 1685, to control all trade. Customs books from this period record the vast variety of products traded through the port – it was busier than London.

Trading with foreigners
Around this time, the British began to increase their trade with China, taking a special interest in Shanghai. In 1757, the Chinese, worried by the arrival of the ‘Foreign Devils’, tried to restrict all foreign trade to the southern port of Canton (Guangzhou). The British East India Company held most of the foreign trade, shipping Indian cotton and opium to China and Chinese silk, tea and porcelain back to Britain. Opium soon became the preferred trading medium of the British, increasing from 1,000 chests (each weighing 133 pounds) in the 1760s, to 7,000 by 1823 and 40,000 chests by 1838. The banning of opium by Imperial decree in 1800 did nothing to stop the trade, forcing Emperor Daouguang in 1839 to take the dramatic action of dumping three million pounds of opium into the sea, in front of angry British merchants. This was not to be tolerated. On June 15th 1842, two British frigates and three sloops carrying an artillery regiment, financed primarily by the British trading house of Jardine Matheson, sailed up the Huangpu and easily seized Shanghai.

On 29 Aug 1842 the Treaty of Nanking (Nanjing) was signed on board the British frigate HMS Cornwallis, giving the British five treaty ports: Shanghai, Guangzhou, Xiamen, Fuzhou and Ningbo. It also gave them ‘most-favoured-nation’ status granting them any privileges given by China to other nations and lastly the cession of Hong Kong to Britain in perpetuity. In for the kill, the United States and France extracted similar concessions – the Americans at the Treaty of Wangxi on 3 July 1844 and the French on 24 October 1844. The Treaty of Wangxi cleverly included a clause placing Americans in China under consular jurisdiction, whereby they could only be tried in their own courts and by their own consulate. Known as ‘extraterritoriality’, this law was automatically extended to the ‘most-favoured’ British, and the ‘favoured’ French. It effectively quarantined foreigners and their property from Chinese laws for the next 100 years.

Building the Bund – the symbol of Empire
In 1843, Captain George Balfour of the Madras Artillery, Britain’s first consul, arrived in Shanghai to secure the rights of the Treaty. He quickly established relations with the Chinese administration, acquired accommodation in the Chinese walled city, and then turned his attention to trade. Within a year, Balfour was organizing a public works committee to strengthen the muddy river bank along which the trading vessels moored, soon dubbed The Bund, a Hindi word meaning ‘embankment’ (pronounced Bund as in ‘fund’, not the German sounding Boond). By the time Balfour’s successor, Rutherford Alcock, arrived in 1846, the river bank was stable enough for Alcock to start building a British consulate at the junction of the Huangpu and Wusong Rivers (now Suzhou Creek). Commanding a clear view of all shipping along the Huangpu, this site is still one of the most valuable locations in Shanghai. Along with Balfour, the British trading houses had arrived–Jardine Matheson, Gibb Livingston & Co.,
Dent & Co., P&O Steamship Line and others. Their first buildings were utilitarian arrangements combining warehouse, offices and residences into a single structure. By 1846 there were 24 merchant firms in Shanghai, of which three were American, the most notable being Russell & Co. who, together with Jardine Matheson were known as ‘the combination’. Closely following the merchant houses came the services with a hotel, clubhouse and several stores in place by 1847.

 The Bund (c 1912) with Shanghai Club, right

Over the next two decades Shanghai rapidly became the centre of foreign commerce in China. By the 1890s, the move was on amongst British interests to upgrade, consolidate and extravagantly display the power of their empire. By 1900, half of China’s foreign trade was cleared through Shanghai. During the early 20th century, the trading houses with a foothold on the Bund were building Neo-Classical edifices to rival ancient Rome, the HSBC premises, completed in 1924, being the grandest. When the bank’s architects, Palmer and Turner, requested a further $1 million to continue decorating the building, the reply was ‘spare no expense, but dominate the Bund’. In 1929 the Cathay (now Peace) Hotel was completed on the Bund for global capitalist Sir Victor Sassoon, it presaged an era of internationalism during which Shanghai became a world financial centre to rival New York. The Art Moderne exterior of the new hotel marked the first chink in the British Neo-classical armour.

Setting up the foreign concessions
In 1845 Balfour and the Chinese officials signed the Land Regulations Treaty, which defined the boundaries of the settlement, and established administrative procedures including one which forbad Chinese from residing therein. The foreigners then divided this area into three settlements, each with a frontage on the Huangpu River. The French Concession lay between the walled Chinese city and Yangjiangbang Creek, later filled in and called Edward VII Avenue (present day Yan’an Road). The British Settlement stretched from Yangjiangbang to Suzhou Creek, while the American Settlement lay to the north-east of Suzhou Creek. Balfour laid out the rough masterplan of the British settlement which included main roads leading directly to the river, a cemetery, church and, most importantly, a racecourse. As the Land Treaty had not fixed the western boundaries of the concessions, the foreigners used every excuse to extend them. By the end of the 19th century the western settlements had expanded to four times the size of the original Chinese walled city.

In essence, each of the three foreign sections of the city was a separate country, run as a self-contained political unit with its own laws, administration and police force. In 1854 the British American and French consuls agreed to create a governing body for foreign Shanghai to be known as the Shanghai Municipal Council (SMC). In 1862 the French withdrew from the agreement and formed their own Conseil d’Administration Municipale. In 1863, the Americans joined with the British to form the International Settlement under the single management of the SMC. From then until 1943, Shanghai would have three distinct areas with three separate administrations, Chinese, French and International.

 US Postal Service in US Settlement

The foreign settlements offered a protective environment for refugees, businessmen, political activists and gangsters alike. Paradoxically, the boundaries between the three cities encouraged lawlessness as criminals fleeing the law in one sector could easily cross into another where the police and laws were different. Criminals exploited the differences between the sectors and the ignorance of the foreign policemen who knew little or no Chinese. The lack of central control left Shanghai as a passport-free port to which refugees gravitated, beginning with Russian Jews fleeing the pogroms of the 1890s, then White Russians fleeing the 1917 Revolution and finally European Jews in 1930s escaping from Hitler’s Europe.

The Lilongs
The seemingly complex arrangement of foreign controlled territories on Chinese soil at times proved beneficial for Chinese as well as foreigners. As the stability of foreign rule in Shanghai made it the centre of foreign commerce in China, it also undermined the power of the weak Qing dynasty and led the rest of the country into political chaos. In 1853 rebellious peasants known as Taipings captured the city of Nanjing while a triad off-shoot of the Taipings, known as The Small Swords Society captured the walled city of Shanghai. The fighting continued in waves until 1864 devastating the surrounding countryside and killing as many as 20 million Chinese. The foreign enclaves were a haven to which the Chinese refugees, many of them landed gentry, fled for safety.

 A Jing'an district lilong, Weihai Road

The regulation forbidding Chinese from residing in the foreign concessions was soon overlooked by both sides and by 1864 the influx of refugees had risen to 20,000. Temporary timber buildings were initially erected to house them and, when it seemed that the emergency situation might become permanent, the international hongs (or trading companies) like Jardine Matheson and Gibb Livingston, began their forays into the development world, eventually earning more money from real estate than they had previously made from opium. Whole city blocks were purchased and developed into a unique form of housing. A wall of shop-houses on the periphery guarded a grid of lanes within, lined with rows of English style tenements. To make these dense living quarters palatable to the Chinese gentry, diminutive Chinese courtyards were added, accessed through pairs of black timber doors framed by stone portals – called shikumen. Cleverly integrating east and west, the housing blocks, known as a ‘lilong’ or ‘longtang’, (Li = neighbourhood, Long = lane, Tang = interior space, Shikumen = stone gate) were soon being replicated all over Shanghai. The Chinese were now permanent residents in the foreign concessions, paying high rents to live on Chinese soil while the foreigners paid no rent at all for the land they had acquired by force.

When the Taiping rebels were finally defeated, many refugees went home, leaving the foreign landlords without rental income to suffer Shanghai’s first real-estate downturn. However, in the boom/bust town of Shanghai, new waves of refugees and workers continued to arrive and lilongs continued to be built. By 1940, three quarters of Shanghai’s four million plus population lived in some form of lilong. These provided the majority of Shanghainese with accommodation right through to the 1990s when Shanghai’s development boom saw many lilongs razed for high rise development. However, by 2004, Shanghai’s progressive government had enacted conservation legislation to protect all remaining lilongs. More than any other building form in Shanghai, the lilong encapsulates the unique intertwining of Chinese and western society. Today, the inner life of Shanghai cannot be fully understood without venturing through one of the lilong gates into the parallel world of serenity and order.

The Foreign Enclaves
While the first lilongs were being built to house the Chinese, the foreigners were building enclaves for themselves based on models from home, with added extras. The so-called Tudorbethan England was spreading west along Bubbling Well Road in the International Settlement as far as distant Hung Jao (Hongqiao) and French châteaux were springing up in the west of the French Concession. Each nationality stuck to their own language, ate their own food, married their own kind and celebrated festivals from home. They also ran their own clubs, with the British Shanghai Club at No. 2 The Bund being the most exclusive, where Chinese, black people, and women were not allowed. In the early days of the settlements, membership of The Shanghai Club was essential for the success of any business. In contrast, the Club Cercle Sportif Français did allow female members, but only forty at a time and, after World War II, it was the first club to admit Chinese members. Foreign wives were known as Tai Tais, described by Betty Peh T’I Wei in Old Shanghai: ‘The majority played bridge, took part in amateur dramatics, sang in choirs, worked with charitable organizations, and went shopping.’

British, French and American architects soon arrived to design in the styles and fashions of home; French Renaissance, French Provincial, Queen Anne, Beaux-Arts, etc.

George Leopold (Tug) Wilson set up the Shanghai office of the Hong Kong firm Palmer and Turner in 1913, and supervised construction of the majority of British buildings along The Bund until their new client, Sir Victor Sassoon tilted them towards Art Deco and Modernism at the end of the 1920s.

In the French Concession architects Leonard, Veysseyre and Kruze became one of the most prolific and celebrated architectural firms. One of their earliest successes was the Club Cercle Sportif Français, built between 1924 and 1926, and now incorporated into the Okura Garden Hotel. Like many of their contemporaries, these architects gradually abandoned the French Renaissance and Beaux-Arts styles of the 1920s and launched themselves wholeheartedly into the streamlined world of Art Deco and Modernism in the 1930s.

               
Tudorbethan villa in French Concession    Former French Police Officers' quarters

In 1918 a Hungarian architect, Ladislav Hudec, arrived in Shanghai having escaped from internment in Siberia. He joined the American architectural firm of RA Curry where he designed many buildings including a French Renaissance apartment block, the Normandie, before setting up his own practice in 1925. Following a trip to the United States, Hudec introduced Skyscraper Gothic to Shanghai in the Christian Literature Building (1930) and the Park Hotel (1934). Hudec’s designs for The Grand Theatre (1933) and the Wu House (1938) remain two of Shanghai’s Modernist masterpieces. During the 1930s, the settlements melded somewhat, although small territorial differences remained; for example three licenses were required to drive through the various sectors. Nor was each nationality restricted to its own concession area – Little Germany, Little Russia and Little America all developed within the French Concession. But the majority of the residents continued to be Chinese. The 1925 census showed a total population of 840,246 in the foreign settlements, of which only 29,947 were foreigners. By 1933 the population had climbed to 1,500,000 of which only 70,000 were foreigners.

Management and planning of the city
At first, the foreign settlements were slow to develop public institutions such as schools and hospitals, preferring to concentrate on trade. However, as commercial life thrived, services were added: banks, police stations, municipal services. The Victorian Tudor waterworks on the Huangpu supplied drinkable water to the International Settlement from 1883, and is still supplying drinking water today. Infrastructure was generally well planned, with western standards applying to water supply, gas, electricity, telephone, road networks and drainage. The foreign communities enjoyed clubs, schools, sporting facilities, and theatres.

The French Conseil d’Administration Municipale administered the French Concession while the Shanghai Municipal Council was the heart of British/American power, controlling everything from business licenses to sanitation. Members of the Municipal Council were voted in by the foreign business elite. It was not until 1926 that Chinese could vote in the Municipal elections or stand for Council, even though the Chinese paid the greater part of local taxes. When new Municipal Council premises were being planned in the early 20th century, they needed to be large enough to house not only the Town Hall but the expanding offices of the Volunteer Corps, Police Department, Public Health Department, Public Works Department, Education Department, Library, Orchestra and Chinese Studies. The new Council offices were designed by Robert Turner, who worked as City Architect from 1904 until 1925. When the Shanghai Municipal Council building was completed in 1922, covering an entire city block, Shanghai boasted an infrastructure the equal of any city in Europe.

The division of the city into three distinct administrative and political entities produced contrasts in the use of urban space still discernible today. The International Settlement tended to create residential, leisure, commercial and industrial zones, following the European planning model. However the French Concession was considered the best place to live, as it was quiet and had little commerce or industry. By contrast, in Chinese Shanghai, the neighborhoods were multi-functional with densely packed residential structures interwoven with commercial and industrial uses, as in the ‘shop-house’ model.

Each of the three entities had vibrant commercial zones, as might be expected in a trading port. Nanking (now Nanjing) Road, which started at The Bund, was the main commercial thoroughfare of the International Settlement and claimed to be the leading shopping street of Asia. Avenue Joffre (now Huaihai Road) the French Concession’s shopping boulevard also claimed leading status. The intense rivalry between the two commercial streets continues today. By the 1920s, the strength of the foreign commercial areas was draining activity from the commercial heart of the old (Chinese) city. However by the 1990s the Old City was thriving once again, drawing around 100,000 visitors daily, with more during holidays and festivals.

The essence of the old city, which had turned the complex relationship between City God Temple, trade guilds, pleasure gardens and festivals into good business, is alive and well today. As the price of real estate around The Bund and Nanking (Nanjing) Road increased in the early 20th century, businesses moved west and north, seeking cheaper land. Large textile mills, breweries and factories of all kinds were constructed along the banks of Suzhou Creek and the Huangpu waterfront in Yangshupu. Across the Huangpu, the early stages of Pudong’s development saw shipyards, warehouses and docks proliferating. By the mid-1990s the Shanghai Government was dutifully removing industry from the banks of the Suzhou Creek and the Huangpu River and beginning a massive water cleansing program, all in preparation for water-front high-rise residential development. However within a decade, a grassroots movement had successfully lobbied for government protection for clusters of riverside factories. Using a planning instrument called ‘Creative Clustering Parks’ the Shanghai Economic Commission runs these groups of factories as art, architecture and media spaces.

 Former Shanghai Race Club overlooking Racecourse

The Shanghai racecourse was moved westwards in 1854 and again in 1862, freeing up valuable land near The Bund for commercial uses. The final location, the current People’s Square, became the social heart of British Shanghai with the spring and autumn race meetings being the ‘grand festivals of Shanghai’ when businesses closed down for a week. The Shanghai Race Club became the third wealthiest foreign corporation in China. The roads surrounding it became filled with Shanghai’s grandest and tallest hotels, including the Park Hotel, completed in 1934 which at 22 storeys, (83.8 metres) remained the city’s tallest building until the 1980s. Also jostling for space around the racecourse were the Foreign YMCA, the Chinese YMCA, the China United Assurance Apartments, the Oriental Hotel, the Great World, the Nanjing Theatre and the Moore Memorial Church. After 1949 the racecourse became People’s Square with a boulevard cut through the middle for political rallies and military parades. Today People’s Square, is the civic heart of Shanghai, with government and cultural facilities carefully balanced along traditional axes.

Relations between Chinese and foreigners
In population, Shanghai was a Chinese city, but the introduction of Western technology, lifestyle and habits from a small number of foreigners was transforming all aspects of Chinese life. The intertwining of Chinese and foreigners in Shanghai is what has made the city unique. It could be said that the foreign irritant has produced the Pearl of Shanghai.

Starting with the business world, the foreigners and Chinese quickly established their mutual dependency. Foreigners controlled the goods between Shanghai and the overseas market, while Chinese controlled the goods between Shanghai and the hinterland. The name for this new Chinese entrepreneurial class was ‘comprador’, coming from the Portuguese word meaning ‘buyer’. The role originated in Guangzhou, and when foreign traders set up in Shanghai many brought their familiar compradors with them to negotiate the buying and selling of tea, silk and opium. The invaluable compradors often became partners in the foreign firms that employed them, carrying out the business dealings of the firm as well as acting as intermediary between the taipan, or white boss, and the Chinese employees. With the comprador managing all Chinese negotiations, the foreigners did not need to know the local language. These canny operators learnt technical and managerial skills from their foreign counterparts, enabling many to establish their own businesses, thus facilitating the emergence of China into the world of modern business. The compradors, who numbered about 2000 at the beginning of the 20th century, occupied the upper echelons of Shanghai’s Chinese society. However, the political perception of their role, as serving foreign masters at the expense of their own people, meant that most compradors had left the country by 1949.

While the compradors were learning on the job, Western schools and missions were providing a formal western education to a new generation of Chinese. The Jesuits opened schools at Xujiahui in the 19th century and the Aurora University in 1903. St John’s University in the International Settlement, founded in 1879 by the Protestant Episcopal Church in China, soon became one of the leading educational institutions in Asia, attended by the country’s Western and Chinese elite. From 1910, reparation money from the Boxer Rebellion was used to train Chinese students at universities in the United States, notably architects at the University of Pennsylvania.

 Quadrangle of former St John's University

Despite their small numbers, foreigners had an impact on the whole of China, destabilizing the imperial regime and leading eventually to the overthrow of the last emperor, Pu Yi, in 1911. The walls of the old city were symbolically removed in the same year in a gesture of openness and celebration following the Republican Revolution and the collapse of the Qing Dynasty. Today, the circular lines on the map, interrupting the orthogonal European layout, are all that remain of the walls of the ancient city.

The inequalities of the foreigners’ lifestyles and the exploitation of the Chinese in the workhouses was fertile ground for radical ideas. The Communist manifesto was quickly translated into Chinese, and the first meeting of the Chinese Communist Party took place in Shanghai in 1921.