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life and times
A description of the Shanghai during his time.
Isabella Bird - 1897
To us the name Shanghai means alone the superb foreign settlement, with all the
accessories of western luxury and civilisation, lying grandly for a mile and a
half along the Huang-pu, the centre of Far Eastern commerce and gaiety,
the'Charing Cross'of the Pacific-London on the Yellow Sea.
But there was a Shanghai before Shanghai - a Shanghai which still exists,
increases and flourishes -- a busy and unsavoury trading city, which leads its
own life according to Chinese methods as independently as though no foreign
settlement existed;and long before Mr. Pigou, of the H. E. I. C. , in 1756, drew
up his memorandum, suggesting Shanghai as a desirable place for trade, Chinese
intelligence had hit upon the same idea, and the port was a great resort of
Chinese shipping, cargoes being discharged there and dispersed over the interior
by the Yangtze and the Grand Canal. Yet it never rose higher than the rank of a
third-rate city.
It has a high wall three miles and a half in circuit, pierced by several narrow
gateways and surrounded by a ditch twenty feet wide and suburbs lying between it
and the river with its tiers of native shipping as crowded as the city proper.
This shipping, consisting of junks, lorchas, and native craft of extraordinary
rig, lies, as Lu Hew*said, 'like the teeth of a comb'.
To mention native Shanghai in foreign ears polite seems scarcely seemly;it
brands the speaker as an outside barbarian, a person of 'odd tendencies'. It is
bad form to show any interest in it, and worse to visit it. Few of the lady
residents in the settlement have seen it, and both men and women may live in
Shanghai for years and leave it without making the acquaintance of their nearest
neighbour. It is supposed that there is a risk of bringing back small-pox and
other maladies, that the smells are unbearable, that the foul slush of the
narrow alleys is over the boots, that the foreigner is rudely jostled by
thousands of dirty coolies, that the explorer may be knocked down or hurt by
loaded wheelbarrows going at a run;in short, that it is generally abominable. It
is the one point on which the residents are obdurate and disobliging. I
absolutely failed to get an escort until Mr. Fox, of H. M. 's Consular Service,
kindly offered to accompany me. I did not take back small-pox, or any other
malady, I was not rudely jostled by dirty coolies, nor was I hurt or knocked
down by wheelbarrows. The slush and the smells were there, but the slush was not
fouler nor the smells more abominable than in other big Chinese cities that I
have walked through;and as a foreign woman is an everyday sight in the near
neighbourhood, the people minded their own business and not mine, and I was even
able to photograph without being overborne by the curious.
Shanghai is a mean-looking and busy city; its crowds of toiling, trotting,
bargaining, dragging, burden-bearing, shouting, and yelling men are its one
imposing feature. Few women, and those of the poorer class, are to be seen. The
streets, with houses built of slate-coloured, soft-looking brick, are only about
eight feet wide, are paved with stone slabs, and are narrowed by innumerable
stands, on which are displayed, cooked and raw and being cooked, the
multifarious viands in which the omnivorous Chinese delight, an odour of garlic
predominating. Even a wheelbarrow-the only conveyance possible--can hardly make
its way in many places. True a mandarin sweeps by in his gilded chair, carried
at a run, with his imposing retinue, but his lictors clear the way by means not
available to the general public. (*Lu Hew (usually written Lu Vu)was a
twelfth-century poet-official. See'A Trip to Shu' and'Drunk Song'. )
All the articles usually exposed for sale in Chinese cities are met with in
Shanghai, and old porcelain, bronzes, brocades, and embroideries are displayed
to attract strangers. Restaurants and tea houses of all grades abound, and
noteworthy among the latter is the picturesque building on the Zig-Zag Bridge*.
. . . The buildings and fantastic well-kept pleasures of the Ching-hwang Miao,
which may be called the Municipal Temple, the Confucian Temple, the Guild Hall
of the resident natives of Chekiang, and the temple of the God of War, with its
vigorous images begrimed with the smoke of the incense sticks or ages of
worshippers, its throngs, its smoke, its ceaseless movement, and its din are the
most salient features of this native hive. . . .
On returning to the light, broad, clean, well-paved, and sanitary streets of
foreign Shanghai, I was less surprised than before that so many of its residents
are unacquainted with the dark, crowded, dirty, narrow, foul, and reeking
streets of the neighbouring city.
(though it's an excerpt from 1897, the city had more or less this 'status' in late 1879-early 1880.