Today’s Shanghai is probably the most Western of all Chinese cities, but it wasn’t always this way. A siege on the city of Kaifeng in 1127 led to thousands of refugees fleeing south. The region emerged as an important center during the Ming dynasty (1368 – 1644). By the subsequent Qing period (1644-1911) Shanghai was one of China’s main trading ports. Western nations were purchasing silk, tea and ceramics in abundance, but selling little in return. The British decided to balance the books in the late 1830s by selling opium. The resulting Opium War concluded with the 1842 Treaty of Nanking which gave the British rights to set up concession areas along China’s coast. The strip of land they were given on the banks of the Huangpu River became known as the Bund. By 1936 Shanghai had a population of over three million. Unfortunately one year later the Japanese entered the city and subsequently took over the concessions, placing many foreigners in concentration camps. The city at this time was also a haven for state-less refugees and in particular Jews fleeing from Europe. They were left to their own devices in an area north of the Suzhou Creek.
After 1945 China entered a bitter civil war which concluded on May 27th, 1949 with the communists seizing Shanghai. Street names were changed, and most foreigners fled. During the Cultural Revolution of the late-1960s the city suffered as a result of its colonial past, and many people were sent to the countryside for‘re-education’. It was not until the early 1990s that Shanghai was rehabilitated when the city’s tax burden was reduced to encourage foreign and domestic investment. This has resulted in a new Bund – on the eastern banks of the Huangpu River a futuristic mass of skyscrapers dominate an area that twenty years ago was little more than farmland, as Shanghai once again re-establishes itself as the great commercial hub of the east.
