Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
The Huangpu riverfront swelled as the
great trading houses
such as Jardine
Matheson and Swire from Hong Kong rushed to open godowns (warehouses)
and offices. Silk, tea and opium (still technically illegal) remained important
but insurance and banking proved lucrative new moneymakers. Behind the
river, homesick merchants built mansions in imitation of the ones they had
left behind in Europe, with large gardens. By 1853 there were several hundred
foreign ships making regular trips into the Chinese interior, and almost a
thousand resident foreigners, most of them British. Still, even the largest firms
had only a dozen or so foreign staff. Shanghai might have continued to grow
incrementally for decades; it would take a catastrophic civil war to kick the city's
development into a much higher gear.
The Taiping Rebellion and
beyond
China's humiliation by foreigners, and the corruption and decadence of her
ineffectual overlords, caused instability in Shanghai's giant, mysterious hinter-
land. Between 1740 and 1840 the Chinese population tripled, a n d vast numbers
of peasantry became poverty-stricken and rootless. Arbitrary taxes and lawless-
ness compounded their plight. Resentment crystallized around the unlikely
figure of charismatic cult leader
Hong Xiuquan
, a failed scholar who declared
himself the younger brother of Jesus Christ. His egalitarian philosophy proved
wildly popular, and he attracted millions of followers. Declaring their intention
to build a Taiping Tianguo, or “Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace”, with Hong
as its absolute ruler, these
Taipings
stormed across southern China, capturing
Nanjing in 1854 and making it their capital. They abolished slavery, redistrib-
uted the land and replaced Confucianism with a heretical form of Christianity.
A sister organization, the
Small Sword Society
, took over the Chinese
quarter at the centre of Shanghai. Alarmed by these fanatical revolutionaries,
the city's foreign residents joined forces with the armies of the Qing against
them. The fighting devastated the countryside around Shanghai, and more than
twenty million are thought to have died (more than a hundred million if natural
disasters and famine are added) - making this obscure rebellion, little known in
the West, the world's bloodiest ever civil war. Hong retreated into the sensual
distractions of his harem, and the drive of the Taiping faltered; the final blows
were administered with the help of foreign mercenaries in 1865.
For Shanghai, the crisis proved an opportunity. Chinese
refugees
from the
conflict swarmed, for safety, into the city's foreign concessions. Previously,
foreigners had banned Chinese from living in their exclusive enclaves, but
plenty of the new arrivals had gold enough to make them overcome any
scruples. Now Shanghai's greatest asset became land, as the average price of an
acre in the foreign concessions shot up from £70 to more than £10,000 in
less than a decade. The merchants demolished their spacious villas, sold their
grounds, and annexed local farms in a feverish
real-estate boom
. The Chinese
population exploded from fewer than a thousand souls in 1850 to more than
70,000 by 1870.
A pattern was set: as Manchu misrule continued and warlords blighted
millions of lives, Shanghai profited by offering haven under the racist but at least
orderly rule of the foreigners. This is when the city began to take its modern
shape, with Nanjing Lu emerging as the busiest shopping street, and the French
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