City Information

For the second city of the world's oldest surviving ancient civilization, Shanghai is surprisingly new. Literally 'On the Sea', Shanghai is a port city on the Huangpu River, where the Yangzi River empties into the East China Sea. The area was marshland until the Song Dynasty (AD 960-1126), when refugees from Mongol and other northern nomad invasions settled the area. By 1291, Shanghai had become a county capital. The growing city got its wall in 1553 (prophetically, against Japanese pirates) and a customs house in 1685. Shanghai was only thrust into the spotlight in June 1842, when a British seaborne force captured it during the First Opium War. One of five cities pried open to Western colonial trade by the Treaty of Nanjing, Shanghai gained foreign districts controlled by the colonial powers - the British and American Concessions (soon combined as the International Settlement) and the French Concession. This hybrid city boomed as the focus of Chinese colonial trade and Qing Dynasty China uneasily coexisted with Western power for almost a century.

Today, the Yuyuan Gardens in Shanghai's Old Town is all that remains of the city's pre-colonial past. Colonial are visible in the period architecture in the French Concession, as well as the grand old buildings - the Customs House, Peace Hotel and Shanghai Club - along the grand parade of the Bund. Across the river from this picture of the past is Shanghai's future, the Pudong New Area, with the outrageously modern Orient Pearl Tower, containing a museum that traces the city's rise against seemingly insurmountable odds.

By 1937, Shanghai was the world's fifth largest city and incontestably China's most advanced, home to a rich ethnic mix of East and West and protected by its colonial status from the political storms ravaging the rest of China but already swelled by refugees from the growing conflict with Japan. In August that year, bombs (actually Chinese) fell on the foreign concessions for the first time. The Westerners began pulling out and by the start of the Pacific War in 1941, there were few Western nationals left for the Japanese to intern. The British and Americans gave up their colonial rights in 1943, to their new allies, the Nationalist Chinese, who took over Shanghai after the Japanese surrender in 1945. However, four years later, the city again fell to the Red Army.

Under the Communists, Shanghai's businesses were nationalised but the city was relatively quiet until the Cultural Revolution, when Mao Zedong made it his new power base for his 'Gang of Four' and his campaign against the Beijing leadership. In 1966, a People's Commune - formed Paris-style - held power for three anarchic weeks before Mao turned the army on it. Shanghai remained a centre for Cultural Revolution excesses until Mao's death in 1976. Reconstruction proceeded peacefully afterwards and, in 1989, Zhu Rongji, then city mayor, brought student demonstrations to a relatively bloodless close, unlike the Tiananmen Square Massacre in Beijing. From 1990, Shanghai once again set the trend for China as the new leadership began breakneck development of the Pudong district, in an economic renaissance that culminated in China's accession to the World Trade Organisation and the award of the 2008 Olympic Games to Beijing in 2001. With Jiang Zemin and Zhu Rongji originating in Shanghai, the city is arguably modern China's de facto capital and certainly its leader into the new millennium that the Chinese leadership hopes will be theirs.

Shanghai experiences climatic extremes, with bitter winters and hot and humid summers. The best time for visitors to plan a trip to the city would be during the autumn or spring months.