Chapter II: “the Model Settlement”

Those of my readers who have followed me through all or any of my eleven volumes of travels must be aware that my chief wish on arriving at a foreign settlement or treaty port in the East is to get out of it as soon as possible, and that I have not the remotest hankering after Anglo-Asiatic attractions. Nor is Shanghai, “The Model Settlement of the East,” an exception to the general rule, though I gratefully acknowledge the kindness and hospitality which I met with there, as everywhere, and recall with pleasure my many sojourns at the British Consulate as the guest of Mr. and Mrs. Lowndes Bullock.

But as the outlet of the commerce of the Yangtze Valley, and as a foreign city which has risen on Chinese shores in little more than half a century to the position and importance of one of the great trading centres of the world—its exports and imports for 1898 being of the value of £37,680,875 sterling[7]—it claims such notice as I can give it, which is chiefly in the shape of impressions.

I have reached Shanghai four times by Japanese steamers, three times in coasting steamers of American build, once in one of the superb vessels of the Canadian _Empress_ line, once from Hankow in a metamorphosed Dutch gunboat, and the last time, after nearly three and a half years of far eastern travel, in a small Korean Government steamer, her quaint, mysterious, and nearly unknown national flag exciting much speculation and interest as she steamed slowly up the river. Of these vessels, the _Empress of China_ alone discharged her passengers and cargo at Woo-sung, a railroad terminus twelve miles below Shanghai, and that not necessarily.

Many hours before reaching port, the deep heavenly blue of the Pacific gradually changes into a turbid yellowish flood, well named the Yellow Sea, holding in suspension the rich wash of scarcely explored Central Asian mountain ranges, the red loam of the “Red Basin” of SZE CHUAN, and the grey and yellow alluvium of the Central Provinces of China, all carried to the ocean by the “Great River,” according to a careful scientific estimate, to the extent of 6,428,858,255 cubic feet a year, solid stuff enough to build an island ninety feet in depth and a mile square annually.

Countless fishing-boats roll on the muddy waste; sailing vessels, steamers, and brown-sailed junks of every build show signs of convergence towards something, and before long a blink of land is visible, and a lightship indicates the mouth of the Yangtze Kiang and a navigable channel. It is long even then before anything definite presents itself, and I confess to being disappointed with the first features of the Asiatic mainland—two long, thin, yellow lines, hardly more solid-looking than the yellow water stretching along the horizon, growing gradually into low marshy banks, somewhat later topped with uninteresting foliage, through which there are glimpses of what looks like an interminable swamp. Then Woo-sung appears with its new railroad, godowns, whitewashed buildings, and big ships at anchor discharging cargo into lighters and native boats, and then the banks of the narrowing Huang-pu, the river of Shanghai, are indicated by habitations and small fields and signs of small industries.

Within four miles of Shanghai the vivacity of the Huang-pu and its banks becomes overpowering, and the West asserts its ascendency over the slow-moving East. There are ranges of great godowns, wharves, building yards, graving docks, “works” of all descriptions, filatures, cotton mills, and all the symptoms in smoky chimneys and a ceaseless clang of the presence of capital and energy. After the war with Japan there was a rapid increase in the number of factories.

The life and movement on the river become wonderful. The channel for large vessels, though narrow, shifting, and intricate, and the subject of years of doleful prophecies as to “silting up” and leaving Shanghai stranded, admits of the passage of our largest merchantmen, and successful dredging enables them to lie alongside the fine wharves at Hongkew. American three and four-masted and other sailing vessels are at anchor in mid-stream, or are proceeding up or down in charge of tugs. Monster liners under their own steam at times nearly fill up the channel, their officers yelling frantically at the small craft which recklessly cross their bows; great white, two-storeyed paddle arks from Ningpo and Hankow, local steamers, steam launches owned by the great firms, junks of all builds and sizes, manageable by their huge rudders, _sampans_, hooded boats, and native boats of all descriptions, lighters, and a shoal of nondescript craft make navigation tedious, if not perilous, while sirens and steam whistles sound continually. “The plot thickens.” Foreign _hongs_, warehouses, shipping offices, and hotels are passed in Hongkew, the American settlement, and gliding round Pu-tung Point, the steamer anchors abreast of the bund in a wholesomely rapid flow of water 2000 feet wide.

I arrived in Shanghai the first time on a clear, bright autumn day. The sky was very blue, and the masses of exotic trees, the green, shaven lawns, the belated roses, and the clumps of chrysanthemums in the fine public gardens gave a great charm to the first view of the settlement. Two big, lofty, white hulks for bonded Indian opium are moored permanently in front of the gardens. Gunboats and larger war-vessels of all nations, all painted white, and the fine steamers of the Messageries Maritimes have their moorings a little higher up. Boats, with crews in familiar uniforms, and covered native boats gaily painted, the latter darting about like dragonflies, were plying ceaselessly, and as it was the turn of the tide, hundreds of junks were passing seawards under their big brown sails.

On landing at the fine landing-stage, where kind friends received me and took me to the British Consul’s residence in the spacious grounds of the Consulate, I was at once impressed with the exquisite dress of the ladies, who were at least a half of the throng, and with the look of wealth and comfort which prevails.

All along the British bund, for at least a mile from the Soochow Creek, which separates it from Hongkew, to the French settlement, are banks, hongs, hotels, and private houses of the most approved and massive Anglo-Oriental architecture, standing in large, shady gardens, the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, the “P. & O.” office, the Canadian-Pacific Railroad office, the fine counting-house and dwelling-house of the old and famous firm of Jardine, Matheson & Co., and the long façade of the British Consular buildings, with their wide sweep of lawns, being prominent.

The broad carriage-road and fine flagged side-walk are truly cosmopolitan. Well-dressed men and women of all civilised nations, and of some which are not civilised, promenade gaily on the walk and in the garden. Single and two-horse carriages and buggies, open and closed, with coachmen and grooms in gay and often fantastic cotton liveries, dash along the drive. Hackney victorias abound, and there are _jinrickshas_ (from which foreigners drop the first syllable) in hundreds, with Chinese runners, and Shanghai wheelbarrows innumerable, some loaded with goods or luggage, while the coolies of others are trundling along from two to four Chinese men or women of the lower classes, seated on matted platforms on either side of the wheel, facing forwards.

I was not prepared for the Chinese element being so much _en evidence_ in the foreign settlement. It is not only that clerks and compradores dressed in rich silks on which the characters for happiness and longevity and the symbols of luck are brocaded are in numbers on the bund, and that all the servile classes, as may be expected, are Chinese, but that Chinese shops of high standing, such as Laou Kai Fook’s, are taking their places in fine streets which run back from the bund, that some of the handsomest carriages on the bund and the Bubbling Well Road, the fashionable afternoon drive of Shanghai, are owned and filled with Chinese, that Chinese ladies and children richly-dressed drive in the same fashion, and that of late, specially, wealthy Chinese have become keen competitors for British houses, and have even outbid foreigners for them. Is Shanghai menaced by the “Yellow Peril” as Malacca, Singapore, and Penang have been?

A great trading Chinese city, with an estimated population of 200,000, has grown up within the foreign boundary, subject to foreign municipal laws and sanitary regulations, but so absolutely Chinese, that were it not for the wide streets and the absence of refuse-heaps and bad smells, one might think oneself in one of the great cities of the interior. The Chinese are quite capable of appreciating the comfort and equity of foreign rule, and the various advantages which they enjoy under it. They pay municipal taxes according to their rating, and “feu duty” for their land, which it is usual for them to hold in the name of a foreigner. They are under the jurisdiction of the Chinese Government, but civil cases in which foreigners are concerned and breaches of the peace are tried in what is known as the “Mixed Court,” an apparently satisfactory and workable arrangement, and serious criminal cases belong to the Chinese Shanghai magistrate.

I soon began to learn why Shanghai is called, or calls itself, “The Model Settlement,” and to recognise the fitness of the name. The British and American settlements are governed by a Municipality elected by the ratepayers, consisting of nine gentlemen, who, assisted by a secretary and general staff, expend the sums provided by the ratepayers to the general satisfaction, arranging admirably for the health, security, comfort, and even enjoyment of the large foreign community, as well as for the order and well-being of the constantly increasing Chinese population, showing to the whole East what can be accomplished by an honest and thoroughly efficient British local administration. This body is, as it deserves to be, grandly housed.

The more important streets are lighted with electricity, the others with gas. Mounted Sikh police patrol the suburban roads, and a mixed force of Europeans, Sikhs, and Chinese preserves order and security in the settlement by day and night. An expensive but successful drainage system keeps Shanghai sweet and wholesome. Water-carts are always at work in dry weather, and scavengers’ carts cleanse the streets three times daily. Waterworks three miles from city pollutions supply pure water abundantly, and keep up a very high pressure unfailingly. The band of thirty performers, which plays in the public gardens every afternoon in winter, and three evenings a week in summer, attracting nearly the whole foreign community to lounge under the trees or stroll on the smooth gravel walks, is the creature of the Municipality.

Shanghai has two telegraph lines embracing London; daily papers well conducted, the _North China Daily News_ specially maintaining a deservedly high reputation; several magazines, and communication with Europe always once a week, and usually oftener, by well-appointed mail steamers of four lines. Telegraphic news from all parts of the world appears simultaneously in London and Shanghai; it is thoroughly in touch with Europe and America, and European politics and events in general are discussed with as much intelligence and almost as much zest as at home. Excellent libraries, and the large book-store of Messrs. Kelly & Walsh, cater for the intellectual needs of the population, but it is likely that the depressing climate in spring and summer, and the whirl of society and amusements in winter, indispose most of the residents for anything like stiff reading.

The tremendous energy with which Shanghai amuses itself during seven months of the year is something phenomenal. It is even a fatigue to contemplate it. Various causes contribute to it on the part of the ladies. There is the Anglo-Saxon vitality which must find some outlet. Then there is the absence of household cares owing to the efficiency of Chinese cooks and “boys,” and ofttimes the absence of children also, owing to the need for home education; and there is also the lack of those benevolent outgoings among “the poor” which occupy usefully a portion of the time of leisured women at home. Then, owing to the imitative skill of Chinese tailors, who can construct the most elaborate gowns from fashion-plates for a few shillings, it is possible for women to have the pleasure of appearing in an infinite variety of elegant toilettes at a very small expense, and dress is certainly elevated into a fine art in Shanghai.

Of the men I write tremblingly! Chinese tailors seem as successful as Chinese dressmakers, and the laundrymen equal both, no small matter when white linen suits are in question. May it be permitted to a traveller to remark that if men were to give to the learning of Chinese and of Chinese requirements and methods of business a little of the time which is lavished on sport and other amusements, there might possibly be less occasion for the complaint that large fortunes are no longer to be made in Chinese business.

For indeed, from ignorance of the language and reliance on that limited and abominable vocabulary known as “Pidgun,” the British merchant must be more absolutely dependent on his Chinese compradore than he would care to be at home on his confidential clerk. Even in such lordly institutions as the British Banks on the bund it seems impossible to transact even such a simple affair as cashing a cheque without calling in the aid of a sleek, supercilious-looking, richly-dressed Chinese, a _shroff_ or _compradore_, who looks as if he knew the business of the bank and were capable of running it. It is different at the Yokohama Specie Bank, which has found a footing in Shanghai, in which the alert Japanese clerks manage their own affairs and speak Chinese. May I be forgiven?

An extraordinary variety of amusements is crowded into every day. Then the community is most hospitable, as every visitor to Shanghai knows, and the arrival of every ship of war and eminent globe-trotter is the signal for a fresh outbreak of gaiety. Home diversions are reproduced, and others are superadded, such as paper hunts in the adjacent cotton-fields, house-boat picnics and pleasure excursions, and house-boat shooting excursions, lasting from three days to a week, for which special advantages exist, as the inland cotton-fields during the winter are alive with pheasants, partridges, quail, woodcock, and hares, while the watercourses abound with wild fowl. Pony races are a leading institution, with gentlemen riders of course. The morning gallops extract people from their beds at unwonted hours, and in spring and autumn the prospects of the stables make great inroads on conversation. But I will not go further. The very imperfect list given below gives some idea of the diversions which the community provides for itself.[8] Amateur theatricals are “the rage” in the winter, the amateur company providing several performances in a theatre built by a subscription of £5000, and holding over eight hundred persons, and the Fine Art Society gives an annual exhibition.

The continual presence of strangers imparts a needed element of freshness to society, and a zest to amusements which might pall, and gives people an excuse, if any were needed, for enjoying themselves. Shanghai has become the metropolis of gaiety for the Far East, and a week at the Astor House, the great recreation looked forward to not only by the dwellers in the treaty ports of China and Japan, but by those who roast and dissolve on the rock at Hongkong, and its delirious whirl attracts people even from Singapore.

But it would be quite an error to suppose that amusement crowds out the kindlier emotions. Europeans fall into distress constantly, some from misfortune, and some from fault, and many widows and orphans are left penniless. One may safely say that there is never a case of distress arising from any cause which is not immediately and amply relieved and planned for; and benevolence never wearies, the Ladies’ Benevolent Society doing a ceaseless good work. There is a Sailors’ Home and Rest in a very efficient and flourishing condition, with musical evenings frequently, at which ladies and gentlemen play and sing; and, without going further into detail, it may be said that the various useful organisations which our civilisation considers essential for a large community, from a fine general hospital downwards, have their place in Shanghai.

Church accommodation is ample for the church-goers. The Protestant cathedral, a really beautiful edifice, built from the designs of Sir Gilbert Scott, is one of the greatest adornments of the settlement, and is the finest ecclesiastical building in the Far East.

From the early days of Shanghai many Protestant missions, both European and American, have had mission houses in the settlement, the most important being the large, appropriate, and substantial headquarters of the China Inland Mission, the gift of Mr. Orr Ewing, with a home for a hundred missionaries, a hospital, goods and business departments, and postal arrangements. Dr. Muirhead, of the L.M.S., whose missionary zeal is unchilled in the winter of his age, and Dr. Edkins, of the same Society, whose Chinese scholarship and researches among things Chinese have won him a European fame, are well known to, and are much respected by, the foreign community. There is also a large Roman mission. British and American Bible Societies, and the English Religious Tract Society and others also have agents and depôts there, and much translation is done by missionaries, and by agencies which have for their noble object the diffusion of pure and useful western literature among the Chinese, and their elevation mentally and morally.

There is a North China branch of the Royal Asiatic Society in Shanghai, with a fine library, regular meetings, and a journal, which gathers up a great deal of very valuable matter. If the size and material of the audience on the night when I had the honour of reading a paper before the Society may be regarded as an indication of the interest in its objects, it must be flourishing indeed.

The topography of this metropolis is fully dealt with in various official and other volumes. The salient points which impress a newcomer are Hongkew, the American settlement, with its commercial activity, the Soochow creek, with its fine bridge, the handsome buildings of the British Consulate, the British Bund, with its fine retaining wall, the long line of handsome private and public buildings, and the glimpses of broad and handsome streets full of private residences which run from the bund towards the boundary.

The French Bund is a continuation of the British; but the French settlement is small, markedly inferior, and gives one an impression of arrested development, the only noteworthy buildings being the Consulate, the Town Hall, and the large but plain Roman cathedral. As some compensation, the fine wharves at which the big Yangtze steamers load and discharge their cargoes are in this settlement, as well as the handsome and commodious premises of the Messageries Maritimes, beyond which stretch, far as the eye can reach, the crowded tiers of the Chinese shipping. The French boundary is an undesirable creek, running past the east gate of the native city, between which and the Huang-pu are crowded and unsavoury suburbs.

It is apparent that France regards her concession as a colony rather than a settlement, and she has lately urged her claims for an extension of it in a most selfish and indefensible manner. The settlement has been frequently in very hot water, and a serious disagreement with the Chinese occurred so recently as 1898. Its Municipal Board was once forcibly dissolved by the French Consul for a difference of opinion, and some of its members were imprisoned.

The English settlement makes a proud display of the wealth of the insular kingdom in the number of its stately buildings, the Consulate, the cathedral, the municipal buildings, the four-storeyed and elaborately-designed club house, the banks and shipping offices, and the massive mansions of historic firms, standing in their secluded grounds; though of the magnates of eastern commerce in the days of the rapid making of great fortunes almost none remain. British, too, in design, architecture, and arrangement, in all indeed but cost, is the magnificent pile of buildings in which the Imperial Maritime Customs and the new Post Office, under the same management, are housed.

Shanghai in every way makes good her claim to be metropolitan as well as cosmopolitan, and, in spite of dark shadows, is a splendid example of what British energy, wealth, and organising power can accomplish.

To us the name Shanghai[9] 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 every-day 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.

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, shown in the illustration. The buildings and fantastic well-kept pleasure grounds 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 of ages of worshippers, its throngs, its smoke, its ceaseless movement, and its din are the most salient features of this native hive.

_Yamens_, of course, exist, and _yamen_ runners, for Shanghai has the distinction of being the residence of a Taotai, or Intendant of Circuit, and a magistrate, in whose hands the administration of justice is placed, involving responsibility for the interests of over 560,000 Chinese, the estimated native population of the city and the settlements, the total population being estimated at 586,000.

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.