Many people have heard of the city of Shanghai, that great cosmopolitan industrial centre on China's coast. People know the name as being synonymous with kidnapping people from the streets of small towns and villages in England and forcing them to serve in the Royal Navy, often under terrible conditions. Others may be aware of Shanghai's role in the opium trade or as the gateway for Western powers into mainland China. Yet few people would be aware of the full story of Shanghai's growth from being a humble village to being one of the world's greatest cities.
Origins
Shanghai is located in a delta region - the mouth of the Yang-tze river is to the north and the bays of Yu-pan and Hangchow to the south. Shanghai was for several centuries little more than a fishing village with few prospects for ever changing into anything more. Although the Han Chinese civilization moved southwards towards the tropics for a period of hundreds of years, Shanghai did not endear itself to the migrants because of the lack of cultivable land for farming.
This finally changed during the Song dynasty period (960-1126) when the area to the west of Shanghai developed as a centre for agriculture and Shanghai's location and potential as a deepwater port commended itself as a centre for trade. As the agricultural hinterland grew during the subsequent Ming period (1368-1644) into an important centre for the cotton and silk industries and Shanghai acquired custom houses and other signs of growth. The Mongol conquest of China in the 13th century had forced further massive migrations of people displaced by war and misfortune. Many migrants came to the Shanghai region and brought their skills with them, leading to a much greater rate of growth in the area.
The European Intervention
For some hundreds of years, European traders had been eager to become involved with trade with China. While some Southeast Asian states had more or less welcomed the presence of foreign trading posts and even small colonies, the Chinese court (as well as the Japanese and Korea) had steadfastly resisted their presence as much as they could. Further, they were able to resist becoming drawn more deeply into international trade patterns because there appeared to be few products available from the European (and, later, American) traders for which there was any significant level of demand within China. By contrast, Chinese goods such as silk and tea were hugely popular throughout the western world. To pay for these, the western traders were forced to hand over precious metals, particularly the silver that was used in China's bimetallic currency system. While this might have been practicable for a nation such as Spain which was able to deploy huge amounts of silver and gold bullion from its South American empire, it was much more difficult for Britain to obtain sufficient supplies of these goods. As a result, a plan was hatched to supply the Chinese people with opium in place of silver. Opium had never been grown on the industrial scale that the British proposed to do in India. There had never been a widespread problem with opium abuse in Chinas or indeed anywhere in East Asia before this time.
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