Shanghai History
During the Song Dynasty (AD 960-1279) Shanghai was improved from a village to a market town (zhen) in 1074, and in 1172 a dam in Shanghai was built to stabilize the coastal ocean, the performance a previous dam. The Yuan dynasty in 1292 Shanghai is officially a city for the first time in 1927.
Two important events helped to promote development of Shanghai in the Ming Dynasty. The Shanghai city wall was first built in 1554 to protect the city against the invasion of Japanese pirates (Wako), but this wall was neither very high nor very long compared to other cities in Chinese. It measured 10 meters high and 5 km in circumference. During the reign of Wanli (1573-1620), Shanghai was a major psychological boost for the construction of a temple city of God (Cheng Huang Miao) in 1602. This honor is usually reserved for places with the status of a city as the capital of the prefecture (fu), and was usually not given to a single county town (zhen) and Shanghai. The honor was probably a reflection of the economic importance of the city to its low political status over.
During the Qing Dynasty, Shanghai was the largest seaport in the whole Yangtze Delta region. This was the result of two important central government policy changes. First, the emperor Kangxi (1662-1723) in 1684 reversed the previous Ming Dynasty ban ships, a prohibition that had been in force since 1525th Secondly, the Emperor Yongzheng in 1732 transferred the Office of Customs (Hai Guan) in Jiangsu province, the capital of the prefecture of the city of Songjiang, Shanghai, and gave exclusive control over customs revenues to the foreign trade of all provinces of Jiangsu. After these two critical decisions, concluded Professor Linda Cooke Johnson, by the year 1735 in Shanghai, a commercial port for the entire region of the lower Yangtze, while they still have the lowest administrative level in the political hierarchy.
The importance of Shanghai grew radically in the 19th Century, the city’s strategic location at the mouth of the Yangtze River makes it an ideal place for trade with the West. During the First Opium War in the early 19th Century, British forces temporarily held Shanghai. The war with the Treaty of Nanking in 1842, which saw the treaty ports, ended included Shanghai, open to international trade. The Treaty of the Bogue signed in 1843 and Sino-US agreement signed in 1844 and Wangsia saw foreign nations achieve extraterritoriality on Chinese soil, the beginning of the foreign concessions.
1854 saw the first meeting of the Shanghai Municipal Council, created to manage the foreign concessions. In 1863 the British colony south of Suzhou Creek (Huangpu District) and American settlement, north to form the Suzhou Creek (Hongkou District), combined with the International Settlements. The French withdrew from the Shanghai Municipal Council, and maintained its own French Concession, south of International Settlements, which still exists today as a popular attraction. The citizens of many countries and all continents came to Shanghai to live and work in the following decades, those who remained for a long time – called the “Shanghai Landers fled in the years 1920 and 1930 nearly 20,000 so-called White Russians and Russian Jews – some for generations. the newly created Soviet Union and moved to Shanghai. The Shanghai Russians constituted the second largest foreign group.
The Sino-Japanese War ended with the Treaty of Shimonoseki, which saw Japan emerge as additional foreign power in Shanghai. Japan built the first factories in Shanghai, which were soon copied by other foreign powers to the emergence of Shanghai industry effect. Shanghai was the most important financial center in the Far East.
In the Republic of China (1911-1949), the political status of Shanghai was finally the 14th of a community Collected in July 1927. Although the foreign concessions of territory were excluded from their control, yet the new Chinese community covered an area of 828.8 square kilometers, including the modern districts of Baoshan, Yangpu, Zhabei, Nanshi and Pudong. Led by a Chinese mayor and city council, new Government’s first task was to create a new center in the city Jiangwan Yangpu, outside the boundaries of the foreign concessions. The new center was planned to include a public museum, library, sports stadium, and the town hall.
The Imperial Japanese Navy Air Service bombed Shanghai 28th January 1932, nominally in an effort to crush protests by Chinese students from the Manchurian Incident and the Japanese occupation of Northeast China. The Chinese fought back in what was the incident of 28 January. The two sides fought to a standstill and a ceasefire was negotiated in May. The Battle of Shanghai in 1937 resulted in the occupation of the Chinese administration outside of the Shanghai International Settlement and the French Concession. The international regime was supported by the Japan 8 December 1941 and remained occupied until the surrender of Japan occupied in 1945.
Shanghai was finally permitted to engage in economic reforms in 1991, of the huge development still visible and the birth of Lujiazui and Pudong.
