French concession of Shanghai

In this podcast, we interview fiction and nonfiction authors working in, around, and about the Asia-Pacific region.

The Bund's grand facades and the leafy streets of the former French concession are usually read as monuments to Western enterprise in China, but those buildings were raised by Chinese labor, and the concessions that defined old Shanghai could not have run without the Chinese who served, traded, and lived inside them.

In Shanghai, the story of China's most dynamic city, Michael Dillon sets out to tell the city's story from the Chinese side.

Michael's new book follows the city from a small fishing town on the Huangpu River, a tributary of the Yangtze, through the Opium War and the treaty ports, the foreign concessions, the Japanese occupation, and the communist takeover, to its place today as the most representative city of China's forward-looking, economy-driven modernization.

But that did mean that it, uh, it was in a good position to have some, um, local regional commerce and, and, and that, the, that start, that started, uh, well, many s- many centuries ago on a very small scale.

But nothing very much happened, uh, really, uh, to make Shanghai seem different and significant until the 1840s, 1850s when Europeans and eventually Americans turned up.

The, I mean, the mo- the most famous parts of, of this history are, are the concessions, particularly the French concession, which is obviously still can be visited in, in Shanghai today.

But how did these concessions get started, and what, what in effect, like, what were the powers they maintained over Shanghai?