Who ruled Shanghai?

Shanghai lies on the Huangpu River close to where it meets the estuary of the Yangtze, on flat alluvial land that the river has built up out of the sea over the last few thousand years. Its position at the mouth of China's greatest waterway, which links the coast to the populous interior, explains almost everything about it. For most of its history it was a modest county town; it became a world city only after 1843, when it was opened to foreign trade by treaty, and its story since then has tracked the upheavals of modern China.

Neolithic farming cultures lived on the higher ground to the west of today's centre, but much of the present city was still marsh or open water in ancient times. The area belonged successively to the states of Wu, Yue and Chu, then to the unified empires from the Han dynasty onward. Its trade at first went through Qinglong, a port on the Wusong River that flourished under the Tang and Song. As the river silted, commerce shifted to the Huangpu, and a market town called Shanghai, roughly "on the sea", grew on its bank. It became the seat of a new county in the early 1290s under the Yuan dynasty.

Under the Ming and Qing the county prospered on cotton growing and weaving and on coastal shipping. Raids by the pirates known as wokou led to the building of a city wall in 1553, which survived until 1912. By the eighteenth century the town had spread beyond its walls towards the river, with wharves, guild halls and a customs office.

The First Opium War ended with the Treaty of Nanking in 1842, which made Shanghai one of five ports opened to British trade. A British settlement was marked out north of the walled city in 1845, and a French concession followed in 1849. In 1863 the British and American areas merged into the International Settlement, run by a council of foreign ratepayers rather than by Chinese officials. Refugees fleeing the Taiping Rebellion poured in during the 1850s and 1860s, establishing the pattern of a city where Chinese residents greatly outnumbered foreigners even inside the concessions.

By the 1920s Shanghai was China's largest city and its industrial, financial and publishing capital, with banks along the waterfront Bund, cotton mills, gangsters, film studios and radical politics. The Chinese Communist Party held its first congress here in 1921, and in April 1927 Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists massacred communists and labour activists in the city. Japanese forces attacked in 1932, and in 1937 a three-month battle ended with the Chinese parts of the city occupied. The foreign settlements survived as an island until December 1941, sheltering among others some 20,000 Jewish refugees from Europe, before Japan took them over too.

The People's Liberation Army entered Shanghai in May 1949, and most foreign businesses and many wealthy Chinese left soon afterwards. For three decades the city was run as an industrial powerhouse whose revenues largely went to Beijing, and it was a stronghold of radical politics during the Cultural Revolution. Change came after 1990, when the government launched the development of Pudong, the farmland across the Huangpu, which became a district of skyscrapers and the site of a stock exchange. Today Shanghai is a municipality of some 25 million people, one of the largest cities in China and the world, and its leading centre of finance and container shipping.