Before We Begin: Why Read the History of a District That Is Gone?

A name that was struck off

On 4 November 2015, Shanghai convened a working conference on "abolishing the Zhabei and Jing'an districts and establishing a new Jing'an District". From that moment, "Zhabei District" ceased to be a cell in an administrative table and became a bundle of memories.

The curious thing is this: an administrative division can be abolished, but a place name is very hard to kill. Walk into any old hospital, old school or old police station in Shanghai today and you will still find the two characters "Zhabei" on doorplates, on seals, in the letterheads of old documents. The bus stops were renamed; the spoken habit was not — older Shanghai people still say "I'm going to Zhabei", not "I'm going to what used to be Zhabei".

Which is interesting in itself: why does a name the state has cancelled go on living among the people?

The answer is probably buried in a single sentence: Zhabei was not a "district". It was a stretch of modern history compressed too hard.

How much fits into twenty-eight square kilometres

Before it was abolished, Zhabei covered 29.19 km² (one source gives 29.26 km² — see the note on figures in About This Book), roughly 10 km from north to south. That is not a small piece of Shanghai's central city. But its density lay not in its area; it lay in its events:

• Shanghai's land gate — the Old North Station, and later Shanghai Station — was here;
• the Commercial Press, modern China's largest publishing house, was here; and its Oriental Library, billed as "the finest library in Asia", burned down here as well;
• Song Jiaoren — the most famous assassination victim in the history of Chinese constitutionalism — lies buried here;
• in the 1932 war in Shanghai, the Japanese army's first objective was Zhabei; in 1937, Xie Jinyuan's "Eight Hundred Heroes" held the Sihang Warehouse, in Zhabei;
• the Central Bureau of the Chinese Communist Party after its Third Congress worked in secret from a shikumen house in Zhabei for more than a year;
• Shanghai's first elected government was formed after the workers' third armed uprising was won in Zhabei;
• and on 13 April 1927 the blood that ran on Baoshan Road made this the most savage page of that coup.

Twenty-eight square kilometres hold several of the main threads of modern Chinese history at once: transport, publishing, constitutionalism, resistance, labour.

So what does this book set out to do

A chronicle very easily turns into a laundry list. This book tries to avoid that: each period is pinned to a single governing question, with events strung along that line.

Read that table and you can probably feel the book's ambition: not to list what happened in Zhabei, but to explain why Zhabei turned out the way it did.

One warning

It should be said plainly at the outset: the modern history of Zhabei is, on the whole, heavy.

Two wars in Shanghai beat it from "the elite quarter of the Chinese city" into scorched earth. After 1937 more than 95% of its buildings were ruins, and for a time it was "one of the poorest parts of Shanghai", called the "stripped-bare district" and counted among the town's low quarters. This is not an appeal for sympathy; it is the premise for understanding everything that followed — the "catching up" Zhabei did over the following decades was the settling of that account.

So the book will rise and fall in tone. It is bright when it speaks of the naming, of the self-opened port, of the bookshops and theatres along Baoshan Road; it is heavy when it speaks of the early morning of 29 January 1932, of the rain on Baoshan Road, of the west wall of Sihang Warehouse. That is not the author's mood. It is the weight of the sources themselves.

If you are ready, let us begin. First stop: the two water gates on Suzhou Creek.