Before We Begin: Eight Sub-districts and One Town

A map

Before its abolition Zhabei District administered eight sub-districts and one town. Their geographical relation to one another went roughly like this:

                     North
      ┌────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
      │ Pengpu Xincun       │ Linfen Road             │  ← furthest north: workers' villages
      ├─────────────────────┼─────────────────────────┤
      │ Pengpu Town (west)  │ Daning Road             │  ← north-central: new town and industry
      ├─────────────────────┼─────────────────────────┤
      │ Gonghexin Road                                 │  ← centre
      ├─────────────────────┼─────────────────────────┤
      │ Zhijiang West Road  │ Baoshan Road            │  ← south-central: sites of revolution
      ├─────────────────────┼─────────────────────────┤
      │ Tianmu West Road    │ Beizhan                 │  ← furthest south, on Suzhou Creek
      └─────────────────────┴─────────────────────────┘
                    South (Suzhou Creek)

(Schematic, not to scale; Pengpu Town lies in the north-west and borders Baoshan District.)

Why take the sub-districts one by one

Because the sub-district — or town — is the right grain at which to understand a district.

• Talk about the "district" and it is too coarse: all you learn is that it was big, that it was poor, that it was abolished;
• Talk about the "streets" and it is too fine: all you see is one building and one tree;
• Talk about the sub-district and it is just right: each one has a character, a lineage and a fate of its own.

Take a few examples:

• Baoshan Road sub-district covers less than 1.7 km², yet it holds nine of Zhabei's twelve revolutionary heritage sites;
• Daning Road sub-district is the only sub-district in Zhabei to have completed the whole transformation "from industrial zone to modern neighbourhood";
• Beizhan sub-district takes its name from a railway station that no longer exists;
• Zhijiang West Road sub-district takes its name from the place where Japan accepted surrender.

None of this is visible until you get down to the level of the sub-district.

Getting to know them one by one

Three patterns that keep recurring

Read these nine pieces and you will notice a few patterns coming back again and again.

Pattern one: almost every sub-district was carved out of another. Gonghexin Road sub-district was carved out of Pengpu sub-district in 1978; Daning Road was carved out of Gonghexin Road in 1985; Linfen Road was carved out of Pengpu Xincun in 1988. When an area's population grows, a piece is sliced off to form a new sub-district — the natural scar of a city growing.

Pattern two: most of these sub-districts are products of the great merger of 1996. In 1996 Zhabei abolished eight sub-districts south of Zhongshan North Road and rebuilt four: Tianmu West Road, Beizhan, Baoshan Road and Zhijiang West Road. So in the history of these four today there is always a line reading "in 1996, sub-districts X and Y were abolished and merged to form the new sub-district Z".

Pattern three: the sub-districts almost never named themselves — they followed the roads. Tianmu West Road sub-district is named after Tianmu West Road; Baoshan Road sub-district after Baoshan Road; Gonghexin Road sub-district after Gonghexin Road … To understand a sub-district you first have to understand the road it takes its name from, and why that road is called that. (Fortunately Appendix 1 is devoted to exactly this.)

So let us start with the one furthest south, hard against Suzhou Creek.