How piped water came to Shanghai, 1875–1913

The short answer. Until 1883 the foreign settlement of Shanghai drank the Huangpu, carried up from the bank in buckets, settled with alum in a jar and boiled. It took eight years of ratepayers’ meetings to agree who should build a waterworks and whether the town should own it. A private English company won the concession in 1880, laid its pipes from a works at Yangshupu, and turned on the taps in the summer of 1883. For the next thirty years the Council’s reports return to the same two questions: what the town should pay for the water it sprinkled on its roads, and whether it should buy the company outright. It never did. In 1905 it took a block of shares instead, and became the company’s largest single investor.

What people drank

Wells in the Settlement gave brackish water. Households bought river or creek water from carriers, poured it into large jars, dropped in a lump of alum to settle the silt, and boiled what rose clear. Hawks Pott, writing in 1928, thought it the cause of much of the typhoid and cholera of the early decades. Fire was the other problem: the brigade depended on wells sunk in the main streets as reservoirs. The water-carriers did not vanish when the pipes came. The Council was still licensing “native water-carts” in 1888, about seventeen of them against twenty the year before, and taking 280 taels in fees.

Eight years of meetings

The ratepayers first discussed public waterworks in May 1875. In 1878 a Glasgow firm, Laidlaw and Sons, tendered to build them for the Council, and the ratepayers voted the Council no power to accept. In January 1880 a group of merchants led by Alexander McLeod proposed a different route: a joint-stock company, with shares sold in Shanghai and London, taking water from the Huangpu well below the settlements and the anchored shipping, filtering it, and supplying it under constant pressure. The Council declined to sponsor the company but did not oppose it. The annual meeting of 1880 told the Council to report within four months and to consider building the works itself; a special meeting on 16 June 1880 settled the matter by authorising a concession to the company.

The choice mattered for decades. A municipal works would have been paid for from rates and loans and run at cost. A company had to pay dividends, and every later negotiation between Council and company is at bottom an argument about how much of the town’s water bill was dividend.

The agreement of 1880

The agreement signed on 31 August 1880 is printed in the Council’s report for that year, all twenty-odd clauses of it. The Shanghai Water-works Company Limited was to be an English company with £100,000 of capital in £20 shares. It had to start building by September 1881 and supply water by 31 March 1883, with a head of 85 to 100 feet in the mains. It could charge a household no more than five per cent of the rental value of the house. The French Concession would share the water pro rata. Profits above eight per cent were to be shared with consumers, and after ten years the Council could buy the works. Missing the deadline would cost the company £5,000. A side contract gave the Council itself up to 150,000 gallons a day for 8,000 taels a year, for watering the roads, flushing the drains, fighting fires and filling the public drinking fountains.

The formal indenture was executed in 1881, and it is as “the agreement of 1881” that the Council’s later correspondence refers to it. Its clause on pressure fixed “a head of water of from Eighty-five to One hundred feet” at the water tower, and its article 8 gave the Council the right to take over the whole undertaking on a year’s notice. Both clauses were to be argued over.

1883: the taps

The deadline was missed. In April 1883 the pipes were in the streets but the works were not finished, and the company’s secretaries, Drysdale, Ringer and Co., blamed the weather. The reports do not agree on the day the water came. The Council’s own report says the company began supplying residents in July 1883, and its contract payments run from 1 August. The Shanghai Concessions Gazetteer gives 11 August 1883 and a supply of 3,698 cubic metres a day in that first year. Pott says pumping began in April and that the viceroy Li Hongzhang (李鸿章, Lǐ Hóngzhāng), who happened to be in Shanghai, took part in the opening. What is certain is that by the autumn the hydrants worked: on 27 November 1883 the brigade put out a fire in the French Concession from them, and the next budget paid for a fire-alarm line to the works at Yangshupu.

The first complaints arrived within weeks. The agreement’s schedule put a dwelling and offices at $2.50 a month; the company billed one ratepayer $4, and after an exchange of letters he agreed to $3. The Council forwarded the grievances and reminded the company of its arbitration clause.

Who drank it

The water was piped to foreign houses first. In February 1885 the ratepayers asked the Council to arrange a supply for the Chinese population, and by April the Council had agreed with the company on a plan to collect a water rate from Chinese households, section by section. Take-up was slow. Pott records that Chinese residents hesitated, partly because of the charge and partly because of a rumour that people had drowned in the water tower, which the Mixed Court magistrate had to deny by proclamation. The Council, for its part, told everyone in 1885 to go on boiling and filtering tap water daily and to draw it fresh rather than store it.

By 1887 the company was rationing: twenty gallons a day for each foreign occupant of a house and five for each Chinese servant, with the rate raised to ten per cent of rental for anyone wanting more. An arbitration in 1886 held the Council to its 150,000 gallons a day; it used some 39.9 million gallons that year, more than half of it sprinkled on the roads to lay the dust.

The Council’s reports say almost nothing about how the water reached Chinese households in these years, whether by house connections or by stand-pipes in the lanes, and they give no count of Chinese consumers. That silence is itself a finding: the “native water supply” of 1885 is a rating arrangement in the correspondence, not an engineering one.

1888: the Council asks the price of the whole works

The municipal contract expired on 30 June 1888, and the renewal opened with a larger question. On 10 April 1888 the Council’s chairman, A. G. Wood, wrote to the company’s secretaries that the chairman had told the last ratepayers’ meeting it “might be advisable at the same time to inquire into the terms and conditions on which the whole water supply of the Settlement can be acquired.” Did the company have proposals, and would it rather deal with the two subjects together or separately?

The answer, from the company’s chairman A. McLeod on 20 April, was polite and closed. The directors preferred to treat the two subjects separately. Article 8 of the existing agreement already set out “fully the terms and conditions upon which the Council can acquire” the undertaking, on not less than a year’s written notice, and the directors were “not at present prepared to make any other proposals.” The company also reminded the Council that the depreciation fund it had been building under the 1881 arrangement would pass to the Council should it “hereafter avail themselves of their right to acquire the works.” No ratepayers’ vote on a purchase followed, and the Council’s report records none. The idea went back into the drawer, where it stayed.

The money question was then fought over the price of a gallon. On 24 May the Council proposed to take 125,000 gallons a day for 6,700 taels a year, paying a Mexican dollar for every 5,000 gallons above that. On 3 July the company refused and set out four alternatives, all priced at a tael per 5,000 gallons: 125,000 gallons a day for 9,125 taels, 150,000 for a net 10,000, 200,000 for a net 12,500, or 260,000 for a net 15,000. Its explanation was the exchange rate. Silver had fallen, and “the present sterling value of the tael” was now what the dollar had been worth when the first contract was made in 1880. A company with capital in sterling and revenue in silver was passing the loss to its biggest customer.

The Council took the third option. The contract adopted ran five years from 1 July 1888 for a maximum of 200,000 gallons a day at 12,500 taels a year, with a ten per cent discount if average use stayed under 150,000, free water for the fire brigade and twenty additional hydrants. The indenture is dated 14 November 1888 and recites the 1881 terms in full. The Council had moved from 8,000 taels for 150,000 gallons to 12,500 for 200,000, a rise in the unit price of about a sixth, which it could tell the ratepayers was a discount.

The company’s return for that year shows where the water went. Of 45,000,000 gallons consumed for municipal purposes in 1888, 20,876,940 were sprinkled on the roads on 266 days from 99,414 cart-loads, 2,530,000 flushed the drains and 3,840,000 fought fires. The company billed for rather more, 57,875,000 gallons, which cost 10,006 taels. The brigade got eighteen more hydrants that year, on Yunnan, Defence, Seward, Woosung and Bubbling Well Roads among others, and four on the river side of the Bund that cost 552 taels, on which the Council paid the company ten per cent a year in perpetuity. Interest on hydrants would turn out to be the most durable grievance of all.

1893: paying for water nobody used

When the five years ran out, the Council’s secretary wrote on 31 May 1893 with four queries that read like a customer’s audit. The average daily consumption for municipal purposes over the previous five years “has been under 150,000 gallons per day,” yet the Council paid for 200,000, and on any day it went over it paid a tael per 5,000 gallons extra, with no credit for the many days it used less. When would the ten per cent payments on the Bund hydrants, now five years old, stop? What revenue did the company earn from the mains and hydrants in Hanbury Road, on which the Council was paying interest? And what, under clause 7 of the 1881 agreement, had the company’s profits actually been?

The company’s reply of 15 June is the only published statement of its early returns. Its net annual profits on supply to the settlements north of the Yangjingbang, since it began working in 1883, “have averaged, not more than, 5½ per cent per annum.” From the Hanbury Road mains it “derives no revenue whatever,” since the only water drawn there was the Council’s own. It offered to renew for five years on the old terms. The Council, having asked for five, took three, and changed the shape of the contract to fit the seasons: 100,000 gallons a day from November to April at twenty taels a day, and 200,000 from May to October at forty, still a tael per 5,000 gallons. On hydrants the new agreement drew a line that lasted: where the company laid mains for its own customers it would put up hydrants at its own cost, and the Council would pay ten per cent a year only on mains and hydrants it had asked for itself.

Municipal consumption in 1893 was 61,461,630 gallons, up by a third on 1888. Roads took 26,696,670 gallons over 281 days and 127,127 cart-loads; police stations and markets 20,106,060; urinals and road-making 11,241,400; fires 3,258,400. The two companies that sold the town its utilities, water and gas, were by now in a similar position: large, steady municipal customers who complained about the price and could not do without the product.

What the water was like

Charles Darwent, an English clergyman who wrote the standard visitors’ handbook in 1904, walked out along Yangtszepoo Road and described the works for tourists. Beside the Ewo cotton mill lay “the filter beds, pumping stations, and other works of the Shanghai Waterworks Co.” He explained the thing that puzzled Western visitors: the intake was below the city, not above it, because at Shanghai the best water was not what came down the Huangpu but what the tide forced up from the Yangtze, and “Shanghai drinks Yangtsze water.” The river water settled in large reservoirs, passed through “the ordinary process of sand filtration,” and was pumped to the water tower on Kiangse Road, of 150,000 gallons’ capacity and, by his account elsewhere in the book, 100 feet high. “During a very hot day in summer the consumption equals 5,500,000 gallons.” Permission to see the works could be had at the company’s office at 69 Kiangse Road. He did not give an average daily figure, and the handbook has none.

The Council’s own test was its Health Officer’s monthly analysis. Arthur Stanley reported in 1905, in a sentence he repeated unchanged in 1913, that “the periodic analyses of water supplied by the Shanghai Waterworks Co. show that filtration is carefully done.” He tied the purity of the supply to a rule that visitors found odd: the prohibition of water-closets, confirmed by an amendment to the foreign building rules published on 24 January 1905. A town whose drains ran into the creeks and whose creeks ran into the river it drank from could not afford flush toilets, and the night-soil system stayed. In 1913 his department closed eighteen “insanitary wells” and had company water laid on in their place, the one line in these reports that shows piped water displacing wells in the lanes, house by house.

1905: the Council becomes a shareholder

The 1905 renewal was meant to end the running argument about rates. The draft agreement put to the ratepayers in March 1905 struck out clause 7 of the old indenture, the one that capped what the company could charge foreign and Chinese consumers, and in exchange gave the Council “a large free supply of water for Municipal purposes.” On 17 March, days before the meeting, McLeod wrote on behalf of the directors with a different idea. The Council should go on paying a tael per 5,000 gallons for what it used. Instead of free water, “in order that the interests of the Council may be identified with those of the Waterworks Company for the future,” the company would issue the Council 975 fully paid £20 shares, free of charge.

The company set out the arithmetic. The 975 shares were worth £19,500 at par, about 150,000 taels, some 13.5 per cent of the company’s capital; at the market price of 430 taels a share, about 180 per cent over par, they were worth about 420,000 taels. The last dividend had been 13 per cent, which on £19,500 came to roughly 19,469 taels a year, slightly more than the 18,600 taels the Council would pay for the 93 million gallons it then used. The Council’s secretary, J. O. P. Bland, accepted the next day and promised to support the amendment at the ratepayers’ meeting. The indenture was signed on 1 July 1905.

Its terms are the fullest statement of how water was sold in the Settlement before the First World War. The company had to keep a head of at least 85 feet at its water towers, plural by now, and give a constant supply throughout the Settlement and along any Council road outside it where mains were laid. It could not supply beyond the limits except to residents who had signed an agreement with the Council to pay a special tax no higher than municipal rates, which quietly made the water company an instrument of the Council’s outside-roads policy. Foreign households paid by a schedule capped at 4 per cent of actual rent, or of the Council’s assessed rent for owner-occupiers. Chinese households paid 5 per cent of actual rent, or 6 per cent of assessed rent for owners, a higher ceiling than the foreign one and a point the agreement does not explain. Trade and institutions paid by meter: 40 Mexican cents per 1,000 gallons up to 200,000 a month, 35 cents above that, 30 cents above 500,000, with a 10,000-gallon monthly minimum, and anyone proved to be wasting water could be put on a meter at 40 cents. Failure to supply carried a penalty of up to 800 taels a day. And the purchase clause was renewed: at any time after 18 March 1911, on a year’s notice, the Council could buy the undertaking at an agreed price or by arbitration.

The Council did not stop at the free shares. In August 1905 it arranged through the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank to pay £19,500 for 976 more shares in the company’s new issue, offered to existing shareholders at par, reckoning on dividends of 10 per cent for two years and 12 after that. Its balance sheet for 1905 carried 975 paid shares at 460 taels and 975 part-paid at 120, 565,500 taels in all. By 1913 it held 1,950 shares valued at 604,500 taels, and its trust funds held 61,100 taels of the company’s debentures besides. The town that had three times declined to build or buy a waterworks now owned something over a quarter of the company that ran it, and every rise in the water rate paid a dividend into the municipal account.

The municipal bill over twenty-five years

The returns the company sent the Council each year make a series. They count only municipal uses, roads, fires, markets, police stations and the Council’s own power station, not what households drank, but they are the only continuous figures the reports contain.

Year	Municipal consumption (gallons)	Of which watering roads	Days watered	Cart-loads
1887	about 39,900,000	22,200,000
1888	45,000,000	20,876,940	266	99,414
1893	61,461,630	26,696,670	281	127,127
1905	99,870,174	39,083,940	273	186,114
1913	127,647,389	65,409,330	338	311,473

The 1913 figure works out at 349,719 gallons a day, more than double the 150,000 the Council had contracted for in 1880 and above the 200,000 it had considered extravagant in 1888. August was the peak month, at 19,881,123 gallons. The roads alone took more water in 1913 than the whole municipality had in 1893, because the Settlement had grown and because the carts now went out 338 days in the year. The Council’s power station, which did not exist in 1893, drew 17,462,000 gallons in 1905. Fires took 6,305,489 gallons in 1913, against 3,840,000 in 1888, and the brigade was still complaining: the single-outlet pillar hydrants were “insufficient in number and placed too far apart,” and it had arranged with the company to convert the “very old pattern ‘top-outlet’ hydrants” to side outlets. It had asked for double hydrants in 1905. The hydrants the Council had paid interest on since 1888 were, by 1913, the old pattern.

One more number shows the 1905 clause on outside roads at work. From 1 April 1914 the general municipal rate was 12 per cent of assessed rental on foreign houses inside the Settlement and 6 per cent on houses beyond the limits, the latter “under provision of the agreement of July 1, 1905.” A householder on an outside road who wanted company water paid the Council’s tax to get it.

The works grow

Beyond the Council’s reports the figures come from the Shanghai Concessions Gazetteer, which draws on the company’s and the city’s records. The Yangshupu works supplied about 7,740 cubic metres a day in 1887. In 1915 they supplied 53,233 cubic metres a day to 49,981 consumers, and by 1931 200,000 cubic metres a day, the largest waterworks in the Far East. The Council’s own purchase option, renewed in 1905 and open from 1911, was never exercised; the company remained a British concern until the Pacific War, and the Council remained its shareholder.

What the sources disagree on

The date the water came is given three ways, by the Council (July 1883), the gazetteer (11 August) and Pott (April), and the article gives all three. The company’s profits are its own statement, made to a customer in a price negotiation, and no independent accounts are printed in the reports. The municipal consumption tables are printed from the company’s returns, and the OCR of the 1888 and 1893 tables is poor; the totals have been checked against the subtotals, but the cart-load counts should be read as approximate.

What to look for

The company’s works still stand at 830 Yangshupu Road, behind a castellated brick frontage built for the 1883 plant and extended for decades afterwards; the site is now the Yangshupu water plant and museum of the city’s water company, and the intake is still below the city, where Darwent said the Yangtze water was. The water tower on Jiangxi Road that fed the first mains is gone, and so is the company office at number 69. On the Bund the four hydrants of 1888 have been replaced many times over, but the river side of the promenade is where they stood. Hanbury Road, on which the Council paid interest for mains that earned the company nothing, is today’s Hanyang Road in Hongkou.