Pudong: how the far bank of the Huangpu became half of Shanghai

The short answer. Pudong (浦东, Pǔdōng) means “east of the Huangpu”, and for most of Shanghai’s history it was the far bank. The city, the walled county town and the foreign settlements all grew on the west side; the east side was salt land and cotton fields that ran down to a line of wharves, warehouses and shipyards along the river. It had no bridge, no foreign municipal council, and from 1961 it did not even have a government of its own: its riverside was run by three Puxi districts and its farmland by Chuansha County. Land on the Bund cost a hundred times as much as land across the water. On 18 April 1990 the central government announced that Pudong would be opened and developed, and in thirty years the far bank became the city’s financial district, its main airport and port, and by output roughly half of Shanghai. This is how that happened, told mainly from the gazetteers of the Pudong New Area, Huangpu District and the Huangpu River, which the city’s gazetteer office compiled from the records of the people who did it.

Why the east bank was the far bank

The land itself is young. Pudong, says its gazetteer, is the tip of the delta that the Yangtze and the Qiantang rivers built out into the sea, and the coast kept moving east as the tides dropped silt: 1,200 years ago it ran past Huamu and Beicai, where the new government centre now stands; 700 years ago past Huinan; 300 years ago toward the sites of the airport. The farmers were salt boilers first and cotton growers later.

The bank was also cut up among governments. Under the Qing, the Pudong area belonged to Shanghai, Nanhui and Baoshan counties, and from 1810 also to a new Chuansha sub-prefecture (川沙, Chuānshā). In 1928 the Shanghai Special Municipality took in the riverside townships, Yangjing, Tangqiao, Yangsi, Gaoqiao and others, but the interior stayed in Jiangsu province. The foreign settlements never crossed the river as territory. Foreign firms bought riverfront lots on the east bank, but the Municipal Council’s roads, police and drains stopped at the water.

Chuansha: towels, lace and builders

Most of today’s Pudong lay in one county. Chuansha (川沙, Chuānshā) was carved out of Shanghai and Nanhui counties in 1810, became a county in 1911 and passed from Jiangsu to Shanghai only in December 1958; in 1985 it covered about 449 square kilometres and had some 600,000 people. Its gazetteer describes a farming county behind its sea walls, salt land until the Ming and cotton afterwards, struck by more than fifty deadly storm floods between 1135 and 1949.

Its industry was the city’s piecework. The first towel works opened in the county town in 1900, after cheap foreign yarn had ruined home spinning, and by 1937 there were 202 towel works, most of them household looms, with 8,695 workers making 2.6 million dozen towels a year; the county called itself “the home of towels”. Lace came in 1913, when a local man, Gu Shaoye, set up schools to teach village women and sold their work to buyers in Europe and America; by 1930 47 lace firms employed 23,050 people. Both trades were wrecked by the war and the inflation of the 1940s, and by early 1949 two lace firms were left.

Chuansha’s other export was men. The gazetteer calls it “a home of builders”: Yang Sisheng (杨斯盛), from Cailu, opened Shanghai’s first building contractor in 1880, and Chuansha firms went on to build the old Customs House on the Bund, the Yangshupu power station, the Bank of China building and the Sincere department store. Yang spent his fortune on Pudong Middle School, which opened in 1907. In 1921 Huang Yanpei (黄炎培) and other Chuansha men formed a company to build a light railway from Qingningsi on the Huangpu to the county town; the 21-kilometre line opened throughout in July 1926, ran until 1975 and is now a road.

In 1950 farming was still 70 per cent of the county’s output. By 1985 industry was 91 per cent, and in 1988 Chuansha’s fiscal revenue was the highest of any county around Shanghai.

Lujiazui before the towers

Lujiazui (陆家嘴, Lùjiāzuǐ) is “the Lu family’s spit”, the sandbank on the inside of the river’s great bend. The Huangpu District gazetteer, which governed it from 1961 to 1993, says it was named after the Ming scholar Lu Shen, who was born and died there, and that his garden, his tomb and his family temple have all gone. Until the nineteenth century the spit held fishing hamlets and the villages of boat people who settled behind the flood bank.

From 1862, the gazetteer says, British, American, French, Japanese and German firms built warehouses, wharves and factories along this shore. The China Merchants Steam Navigation Company put its north wharf at Lanniduo in 1871 and a warehouse at Lujiazui. The British Boyd yard (祥生船厂) opened at Lujiazui in 1862; with Farnham & Co. and others it became the Shanghai Dockyards in 1936, and with a China Merchants repair yard of 1914 it became the Shanghai Shipyard, the largest works on the spit until 2005. Cotton mills, the British-American Tobacco factory, paper and match works followed: the Huazhang paper mill of 1899, later the Lihua mill, was then the largest machine paper mill in China, and the British Lunchang mill, built in 1931 with 40,000 spindles, a thousand looms and its own power plant, became the No. 10 Cotton Mill. Further north the oil companies put their tanks on the empty shore, and in November 1929 more than six hundred Gaoqiao people marched against the Asiatic Petroleum Company’s taking of land for an oil depot. Eight sampan ferries crossed from Lujiazui’s stretch of bank alone.

Behind the wharves lived the people who worked them. In the creek lands south of Lujiazui, around Zhangjiabang, boat families and dock porters had long settled by the water; the floods of 1921 and 1931 in northern Jiangsu and Anhui brought many more. By 1949, the gazetteer says, most housing there was “rolling-earth dragons” (滚地龙), huts of reed matting, and houses on stilts over the creeks, and most of the men were porters, hawkers and rickshaw pullers.

The price of land measured the gap. In 1933 the city government, arguing for a bridge, put land on Nanjing Road at the Bund at 300,000 taels a mu, the Pudong riverfront at an average of 3,000 and the land behind it at two or three hundred. “Separated by only a river, and land values so far apart,” the statement went; the reason was transport.

The bridge that was not built, 1921–1948

Shanghai talked about crossing the river for a generation before it did. An American engineer lectured on a Huangpu bridge in 1921; a student published a lift-bridge design in 1923; in 1931 a group of gentry signed a draft contract with a German bridge company for a pontoon bridge at Dongjiadu, and the city’s public works director, Shen Yi (沈怡), refused to approve it until they could show the money. The Greater Shanghai plan of the 1930s wanted a railway bridge across the river and a port along the Pudong bank.

After the war the city set up a river-crossing committee and in 1946 engaged Mao Yisheng (茅以升), who had built the Qiantang River bridge at Hangzhou. His China Bridge Company offered four schemes: a tunnel, a high fixed bridge, a low opening bridge and a bridge upstream. In 1948 the committee chose a tunnel at the Bund, partly because a bridge would have needed approach ramps running back nearly to the racecourse. The estimate was about 20 million US dollars. There was no money, and the gazetteer records the verse that followed: “Twenty years of plans, and in the end nothing.”

One city, the far bank: 1949–1990

The People’s Republic changed Pudong’s government several times and its position hardly at all. The riverside became Yangjing district, then Yangjing and Dongchang, then Dongjiao and Dongchang; in 1958 these were merged into a Pudong County, which lasted until February 1961. After that the waterfront belonged to Huangpu, Nanshi and Yangpu districts across the river and the farmland to Chuansha County, “a pattern that remained basically unchanged for more than thirty years”.

What Pudong got was factories and workers’ housing. A city rule of 1934 had already named Pudong as a zone for factories; in 1958 the planners built three new industrial districts on the east bank: Gaoqiao in the north for oil and chemicals, Qingningsi, and Zhoujiadu in the south for steel and glass, where the No. 3 Steelworks grew on the shore that later became the Expo site. The risks stayed local: in October 1988 escaping gas exploded at the Gaoqiao refinery’s tank farm and killed 22 people. The first workers’ estates on Pudong land, Changhang and Pudian, were built from 1951; Laoshan estate, from 1953, housed the city’s model workers in three-storey brick houses with a bathroom shared between two households. By 1979 fourteen estates stood on the east bank, and the large Weifang, Meiyuan and Zhuyuan estates of the 1980s added several million square metres more. The shanties lasted longer: in 1956 there were 24 settlements of more than a hundred households in Huangpu’s part of Pudong, three-fifths of them at Zhangjiabang, and serious clearance began only in the late 1970s.

The planners kept drawing Pudong in. The 1953 city plan put a cultural park and a tall memorial at Lujiazui, looking at the Bund, and a tunnel under the river; the 1959 plan proposed to develop Pudong “appropriately” because Puxi had run out of land for housing. The first tunnel was dug as a defence project from 1965, from Dapu Road to Yaohua Road; it opened in 1970 or 1971 and carried 43 per cent of all vehicles crossing the river for the next two decades. In 1958 the district had even turned 33 Bund-area bank and office buildings over to instrument factories; when factories began moving out of central Puxi from 1980, eleven of Huangpu’s collective plants went to new sheds in Pudong.

People crossed by ferry. In 1987 the city’s ferries carried an average of 1.03 million passengers a day. The Lujiazui–Yan’an Road line, the busiest, carried about 180,000 a day before the Yan’an Road tunnel opened; in 1993 the ferry company’s busiest day reached 1.1 million. In 1990 the river ferries carried 371 million passengers, which the city’s general gazetteer calls the most of any ferry system in the world. The crossing could kill. On 10 December 1987, the gazetteer’s chronicle records, thick fog and crowding at the Lujiazui ferry led to a crush in which 16 people died and more than 70 were injured. The Pudong gazetteer, describing the 1980s, says the riverside urban area covered only 39 square kilometres, a tenth of the city’s, and that the popular saying “better a bed in Puxi than a flat in Pudong” (宁要浦西一张床，不要浦东一套房) “truly reflected” how people saw it.

Why Pudong, and why 1990

The case was made in Puxi’s own numbers. In 1979, asking the State Council for a second tunnel, the city planning commission wrote that the old centre between the Bund and Xizang Road held 100,000 people per square kilometre, that the roads were permanently jammed, and that “we must actively create the conditions to develop Pudong, to thin out the population of Puxi”. The tunnel from Yan’an Road to Lujiazui was begun in December 1984 and opened on 1 May 1989. The master plan the State Council approved in 1986 added an instruction to “pay special attention to building and transforming Pudong according to plan”, and extended the future city centre from People’s Square and the Bund across to Lujiazui. In 1984 the city’s economic strategy outline proposed developing Pudong to the State Council, which endorsed the idea in February 1985. An outside voice helped: the Chinese-American bridge engineer Lin Tung-yen (林同炎) sent the city a study on the “comprehensive development” of Shanghai, revised the next year as “Developing Pudong, building a modern Greater Shanghai”, and in April 1987 the city set up a Sino-American study group on Pudong with Lin as its senior adviser. A draft plan outline for a Pudong new area followed in August 1987 and a preliminary master plan in October 1989, for 150 square kilometres and 1.5 million people. In February 1988 the Shanghai planning institute, working with the Paris regional planning institute, submitted a first plan for a business centre at Lujiazui.

The decision came in the spring of 1990. On 18 April Premier Li Peng, at the fifth-anniversary celebration of Shanghai Volkswagen, announced that the Party Centre and State Council agreed to faster development of Pudong, with the policies of economic and technical development zones and some of those of the special economic zones. On 30 April Mayor Zhu Rongji announced a leading group under Vice-Mayor Huang Ju and ten preferential measures; on 3 May the Pudong Development Office put up its board, at 141 Pudong Avenue; on 2 June the Centre approved the city’s formal request. In September the State Council approved the Waigaoqiao bonded zone, and the three development companies for Lujiazui, Jinqiao and Waigaoqiao were set up at the Youyou Hotel in Tangqiao.

Deng Xiaoping lent his name to it. During his stay in Shanghai in early 1991 he said, as the gazetteer records, that developing Pudong “is not just a question for Pudong” but for Shanghai and the whole Yangtze valley, and that the city should “hold on to Pudong’s development, without wavering, until it is built”. In early 1992 he said Pudong had started later than Shenzhen “but can start from a higher point”. Accounts differ on when he said that Pudong was started too late; the gazetteer does not record it.

Land for money

Pudong had land and no cash, and the gazetteer is frank about the method. The city transferred land to the three development companies in exchange for shares, a book transaction in which “fiscal money spins on paper, land leasing turns for real” (财政资金空转，土地批租实转); the companies then leased the land to investors for real money. By the time the system ended in 2001, 88.6 square kilometres had been handled this way, about four-fifths of all land sold in Pudong, and 6.1 billion yuan of government money had levered about 70 billion. The first commercial plot, 8,116 square metres, went on 7 November 1991 for 900 US dollars a square metre.

The land was not empty. By the end of 1995 the Lujiazui zone alone had moved 13,300 households and 240 work units and demolished 1.38 million square metres of buildings; by 2000 the count was 26,000 households. The trial section of Century Avenue, 730 metres long, cost 330 million yuan in 1994, and 91 per cent of that went on moving 1,700 households and 43 units. Across the whole new area 230,000 households, farm families, factories and units were moved between 1993 and 2009. The gazetteer lists 27,872 phone calls and visits about demolition and 10,604 rulings on disputes in the same years.

Drawing Lujiazui

The new area was made official on 11 October 1992: Chuansha County was abolished and its land joined to Sanlin township and the Pudong halves of Huangpu, Nanshi and Yangpu, 522 square kilometres with about 1.44 million people. The party and management committees put up their boards at 141 Pudong Avenue on 1 January 1993. A full district government came only in 2000.

The centre of it, the 1.7 square kilometres of “Little Lujiazui” on the river bend, was designed by competition. Shanghai and the French ministry of public works ran the consultation together: in April 1992 invitations went to teams the gazetteer names as Rogers from Britain, Ito from Japan, Perrault from France and Fuksas from Italy, and to a joint Shanghai team, and in November 1992 they showed their schemes. None was built as drawn. A deepened plan, approved in December 1993, kept 30 per cent of the 170 hectares green, set an arc of towers about 200 metres high along the river, and placed three towers of about 400 metres at the core “to answer the Bund”. That is the skyline a visitor sees today.

The Central Green at its heart opened on 1 July 1997, ten hectares of lawn on cleared housing land with a lake shaped like a map of Pudong. Century Avenue, designed by a French firm, runs 5.5 kilometres and 100 metres wide from the tunnel mouth to Century Park and opened on 18 April 2000, the tenth anniversary of the announcement.

Bridges, tunnels and the end of the ferry city

The first bridge across the Huangpu in the city, the Nanpu Bridge, opened on 1 December 1991: 8,346 metres including its spiralling approaches, with a 423-metre main span, the first twin-tower cable-stayed bridge in Shanghai, costing 820 million yuan. A lorry that had waited two hours for a car ferry could now cross in seven minutes. The Yangpu Bridge followed on 23 October 1993 with a 602-metre span and 48 metres of clearance for ships. Metro Line 2 began trial running under the river in 1999 and opened formally in June 2000; Pudong International Airport opened on 16 September 1999; the maglev from Longyang Road ran from 31 December 2002. By 2010 the ferries carried 250,000 passengers a day, a quarter of their peak, and the last car ferry stopped that year.

The towers

The Oriental Pearl Tower was the first: begun on 3 December 1991, it reached 468 metres when its mast went up on 1 May 1994, began broadcasting a year later and opened its 263-metre sphere to visitors on 1 September 1995. Jin Mao Tower was begun in May 1994 and completed on 28 August 1998; the Shanghai World Financial Center, begun in 1997 and halted, resumed in 2003 and opened at 492 metres in 2008; Shanghai Tower was begun on 29 November 2008. The Shanghai Stock Exchange moved into its Lujiazui building in December 1997. Nextage, a Sino-Japanese department store at Pudong South Road and Zhangyang Road, opened on 20 December 1995, and the gazetteer says 1.07 million people came on the first day.

What the numbers say

The gazetteer gives Pudong’s output in a series. In 1990 its GDP was 6.02 billion yuan, 8.1 per cent of Shanghai’s. In 1993 it was 16.4 billion, 10.9 per cent; in 2000, 92.1 billion, 20.2 per cent; in 2008, 368.7 billion, 22.4 per cent. In 2009 Nanhui District was merged into Pudong, more than doubling its area, and the share rose to 26.6 per cent. In 1990 services were a fifth of the economy and industry three-quarters; services passed industry in 2007. The new area had 1.44 million people in 1993 and 1.94 million registered residents in 2008, and public green space per person went from 3.45 square metres in 1996 to 24.25 in 2008. Those figures stop at 2009, where the gazetteer ends. The district’s own statistical bulletin for 2024 gives a preliminary GDP of 1,775 billion yuan, nearly three hundred times the 1990 figure in current money. In 2021 the Party Centre and State Council issued a new set of opinions making Pudong a “leading area” of modernisation, with targets set for 2035 and 2050.

South along the river: Houtan and Qiantan

Pudong’s last great stretch of riverside industry lay south of the Nanpu Bridge, and the 2010 World Expo cleared it. In early 2004 the planners pushed the Expo site west of the Lupu Bridge to take in Houtan (后滩, Hòutān), giving as reasons the “strong contrast” between Houtan and the rest of the site and the need to move the No. 3 Steelworks out whole. The steelworks covered 231 hectares with 1,820 metres of river frontage; its last line was shut on 18 July 2007, and in all eighteen central state enterprises inside the boundary, among them the Jiangnan Shipyard on the Puxi bank, were moved to sites at Luojing and Changxing Island. On the steelworks shore Yu Kongjian of Peking University and his firm Turenscape built Houtan Park in 2008–09: 14 hectares of terraced fields and wetland that clean 2,400 cubic metres of Huangpu water a day, which won the American Society of Landscape Architects’ Award of Excellence in 2010.

Qiantan (前滩, Qiántān), “the front shore”, is a newer name. A 2012 report says it was given to the land around the Oriental Sports Center, built for the 2011 world swimming championships, across the Chuanyang River from Houtan, which the Expo had made famous. The Lujiazui Group has built it since as a second business district of about 283 hectares, planned for 25,000 residents and 100,000 jobs; its shopping centre, Taikoo Li Qiantan, opened in September 2021. No gazetteer records either name as an old place-name.

What the sources disagree on

• When the first tunnel opened. The Huangpu River gazetteer gives June 1970 for the Dapu Road tunnel in its tunnel chapter and June 1971 in its bridge chapter. English sources usually give 1971.
• The 1987 ferry crush. The Shanghai general gazetteer’s chronicle gives 16 dead and more than 70 injured; English Wikipedia gives 17 dead.
• What Deng said, and when. The Pudong gazetteer records Deng’s words of 1991 (“without wavering, until it is built”) and 1992 (“a higher starting point”). Memoirs by officials put his remark that Pudong was developed too late in 1990 or later, in different words; none of these is in the gazetteer, so this page does not quote it.
• The saying about a bed in Puxi. The gazetteer gives “a flat” (一套房); many retellings say “a room” (一间房). Nobody records who first said it.
• The name Qiantan. One 2012 report calls it new; online retellings tie it to an older sandbank upstream of Houtan. Neither name appears in the gazetteers used here.

What to look for

• From the Bund, the arc of 200-metre towers along the river and the three tall towers behind it are the 1993 plan, built more or less as drawn.
• Chen Guichun’s house, a courtyard house of old Lujiazui with Western-style gables, sits on the edge of the Central Green; it was kept when everything around it was cleared and opened as the Lujiazui development exhibition in 1997.
• The ferry. The Lujiazui pier still runs boats to the Bund at Jinling Road, the cheapest way to cross and the way most Pudong people crossed until 1991.
• The riverside path south from Lujiazui passes former wharf and shipyard sites, now parks and apartment towers; the old Shanghai Shipyard land lies just east of the Oriental Pearl Tower.
• Houtan Park, on the old steelworks shore, is the one place where the riverbank has been left to look something like a riverbank again.
• Gone: Lu Shen’s garden and tomb, the Lanniduo wharves, the Zhangjiabang huts, the cotton mills and the eight sampan crossings.