Puxi: how the old city on the west bank was planned, rehoused and given back its river, 1927–2022

The short answer. Puxi (浦西, Pǔxī), “west of the Huangpu”, is the old city: the walled county town, the International Settlement and the French Concession, the mill districts along Suzhou Creek and the Yangshupu waterfront. Other stories on this site cover how the settlements were governed until 1943. This one picks up after 1949, when Puxi was one city with too many people in too little space. In 1949 a typical resident had 3.9 square metres to live in, and more than three million people lived in huts, old works housing and subdivided lane houses. Over the next seventy years Shanghai built workers’ villages on the city’s edge, cleared its worst shanties, moved its factories across the river or out of town, and from 1992 to 2022 demolished or rebuilt every block of old lane housing of the lowest grades in the centre, more than 30 million square metres and about 1.3 million households. At the same time it pulled the docks, mills and shipyards back from the river and opened the banks to walkers. The account here relies on the Shanghai housing gazetteer, the gazetteer of the Huangpu River, People’s Daily and other reports.

A city centre outside the settlements: the Greater Shanghai Plan, 1927–1937

The first plan for the whole of Shanghai was drawn by the Chinese city, not the foreign councils. The Shanghai Special Municipality, formed in July 1927, governed everything except the 33 square kilometres of the two settlements, which sat in the middle of the city, held its port and its business, and split its roads and drains into three systems. The general gazetteer calls the Greater Shanghai Plan the city’s first master plan. Its answer was to build around the settlements: a new deep-water port north of the city near the Yangtze, and a new city centre between that port and the old city.

On 5 July 1929 the municipal council fixed the centre at Jiangwan, about 7,000 mu (460 hectares) of flat farmland between the river and the Songhu railway, and froze land sales there from 16 July. The planners, advised by American consultants, laid out a ring-and-radial road plan in 1930, zoned the whole city west of the Huangpu into business, industry, port and housing, and drew a port with seven docks south of the Yunzao Creek, near the Yangtze. At the core was a cross-shaped group of squares, more than 500 mu, with the city hall in the middle, the eight bureaus on either side, a memorial hall to Sun Yat-sen behind it and a tower where the axes met. The first stage was costed at about 50 million yuan, to be paid with bonds and with land bought cheap and leased once the new roads had raised its value.

The city hall was meant to look Chinese. The competition, opened on 1 October 1929 with a first prize of 3,000 yuan, was won by Zhao Chen’s team in February 1930, but the city was not satisfied, and the architect Dong Dayou (董大酉) combined the best of the top three designs into a building in painted Chinese classical style on a concrete frame. Work began in June 1931, stopped when the Japanese attacked Shanghai in January 1932 with the building seven or eight tenths done, resumed that June, and the city hall opened on 10 October 1933. A library, a museum and a stadium of 20 hectares with seats for 40,000, all by Dong, followed, with Siping and Huangxing roads and the first wharf of the new port. Then the war of August 1937 stopped everything. The Japanese occupation plan of 1938 kept Jiangwan, but for an airfield and military buildings.

The city tried once more after the war. A planning committee under the public works director Zhao Zukang drew a regional plan in December 1946 for 6,538 square kilometres, forecasting 15 million people by 1996 and proposing new towns separated from their factories by green belts 500 metres wide. Critics called it too idealistic and too Western. A third draft was finished on 6 June 1949, two weeks after the city changed hands, and the new public works bureau printed it “to preserve the material”.

The city in 1949

The core of Puxi had grown in a century from a walled county town of courtyard houses to a city of millions. Many people lived in lane houses (lilong), the terraces described in this site’s story on the shikumen lanes. Below the lanes were the shanties. The housing gazetteer says that on the eve of 1949 huts and simple sheds covered 3.23 million square metres, 13.7 per cent of all housing in the city. They stood by creeks, railways and wharves, on waste ground and in graveyards; the two wars with Japan in the 1930s drove refugees in their tens of thousands to the north bank of Suzhou Creek. The Special Municipality had built a few “commoners’ villages” from 1928, about 1,600 rooms, which hardly touched the problem.

Surveys made by the trade unions in 1949–50 found about a million working people, with their families some three million, living in huts, bungalows, old works housing and old lane houses, with “lofts built inside the rooms and extra storeys on the roofs, rooms built over the terraces and courtyards, kitchens turned into bedrooms”. Average living space was 3.9 square metres per person.

Suzhou Creek: the mill district

Most of Shanghai’s industry stood where the plans had never reached. Before the First World War, the general gazetteer says, factories gathered along the Huangpu and Suzhou Creek in four districts, Yangshupu, Nanshi, Caojiadu and Zhabei, which held 1,781 factories in 1930. By May 1949 the city had 10,079 factories, and only 2,263 of them were in any industrial district; 5,886 were mixed in among people’s houses.

The upper creek was the heart of it. The Putuo District gazetteer says its land was farmland until the south bank of Suzhou Creek was taken into the International Settlement in 1899. Chinese firms opened the first oil press there in 1889 and Shanghai’s first machine flour mill, the Fufeng, in 1900, to use the creek for transport. Japanese cotton firms came after them: the Naigai Wata company opened four mills at 1291 West Suzhou Road between 1914 and 1922, and by 1937 the district had 19 Japanese mills with 470,000 spindles beside some 750 Chinese firms. In 1933 the Rong family moved their Shenxin No. 9 mill to Macau Road on the creek, and by 1940 it was the largest mill in China, with 138,000 spindles and more than 7,000 workers. In 1949 Putuo alone held 42.8 per cent of the city’s cotton spindles, 80 per cent of its flour milling and 82 per cent of its oil pressing.

The workers lived beside the mills. Most were bankrupt farmers from Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Anhui or refugees from the wars, and around Xiaoshadu they built the shanty belt known as “three bays and a lane”, Zhujiawan, Panjiawan, Tanziwan and Yaoshuinong. The gazetteer describes twelve-hour days for the women in the mills, huts with no roads, water or light, and a creek used for washing rice, vegetables, clothes and chamber pots alike; under the Japanese occupation Yaoshuinong was sealed off for half a month and many people died. Twenty-two ferries crossed the creek at liberation, and the one at Xiaoshadu, among the factories, was the busiest.

The district was also where Shanghai’s labour movement began. On 5 June 1919 five or six thousand workers at three Naigai Wata mills struck, the first strike of the May Fourth movement. In February 1925 a strike that began at the company’s No. 8 mill spread to 22 Japanese mills and 35,000 workers, and in May that year the worker Gu Zhenghong was shot dead by a Japanese manager at the No. 7 mill, the killing that led to the May Thirtieth movement told in another story on this site.

After 1949 the mills stayed and changed. In 1959–61 several were turned into radio factories, and the city’s 72 cotton mills of 1949 had become 35 by 1961. The creek paid for the growth: after 1958, the gazetteer says, its water grew steadily worse until it formed a black, stinking belt 26 kilometres long from its mouth to Huacao. Putuo built 84 housing estates between 1951 and 1990 and cleared the huts of Yaoshuinong and Zhujiawan, and by 1990 its 632 factories still employed 220,000 people.

Caoyang: the first workers’ village

The new government started with the workers. In March 1951 it chose Putuo district, the mill district along Suzhou Creek, as a pilot. Its planners looked at five sites and picked farmland north of Zhongshan North Road on Caoyang Road, about four kilometres from the mills around Changshou Road and far enough from their soot. A committee under the city’s public works director, Zhao Zukang (赵祖康), decided in July 1951 to build a thousand homes; 1,002 were built. The city took 225 mu of land and moved 369 vegetable-farming households. Building began on 16 September 1951, with up to 5,000 men on site, and finished in April 1952.

What was built was modest. There were 48 two-storey brick-and-timber buildings, 32,366 square metres in all, with kitchens and toilets shared between households. The rows stood 13 metres apart, more than twice their height, for winter sun. A school, a hall, a library, a bathhouse, a hot-water shop, a market, a co-op and a clinic were built at the same time. The tenants were chosen: workers with inventions or production records first, then long service and crowded homes. On 12 August 1953 the city named it Caoyang No. 1 Village, and the Xinhua news agency called it “the first workers’ new village in China”. Caoyang grew around it in phases until it covered 180 hectares.

Twenty thousand homes

A year later the city scaled the idea up. On 11 April 1952 the mayor’s meeting decided to build 20,000 workers’ homes that year, on nine sites matched to the industrial districts: four in the east along the Yangshupu mills, one in the north, three in the west, one in the south. Building began on 15 August 1952. By 28 September 1953 nearly 100,000 workers and their families had moved in, mostly from the cotton, metal and chemical works. The 1,052 buildings became seventeen villages, Changbai, Kongjiang, Anshan, Caoyang 2 to 6, Tianshan, Rihui and others, and many more were added around them from 1954.

Each building housed ten families, sharing ground-floor kitchens, toilets and washing places, five families to a kitchen. A large household had 20.4 square metres of living space, a small one 15.3. The gazetteer is candid about the faults: one design for every kind of family, shared kitchens and toilets, two-storey buildings that wasted land. From 1979 floors were added and kitchens and toilets separated, and by 1990 the “20,000 households” estates had been extended and rebuilt from 600,000 to 1.64 million square metres.

Clearing the worst: Zhaojiabang and Fanguanong

The shanties were harder. From 1954 the city filled in the Zhaojiabang creek, cleared more than 23,000 square metres of huts along its banks and rehoused 1,700 households on Caoxi Road. The best-documented case is Fanguanong in Zhabei, five hectares beside the railway that before 1949 held nearly 4,000 huts and more than 16,000 people, which the gazetteer calls “the most densely populated shanty settlement in Shanghai”. In 1963 the city chose it as the pilot for clearing a whole shanty district at once and rehousing everyone on the same land. Its designers drew eight schemes and in two phases, from October 1963 to December 1965, built 41 five-storey blocks with shared kitchens and toilets, shops, a school and a bathhouse. They also kept a group of the old huts and built replica “rolling-earth dragons” for teaching, and Fanguanong became a stop on the route for foreign visitors.

The pace then fell away. During the Cultural Revolution little housing was built, and in the late 1970s the problem came back in force: sent-down youth returned from the countryside and people whose homes had been taken in the 1960s were given them back. The housing gazetteer says the shortage became “a topic discussed on every street corner”. In 1979, asking for a second river tunnel, the city planning commission said the old centre between the Bund and Xizang Road held 100,000 people per square kilometre.

Factories in the bank buildings

Puxi’s crowding was partly industrial. The 1926 Council plan marked Yangshupu as an industrial district, and the river gazetteer counts the cotton mills on the Huangpu bank: Shanghai’s first modern mill, the Machine Weaving Bureau, opened at 87 Yangshupu Road in 1889; Jardine’s Ewo mill followed in 1897; thirteen mills lined the river in 1940 and eight in 1970. The Jiangnan Shipyard, on the river at Gaoxiong Road since 1867, built China’s first powered steamship there in 1869.

After 1949 industry also moved into the centre. In 1958 Huangpu District handed 33 office and bank buildings around the Bund to instrument and electrical factories, twenty of them entirely, so that radio, clock and camera works occupied the banking streets. When the planners began moving factories out in the 1980s, eleven of the district’s collective factories went to new sheds across the river in Pudong; by 1992 twenty-five factories had left the Bund buildings, which were returning to offices.

1980–1992: land for housing

In March 1980 the city changed course. State and enterprise building would be combined, housing would be tied to the rebuilding of old districts, and new land would be taken: 8,400 mu of farmland that year, 15,800 the next, 58,375 mu over the 1980s, for new districts at Quyang, Changbai, Xianxia and Tianlin in Puxi and Shanggang and Meiyuan across the river. Enterprises were told in 1982 that they, not the city, must house their own workers.

Inside the city the gazetteer records one cleared shanty after another: Mingyuan village in Yangpu in 1975; Sanle Li in Jing’an from 1977; Xilingjiazhai in Nanshi, 3,032 households, rebuilt from 1984 to 1994 with money from 34 work units; Shiminchun in Xuhui, 3,610 households moved, finished in 1992. In February 1991 Mayor Zhu Rongji went to Tangshanli in Hongkou, 700 families on 15 mu, and proposed that the state pay the largest share, the work units a middle share and residents “a small change”. The model that lasted came the next year: in 1992 the Xiesan site in Luwan, 3.49 hectares of shanties, was rebuilt in a joint venture with a foreign investor, who built high-rise blocks while the residents were rehoused elsewhere. By 1995 average living space had reached 8 square metres.

Thirty years of old-district clearance, 1992–2022

People’s Daily, reporting the end of the programme in 2022, dates it from March 1992 and the Xiesan site. The first goal, set in 1992, was to clear 3.65 million square metres of dangerous huts and shacks in the urban area by the end of the century, financed by land leasing, property development and road building; it was met by 2000 and benefited about 680,000 households. At the end of 2000 a second round began on housing classed as “second-class old lane and below” (二级旧里以下), the oldest and worst-equipped lane houses, with residents compensated mainly in cash. It ran for another twenty years. The last such project in the central city, blocks 68 and the eastern part of 67 on Jianguo East Road, took effect in late July 2022. In all, the newspaper counts more than 30 million square metres and about 1.3 million households over thirty years; a CCTV report counts about 40 million square metres and 1.65 million households from 1991.

The figures measure how far it went. Average living space was 3.9 square metres per person in 1949 and 8 in 1995; in 2015 the city’s statistics bulletin gave 18.1 square metres of living space (35.5 of floor area). Even so, a survey in 2023 still found 14,082 households using chamber pots, and Xinhua reported the last of them largely fitted with toilets only by the end of September 2025.

Giving back the river

The other great change in Puxi was at the water’s edge. For a century the Huangpu bank from Yangshupu to Longhua was wharves, mills, power stations and shipyards, The planners had wanted it otherwise since 1953, when they proposed moving the wharves between Suzhou Creek and Renmin Road to make a riverside park; in 1959 they drew a “new Bund” on the Nanshi waterfront whose buildings would outdo “the old Bund built by the imperialists”. Nothing came of either.

The Bund itself was rebuilt first: a 1988 plan, carried out from 1992, gave it ten traffic lanes, a viewing terrace and a riverside green belt. In January 2002 the city launched a programme for the whole Huangpu riverfront, 85 kilometres of bank from Wusong to the Xupu Bridge, with a leading group and a development company. The survey it began with found more than 150 enterprises in the zone, over a hundred of them factories, and between the Lupu Bridge and Xiangyin Road 99 factories employing 113,500 people. In the centre, Old City Park opened in June 2002 on land cleared of 4,123 households between the Bund and the Yu Garden, and the Bund Origin block at the mouth of Suzhou Creek was emptied of later occupants from 2003 to restore its 25 old buildings.

The 2010 World Expo moved the heaviest industry. The Jiangnan Shipyard announced the completion of its move to Changxing Island on 3 June 2008, and its docks and sheds became part of the Expo grounds; on the Puxi side 6,712 households in Dongjiadu and Bansongyuan Road were moved in 2005–06. A former power station on the Puxi side of the site is now the Power Station of Art.

Yangpu followed. The river gazetteer calls its 15.5 kilometres of frontage the cradle of China’s modern industry; in 2010 it was still almost all factories, warehouses and wharves, with second-class old lanes behind. Work on Fisherman’s Wharf began on 11 January 2008, and the Yangpu riverside has been opened stretch by stretch since. On 2 November 2019 Xi Jinping walked the stretch in front of the Yangshupu Waterworks and spoke of a “people’s city, built by the people, for the people”; the phrase now stands in front of the exhibition hall there. To the south, the Xuhui riverfront was added to the programme in 2002; on the site of the old Longhua airfield, People’s Daily reported in 2022, twin towers house artificial-intelligence firms beside the museums.

By the end of 2017, People’s Daily reported, 45 kilometres of the Huangpu bank from the Yangpu Bridge to the Xupu Bridge had been “basically” opened as continuous public space.

Suzhou Creek

Suzhou Creek was the dirtiest water in the city. The Paper’s account of its clean-up quotes the old description, “black as ink, stinking as dung”. Early in 1998 the city set itself to end the creek’s black, stinking water by the end of 2000, and in May 1998 the national planning commission approved the first phase, about 7 billion yuan over five years. By 2000 the “yellow-black line” where the creek’s water met the Huangpu had largely gone. Phases two and three, from 2003 to 2011, cost about 7 billion more; by 2012, 45 kinds of fish had been found, after 27 years with none. A fourth phase of more than 25 billion yuan began in the late 2010s. By the end of 2020, 42 kilometres of the creek’s banks in the central city had been “basically” opened to walkers, and a regulation on the public waterfront of both rivers followed in 2021.

What the sources disagree on

• How much was cleared. People’s Daily counts more than 30 million square metres and about 1.3 million households for 1992–2022; a CCTV report counts about 40 million square metres and 1.65 million households from 1991. The two probably count different kinds of housing; neither explains its scope.
• When the programme ended. The official phrase of 2022 is that the clearance of whole blocks of second-class old lanes in the central city was “concluded”. Old houses of other grades, and blocks outside the centre, were not part of that count, and chamber pots were still in use in 2023.
• Living space. The housing gazetteer’s 3.9 square metres for 1949 and 8 for 1995 are living space; many later figures are floor area, which is about twice as large. The two should not be compared.
• When the city hall opened. The urban planning gazetteer gives 10 October 1933 for the opening of Dong Dayou’s city hall at Jiangwan; some English sources give 1932, the year work was interrupted.
• Who did the clearing. The gazetteers and newspapers describe the programmes from the side of the city; the residents’ view appears in them only as petitions and dispute counts.

What to look for

• Jiangwan, north of Wujiaochang, where the planning gazetteer records Dong Dayou’s city hall, library, museum and stadium; what survives and what can be visited has not yet been checked on site.
• Caoyang No. 1 Village, off Caoyang Road in Putuo, still has its two-storey rows of 1952 (with a storey added in 1960), its little river and the layout around a central green; it was listed as a historic building in 2004 and renovated in 2019–21.
• The Yangpu riverside, east of Qinhuangdao Road, where the path runs past the Yangshupu Waterworks and the old power station, with the people’s-city exhibition hall between them.
• The West Bund in Xuhui, where museums and the twin AI towers stand on the site of the Longhua airfield.
• Suzhou Creek’s walk through Putuo, past Macau Road and West Suzhou Road, where the Shenxin No. 9 and Naigai Wata mills stood and the three bays and a lane lay behind them.
• Gone: the shanties of Zhaojiabang and Fanguanong, the Puxi wharves, most of the river mills and the second-class old lanes of the city centre.