The river and the Bund: the Wusong bar, the Whangpoo Conservancy and the Council's foreshore, 1863–1932

The short answer. Shanghai became the largest port in China on a river that ocean ships could barely enter. The bar at Wusong, where the Huangpu met the Yangtze, had six feet of water at low tide in a bad month before 1900, and the Chinese authorities, Pott says, sometimes thought of it as “a heaven-sent barrier” against foreign warships. The foreign merchants asked for dredging in 1863 and were refused; the Boxer Protocol of 1901 imposed a conservancy board on China; a convention of 1905 gave the work to a Chinese-Customs board funded from the opium duty; a Dutch engineer dredged the bar from 1906; and by 1928 the channel had 26 feet. On the Settlement’s side of the river the Municipal Council spent fifty years bunding Suzhou Creek, reclaiming the Public Garden, rebuilding the Garden Bridge and arguing with the board about a line in the water called the normal line, beyond which it could not build. This is the river as the Council and Pott recorded it.

1863–1881: “a heaven-sent barrier”

The Huangpu was a tidal river, and the Settlement drank it, as the waterworks article explains; it was also the only way in. “The low water depth of the river bar varied in different months of the year from 6 feet to 13 feet 6 inches,” Pott wrote of the years before 1900. The shipping firms wanted it dredged and the Chinese did not: in 1863 a deputation asked Robert Hart, head of the Maritime Customs, to press the matter, and “the Chinese government answered ‘No’”; F. B. Johnson then asked the British minister, Sir Thomas Wade, for powers to levy conservancy taxes on shipping and land, and got nowhere; and in 1875 Hart himself judged that dredging “will not prolong or avert the commercial death of the place”, which he expected from the silting of the whole estuary. The Chinese view was that the bar kept ironclads out, and Pott’s phrase for it, “heaven-sent barrier”, is the one the foreign community used. In 1881, or 1882 in another of Pott’s passages, “the Chinese authorities, at their own cost, ordered a steam dredger”, “but with no enduring results”. The Customs’ own decennial report for 1892–1901 is the engineers’ view of the same river: the 18-foot passage of the South Channel “silted in 1898”, 16 feet at low water of spring tides “has been fairly constant” on the Fairy Flats, the Tsungming crossing had “over 4 fathoms” and was closing, and “if nothing is done to remedy these two characteristics, a condition will soon be arrived at which will be most detrimental to navigation.” Shipping tonnage at the port had risen 71 per cent in the decade, more than half of it British.

1901–1905: the Protocol and the convention

The Boxer settlement gave the foreigners their lever. “Annex No. 17 of the final Protocol provided for the establishment of a Conservancy Board” on which, Pott records, foreign representatives would predominate and the Chinese have “not more than two appointees”, which the Chinese “regarded as an infringement of sovereignty” and would not work. The Council’s part in the Annex 17 board was limited to “the annual election of the Chairman to serve on the Board which should have been constituted”, and the board never met. What broke the deadlock was a Customs proposal: a memorandum by Sir Robert Bredon of 1 December 1904, supported at a Shanghai meeting on 13 December, for the work to be done under the Customs, and a counter-proposal through the viceroy’s adviser A. E. Hippisley that China bear the whole cost, 460,000 taels a year, rather than the 230,000 the foreign community was to have found from taxes on land, houses, trade and tonnage. The convention “ultimately signed on the 27th September” 1905 at Peking, by China and the eleven Protocol powers in twelve articles, is printed in the Council’s report for the year. The Customs daotai and the commissioner of customs at Shanghai would manage “the improvement of the Whangpoo and the bar”; China would choose the engineer, subject to the powers’ approval; the board would report quarterly to the consuls, license every wharf and jetty, be able to expropriate moorings and buy land outside the concessions; and it would do all this “without levying any tax or contribution either upon riparian property or upon trade or navigation”, on the security of the Sichuan and Suzhou opium duty, “a minimum of 460,000 Haikuan taels” a year for twenty years. If China failed to pay, Annex 17 revived. It was the Settlement’s first lesson that a Chinese-run board with a foreign engineer could do what a foreign-run board could not.

1906–1912: de Rijke, von Heidenstam, and the board of 1912

The engineer China chose was J. de Rijke, the Dutch hydraulic engineer who had worked on Japan’s rivers and had already advised the Council, from Arnhem in January 1904, on its Public Garden reclamation; he had reported on the Huangpu in 1898. He was “appointed Engineer-in-Chief in January 1906”. After four years, Pott says, “the funds were nearly exhausted” and the board asked for “eight million dollars” more; dredging resumed on 25 November 1909 with 300,000 taels; and on 17 May 1910 de Rijke was given notice that his engagement would end on 30 November, the consuls protesting that his contract ran to June 1911. By then, in Pott’s account, the Inner Woosung bar “had been practically eliminated” and the Astraea channel “had acquired a considerable depth”. He was succeeded by “Mr. H. M. von Heidenstam”, a Swede, who ran the works until 1929 and whose letters to the Council on the Yangjingbang fill its 1914 report; Dr H. Chatley followed him.

The republic rewrote the board in 1912. “The present Whangpoo Conservancy Board” was made up of the Jiangsu commissioner for foreign affairs, the Shanghai commissioner of customs, H. F. Merrill, the harbour master, Captain W. A. Carlson, and three Chinese officials, with “a consultative committee of five foreign and one Chinese member”, its authority “delegated to it by the Chinese Government” over the river from the Yangtze to the tidal limit, “a radius of more than 30 miles”. Its money came no longer from opium but from the port: wharfage dues “at one and a half per mille” on goods and “the sale of sheng-ko land”, the crown land that silted up along the banks or was reclaimed; by 1928 a conservancy surtax of three per cent on Shanghai customs dues, one and a half per mille on duty-free goods, 0.045 per cent on treasure, and foreshore land sales. “In 1921 a committee of harbour and river experts of the first rank was convened.” The board’s general report of 1928, which Pott summarises, gave the result of twenty-two years: a channel “with a least navigable depth of 26 feet” at extraordinary low water, 24 feet at the Wayside bar, and 30 to 32 feet at high water of neap tides. The six-foot bar of the 1870s had become a 26-foot channel, and the Settlement had paid for none of it except through its trade.

The Council’s foreshore

What the Council owned was the bank. The Public Garden’s ground had been “the Consular Mud-flat, being formed by the silt deposited by the meeting of the waters of the Whangpoo and Soochow Creek”, and in May 1886 “the grass plots, extending from the Public Gardens to the Customs shed, were thrown open to the public”. In November 1903 the Council proposed to push the garden out into the river and “took the best expert opinion available”, de Rijke’s, who advised that “there is no objection” to a reclamation of about 5,180 square yards, against a larger scheme by the Customs coast inspector Tyler that would have added over 9,000. In 1905 “5½ mow of land has been added to the grounds” of the garden, raised with “about 40,000 tons of mud” from Suzhou Creek, done by the Council’s own men for 11,300 taels, “just less than half” the lowest tender, and “the Bund between Peking Road and the Garden Bridge has been widened to 60 feet”. The river answered in kind: by 1908 “a considerable accretion had taken place on the Public Garden foreshore since its reclamation in 1905”, and 25,000 tons of mud had to be taken out of the creek mouth for a 200-foot channel. In 1909 the Council planned “a new bund line 50 feet back from the Conservancy Normal Line”, which “will provide for a further enlargement of the Public Garden”.

The normal line was the board’s rule for the whole river: a line beyond which no wharf, jetty or reclamation could go, fixed to keep the channel at its designed width. The Council learned to live with it. In 1908 the engineer reported that “on account of the Conservancy Normal Line being a considerable distance from the existing stone slope, no dredging has taken place along the Bund foreshore. The result is that all the pontoons south of the Customs pontoons are aground at low-water.” The 1911 budget noted that “the establishment of what is known as the Conservancy Normal Line, and the bunding and filling work” behind it “is having the effect of enlarging the available deep water frontage of the River”, most of which, from Hongkew Creek to the Point, was “in private undisputed ownership”; in 1912 the line “is now accurately shown on the plan” where before it “was merely estimated”. The Bund pontoons were removed, overhauled and the foreshore dredged in 1912; in 1913 a Chinese steamer carried away the Nanking Road pontoon’s bridge on 27 December and a Japanese steamer hit the Peking Road pontoon on 9 November, and the Council’s new Wayside public wharf opposite Ewo Road had a basin 250 by 90 feet with seven feet at low water, which it expected to keep only by “constant dredging”; the shipping companies, the 1914 report noted, “dredged to a depth sufficient for ocean-going steamers along their frontages” themselves.

The Garden Bridge

The bridge that joined the Bund to Hongkou was rebuilt in the same years, because the trams needed it. In 1905 the Council called “tenders for a new Garden Bridge, sixty feet wide, having one clear span of 165 feet over the fairway on the south side and three smaller spans on the Hongkew side”, and for a steel Chekiang Road bridge of 192-foot span. Test borings of “3½ ft diameter” went down 200 feet into what the geologist T. W. Kingsmill described as “a water-logged, highly micaceous sand of extreme fineness”, which is why Shanghai’s bridges sit on piles. The old bridge was closed to rickshaws and carriages for “the past twelve months”, a shopkeeper complained in August 1907, and the Council refused him compensation in September; the engineer’s report for January 1908 records that “the Bridge was opened to vehicular traffic on the 20th instant”, the temporary footbridge from Astor Road having served “a little over six months”. “Careful levels taken throughout the year indicate that there has been no measurable settlement of the foundation,” the Council reported at the end of 1908, and noted that the cofferdams had silted the creek mouth. The bridge the Settlement built for its trams in 1907–08 is the one that stands.

Suzhou Creek: a quarter of a million taels and no voice

The board’s writ ran up the creek too, and the Council resented it. “The Municipal Council,” its engineer wrote in 1913, “has spent no less than a quarter of a million Taels in erecting one and three-quarter miles of permanent bunding without any contributions from the Chinese Authorities and yet has no voice in the conservancy of the creek”, on which “the Chinese Government has not spent a single cash” “for fifteen years or more”; a Gazette of 1910 had put the Council’s creek bundings since 1901 at 188,000 taels. That year reinforced concrete replaced the wooden bunding on the north bank between North Fokien and North Shanse Roads, with three concrete jetties. The relationship improved when the board took on the creek itself. In 1921 “a new fairway 120-ft. wide with a depth of 8-ft. at lowest low water was dredged from the Garden Bridge to the confluence” at the joint cost of the board and the Council, the board’s dredger lifting 11,515 fang of mud; in 1932 the board “removed a further 266,770 cubic yards” and had reached Macao Road, “over three miles from the Whangpoo”; by the end of 1934 it had dredged “1,115,964 cubic yards barge measure” from the creek. The mud had uses. When the French proposed filling the Yangjingbang in 1914, von Heidenstam offered the Council “approximately 78,000” cubic yards of harbour mud “at ten (10) tael cents per cubic yard (barge-measure)”, pumped up to 2,900 feet from the river but only “when dredging for conservancy purposes at the same time is going on in the vicinity”, and warned that the board’s contract dredging would stop in November 1914 and not resume for a year; the Council’s engineer costed river mud at 14,690 taels against 24,100 by cart, doubted whether harbour mud “would be satisfactory”, and the Council decided instead to fill its Defence Creek with mud “dredged from the Soochow Creek”, which would “help to improve the much to be desired conservancy” of the creek it had bunded.

1921–1932: widening the Bund, and the last works

The Bund’s last widening took a strip of the garden the Council had reclaimed in 1905. In 1921 the works schedule carried “Widening of the Bund by the excision of a strip of the Public Garden”, between Peking Road and the Garden Bridge, with a freight road on the river side and a rank for motor cars between it and the old carriageway; petitions for and against were printed in the Gazette through June and July 1921, “about half a mow” was gained by bunding out, “several trees” were transplanted, and 31,500 taels were budgeted. Pott records the criticism: “the objectors were right in regretting the sacrifice of some beautiful trees”. “Widening along the Public Garden frontage between Peking Road and the Garden Bridge has been completed” in 1922, the year the Council also put 16,000 taels into “the new Bund Jetty scheme” and built concrete jetties on North Soochow Road. In 1925 Liping Road was scheduled to 140 feet “in connection with the Dock Scheme formulated by the Whangpoo Conservancy Board”; in 1928 the strip of foreshore north of the Customs House, vacated by the US marines who had camped there in 1927, “was made into a parking space”; in 1932 the Council built a public wharf of 700 feet west of Yangtszepoo Creek on ground “raised with dredged mud pumped ashore by the Whangpoo Conservancy Board”, dredged to ten or eleven feet, and extended the Chaoufoong Road jetty “to the Conservancy Normal Line”. The board’s survey of the river in those years survives as a chart: sheet 3, Yangtszepoo to Longhua creek, “compiled from the latest surveys of the Whangpoo Conservancy Board, 1914–1921”, printed by the Commercial Press for the Customs marine department in a new edition of 15 June 1921, with every sounding on it.

What the Council took from the river was its wharfage dues, a share of the customs duty on goods landed, which the Customs collected for it from 1897: 177,636 taels in 1909, 215,245 in 1913, 365,297 in 1920, 489,622 in 1924, 602,787 in 1928. The dues, the Council complained in 1925, “have not grown to the same extent” as the port, because the ratepayers could never muster a quorum to raise them; the deepening of the channel was paid for by the board’s own surtax on the same goods, and the Settlement got the trade.

What the sources disagree on

Pott dates the first Chinese dredger to 1881 on one page and 1882 on another. The bar depths before 1905 are Pott’s and the Customs’; those for 1905–07 come from Hong Kong directories known only through search summaries, on two different datums two feet apart, and are given as low confidence. The Council’s reports do not print shipping tonnage or bar depths by year, so the series here is the board’s as Pott and the Customs decennial quote it, and the Council’s wharfage dues stand in as a proxy for the port’s growth. The engineer in post from 1912 to 1929 was von Heidenstam; a Dutch engineer named van der Veen, sometimes given, does not appear in these sources, and the Dutchman was de Rijke. The Garden Bridge is dated 1907 in most accounts and was opened to vehicles on 20 January 1908 by the engineer’s report; the Council’s own report for 1907, which described its construction in full, is not on the Internet Archive.

What to look for

Stand on the Bund promenade north of the Peking Road crossing: the lawn and the river wall are the Council’s reclamation of 1905, the roadway behind the strip it cut back in 1921–22, and Huangpu Park what was left. The Garden Bridge is the steel bridge of 1907–08 on its 200-foot piles, restored in 2008 and carrying buses where the trams ran. The Customs House of 1927 stands where the pontoons lay aground in 1908; the river wall in front of it is on the normal line the board drew. The mouth of Suzhou Creek is the concrete bunding of the Council’s 1913 works under a century of renewal. The Wusong bar is forty minutes downstream by the metro to Wusongkou, where the Yangtze’s brown water meets the Huangpu’s grey and the ships that the board’s dredgers let in still turn the corner.