Topic
Services on the rates: how the Settlement got fire engines, water, light and schools
Nine stories on what the rates bought: a fire brigade, piped water, electricity, trams, a health office, markets, schools and a band.
A town is not its monuments. It is water that can be drunk, streets that are lit, fires that are put out and food that can be bought without cholera. Nineteenth-century Shanghai had none of this by default: river water was carried to the door in buckets and settled with alum, and until 1866 each trading house put out its own fires.
These nine stories follow how the Settlement bought those services, one by one, out of the rates and licence fees its Council collected — and how often it chose a franchise company over doing the work itself.
Fire starts with a single engine imported in 1863 and the volunteer brigade of 1866 that took the motto We Fight the Flames. Water follows the argument that began at the ratepayers’ meeting of May 1875 and ended with filtered water under pressure. Power is the Council’s own electricity station; trams the franchise that finally got the Settlement moving; rickshaws the licensing system that regulated the vehicles the trams never replaced.
Health is the officer whose year ran from smallpox season to cholera season; markets the long campaign to move food off the street and under a roof; schools the municipal system that grew out of a single orphanage; and the band the one service nobody strictly needed, paid for on the rates anyway, and the municipal orchestra it grew into.
Each part stands alone. Together they show where the money actually went — and why the receipts for it are still visible in the streets, from substation buildings to covered markets.
Read in order
Part 1 · Fire
We fight the flames: the Shanghai fire brigade from volunteers to professionals, 1866–1932
Merchants' clerks with a Meneely bell and a steam launch, fires that took houses by the hundred, and the day in 1919 the last 44 volunteers resigned.
12 min read
Part 2 · Water
How piped water came to Shanghai, 1875–1913
Until 1883 Shanghai drank settled river water. The Council's reports record the 1880 concession, the first taps, the bills and the shares it took in 1905.
16 min read
Part 3 · Power
The Council's own power station, 1893–1929
Bought for 66,100 taels on a vote of 25 to 14, grown into the biggest plant in the Far East, sold for 81 million: the Settlement's electricity business.
13 min read
Part 4 · Trams
The first trams, 1905–1928: how the Settlement got moving
Refused in 1898, running by 1908 from the Bund to Jing'an Temple. The Council's files record the fares war, the accidents, the 1918 riot and the bus.
15 min read
Part 5 · Rickshaws
Licensed to pull: rickshaws, wheelbarrows, sedan chairs and motor cars, 1874–1934
The Council licensed everything on wheels. Its tables count 31,439 rickshaw licences in 1887, 10,000 capped in 1924, five cars in 1903 and 8,073 in 1932.
13 min read
Part 6 · Health
The Health Officer's year: smallpox, plague, cholera and the milk cart, 1871–1932
What the Council's doctors counted: free vaccinations by the thousand, the plague scare of 1910, cholera summers, adulterated milk and the death rate.
15 min read
Part 7 · Markets
Markets and hawkers: how the Council tried to get Shanghai's food off the street, 1880–1932
From a market in the Nanking Road roadway to sixteen municipal markets and 26,000 hawker prosecutions a year: fifty years of housing the food trade.
13 min read
Part 8 · Schools
The Council's schools: from a Eurasian orphanage to fifteen municipal schools, 1870–1932
What the Settlement thought it owed its children: a Eurasian school, a Public School taken over in 1893, a Chinese boys' school in 1904, the rule of 1911.
14 min read
Part 9 · The band
The Town Band and the Municipal Orchestra: music on the rates, 1879–1932
Twenty-one musicians from Manila in 1881, a German conductor in 1906, an Italian in 1919, and ratepayers who twice voted to keep paying for the orchestra.
12 min read
Everything on one map
Every place the parts mention. Numbers run through the parts in reading order.
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Places to see
Shopping street· c. 1851–1854
East Nanjing Road Pedestrian Street
南京东路步行街Nánjīng Dōnglù Bùxíngjiē
Shanghai's best-known shopping street, pedestrianised in the late 1990s and extended east to the Bund in September 2020.
Bridge· 1906–1907
Waibaidu Bridge
外白渡桥Wàibáidù Qiáo
Riveted steel truss bridge of 1907 over the mouth of Suzhou Creek, the first steel bridge on the creek; its name recalls a toll-free crossing of the 1870s.
Also on this subject
The Settlement's budget from $25,000 in 1854 to 15 million taels in 1932: who paid the rates, who bought the debentures, what the 1929 power sale bought.
Who could vote: the ratepayers' meeting, 1869–1941, and the jubilee of 1893
A city of a million run by a few thousand votes: the franchise in the Land Regulations, the polls, the meetings without a quorum, and the jubilee of 1893.
Sources
- 1.A Short History of Shanghai (A Short History of Shanghai: Being an Account of the Growth and Development of the International Settlement), F. L. Hawks Pott, Kelly & Walsh, Shanghai (digitised copy on the Internet Archive), 1928 — pp. 70–71, 96–97, 109–110; pp. 70, 109book
- 2.Shanghai Municipal Council annual report for 1880 (Shanghai Municipal Council: Report for the Year 1880 and Budget for the Year 1881), Shanghai Municipal Council, Shanghai Municipal Council (digitised copy on the Internet Archive), 1881 — Water Works, p. 104archive