Who ran the Settlement: the vote, the money, the police and the courts

The International Settlement was not a colony. No government in London or Washington appointed its rulers, and no Chinese ministry confirmed them. It was run by the Shanghai Municipal Council: a committee elected each year by the foreign ratepayers, under rules that tied the vote to property. Owning land worth 500 taels, or renting a house assessed at 500 taels a year, made a man an elector; anything less did not, and for most of the Council’s life no Chinese resident could vote or sit on it at all.

These seven stories follow that machine from the inside, through the Council’s own reports and regulations.

Who could vote reads the Land Regulations as a constitution: who qualified, who could stand, and what the annual ratepayers’ meeting could and could not decide.

The money follows the budget from its first year, 1854, when $14,000 of $25,000 went to the police, through rates, licences and loans.

The police and the Volunteers are the force that spent it: a paid service that grew from a handful of constables into a mixed body of foreign, Sikh and Chinese branches, and beside it an armed corps of residents.

The Mixed Court and the gaol are the sharp end. A Chinese magistrate sat with a foreign assessor to judge the Chinese of the Settlement, and those it sentenced went to the Council’s own prison on Ward Road.

May Thirtieth is the reckoning: the crisis as the Council’s own documents record it, and the three Chinese seats that followed.

Read in order, the parts answer one question: what did it mean, day to day, for the centre of Shanghai to be governed by a private electorate of property holders?