The Capture of Shanghai

When emissaries of Queen Victoria and the Daoguang Emperor signed the treaty that opened Shanghai and four other Chinese ports to foreign trade, there were no cameras on hand to record the event. It was 1842, and photography was still in its infancy. But a dazzling new pictorial history of the city takes that treaty signing as its starting point and, like Shanghai, sprints chronologically toward the future in a blur of images.

In Shanghai: A History in Photographs, 1842-Today, journalist Liu Heung Shing and Chinese-art expert Karen Smith have assembled more than 400 photos from municipal archives, private collections, newspapers and photo agencies, plus new ones commissioned from Chinese and Western shooters. There are never-published treasures like British entrepreneur William Turner’s scenes of Shanghai life in the early 1900s — probably taken with a homemade pinhole camera — as well as a few famous icons, like Henri Cartier-Bresson’s shot of Shanghainese queuing to change money during a 1948 financial panic. The book is based on a photo exhibit Liu and Smith have created for the Shanghai World Expo, so there are many heroic shots of sun-kissed skylines and bristling construction cranes. But mostly the scale is intimate, human and unfailingly arresting.

(See pictures of Shanghai.)

The fun begins with the book’s cover, an unusual photo from the 1950s of Chinese minicars on a blissfully quiet street. A picture from the same era of a woman surrounded by colorful thermos flasks marries the saturated colors of cheesy calendar art with the grace of a Flemish genre painting. A 1930s studio portrait of two girls posing in the style of affluent Western children hints at the aspirational dreams of a growing middle class. But then the nightmares take over — among them the violence that followed the 1920 birth (in Shanghai) of the Chinese Communist Party, and the 1937-45 war with Japan. Communist agents are executed in the street, bombs fall on residential neighborhoods and people scramble in the dirt, under the gaze of Japanese occupiers, for dropped rice grains.

Shanghai regained some of its zest after the war, as seen in the everyday bustle of a bar or basketball game. But the images acquire a new sobriety when the communists take power. “On 24th May [1949] you could bribe everyone in Shanghai,” said a British businessman quoted by the authors. “On 26th May you could bribe no one.” But thereafter you could, as evidenced here, march in giant rallies, practice military maneuvers, smile through a train window before going off to learn from the peasants and, in one chilling scene, watch schoolchildren denounce the freshly disgraced Gang of Four.

(See pictures of China on the wild side.)

By the 1980s, as China reopened to the world, Shanghainese can be seen enjoying themselves again. They crowd new department stores, sell wares in now legal street markets, canoodle in parks, take photos of their kids and foxtrot in the streets.

Eventually, of course, those thoroughfares start to look pretty much like those of any major city — but do not search here for a sense of loss. “Shanghai,” the authors insist, “has retained a greater portion of its historic architecture than Beijing.” Given the Chinese capital’s sorry record of destruction, that’s not saying much, but Shanghai: A History in Pictures accentuates the positive. Here is a city too busy building and shopping, making movies and automobiles, having sex-change operations and gawking at sidewalk fashion shoots to worry about the past or its foreign humiliations and ideological excesses.

The book ends, as it begins, on wheels. In a 2010 photo by Liu, a former TIME photographer, two fashionable young businesswomen cruise in a Mercedes convertible, top down, amid the skyscrapers of Shanghai’s Pudong financial district. Toward, no doubt, that future of mobility and prosperity first promised in 1842 and now as real as a photograph.

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