The Beggar-Boats of Shanghai

Later this year the excellent reprint house Earnshaw Books are reissuing EW Peters’s 1937 classic Shanghai Policeman, the true story of a sorry copper’s lot in the Shanghai Municipal Police. It’s a terrific read and full of stories from Shanghai at probably its most exciting moment in history. Additionally much of the action of the book takes place north of Suzhou (Soochow) Creek in the Hongkou (Hongkew) and Yangpu (Yangtszepoo) districts which I write about often on this blog but are still largely undiscovered by the ex-pat crowd of Shanghai who mostly stubbornly refuse to venture north of the Creek for some reason.

Earnshaw Books were kind enough to ask me to blurb the book and so I had to re-read it recently. I had completely forgotten about Peters’s vivid descriptions of the beggar-boats of Shanghai. Peters talks of the beggar-boats on the Hongkew Creek, near Kashing Road (now Jiaxing Road) and again by Fearon Road (Jiulong Road). Apparently the greatest concentration of the beggar boats was along the creek at Fearon Road between Yalu and Yuhung Roads (Haining Road East and Dongyuhang Road West), just south of the old Municipal abattoir, what is now the struggling development called 1933.

Talking of the beggar-boats in Shanghai Policeman Peters writes, ‘Numbers of these boats always infest the waterways in Shanghai at night, the beggars mooring them along the creeks in the evening, practising their profession in the streets of the city during the night, and then slipping away in these boats next morning.’ Apparently, all creeks and waterways, even in the Settlement’s boundaries, were deemed to belong to the Chinese. Hence, moving beggar boats along was problematic for the police and authorities.

I have never seen a picture of the beggar-boats of Shanghai’s creeks (and if anyone has one please do let me know). However, I wandered down to the stretch of creek on Fearon Road between Yalu and Yuhung Roads the other day – the creek is of course cleaned up and has new banks and vegetation now. The west side of the creek is all post-1949 buildings and a police station but the east side has some structures remaining that would have been there in 1937 – of course it goes without saying north of Soochow Creek that anything pre-1949 is in a state of disrepair and probably not long for this world.

the creek facing south

the creek facing north towards 1933, the old Municipal abattoir

A remaining corner by the creek that would have overlooked the beggar-boats

Creek side housing from the 1930s that remains