The Old Pudong Debate

An interesting post on the excellent Bricoleurbanism blog on the development of Pudong (Pootung). I have tried, usually in vain, to fight the continuing number of fake Old China Hands in Shanghai who regularly like to drone on about remembering Pudong when, standing on the Bund, all you could see was farmland and marsh on the otherside of the river. I still occasionally get stuck at dinners where people drag this old nonsense out – most recently someone talking about the late 1990s!! Truth is that if you’re old enough to stood on the Bund and looked across the Huangpu River at marsh and farmland then you are the oldest person in the world by about 190 years and you’re still lying…there was no Bund to stand on then!!

I offer as evidence once again Carl Crow’s 1935 Shanghai map that clearly shows the lines of godowns, wharfs, shipyards and warehouses along the Pootung waterfront and stretching back (and, shameless plug, I’ve still got some repros of the map for sale at RMB250 if you email me!!).

Bricoleurbanism has an excellent image from 1990 (I first saw this view just a few years earlier) that also shows the build up along the Pudong waterfront. If I remember correctly the green you see towards where the Pearl Oriental Tower and the north side of the headland was formerly low-level factories cleared for those developments to start – this was also the area where the old cemetery was where many sailors and other foreign visitors to China were buried if they died on board ship or while in Pootung – now under the Pudong Convention Centre (as with other cemeteries in Shanghai such as the one under the JW Marriot, Bubbling Well in the Jing’an Park and the cemetery under what is now Huaihai Park I don’t think there was ever any proper remains removal procedure, they just churned it up and dug it over).

I won’t nick the image from the site – just click through to see it.

Somewhere I have a bunch of photos of various expeditions to Pudong undertaken in the late 1980s and early 1990s – I’ll try and find them and scan them in.

Bricoleurbanism’s comments on the failure of urban planning in Pudong are also of interest.