Shanghai's fishing village became the world's busiest container port
Shanghai, a Chinese provincial-level municipality, counted about 30.05 million urban residents as of 2026—China's most populous city and roughly the world's fifth. A Yangtze delta fishing town forced open as a treaty port after nineteenth-century wars, it re-emerged via Deng-era reforms and Pudong as a finance, tech, and shipping giant.
The name means upon the sea. It first appears in the eleventh century for a town at a river confluence, and the settlement was formally called Shanghai from 1280, though some argue records reach back about 2,150 years to a fishing village called Hu. That older word survives as the city's official abbreviation, seen on licence plates; it contracts a fourth- or fifth-century name for the fishing-weir mouth of Suzhou Creek. Another short name, Shen, honours Lord Chunshen, a third-century BC minister of Chu whose fief included the area and who, legend says, ordered the Huangpu dug.
For centuries the region's great port lay elsewhere. Qinglong Town in today's Qingpu District, founded in 746, traded along the Yangtze and the coast and with Japan and Silla, until silting shifted business downstream. Shanghai rose from village to market town in 1074, gained a 10-metre wall five kilometres around in 1554 to fend off Japanese pirates, and in 1602 received a City God Temple, an honour usually kept for prefectural capitals.
Qing policy then made it a major port. In 1684 the Kangxi Emperor lifted a ban on ocean-going ships dating from 1525, and in 1732 the customs office for Jiangsu moved here with sole control over the province's foreign-trade duties; by 1735 Shanghai led the lower Yangtze trade despite its lowly administrative rank. British troops occupied it in the First Opium War, and the 1842 Treaty of Nanking made it one of five treaty ports, with British, French and American enclaves growing outside the old walls.
Its modern skyline reflects every phase, from Art Deco buildings on the Bund to shikumen lane houses and the towers of Lujiazui. A Japanese novelist's 1924 book Mato gave it the nickname demon city, while English writers called it the Paris of the East and the Pearl of the Orient.
Source: Shanghai
