1990 Shanghai Institute of Surveying and Mapping Map of City Districts

A very large 1990 indexed street map of the urban districts of Shanghai produced by the Shanghai Institute of Surveying and Mapping. It provides a great deal of information on the city's administrative, transportation, and demographic geography in the early days of Shanghai's economic transformation.

A Closer Look

Coverage includes the contemporary urban districts (市区) of Shanghai, including (clockwise from left) Jing'an, Putuo, Changning, Xuhui, Luwan, Nanshi, Huangpu, Yangpu, Hongkou, and Zhabei. An inset map at bottom left displays the suburban districts (郊区) of Shanghai County, at that time largely consisting of farmland but now largely developed. Streets, parks (including People's Park at dead center), government and party offices, post offices (the numbers in green overprint are postal codes), train stations and ticketing offices, hospitals, museums, bus and train lines, and many other features are noted throughout. An alphanumeric grid surrounds the map, corresponding to a detailed index of street names at left and bottom. Where space does not allow the writing of street and alley names, numbers are given which then appear after the name of the road in the index. At bottom right, insets display Minhang District and Wusong, administered as part of the city despite being separated from the main area of urban development: Minhang because it included a large new campus for Shanghai Jiaotong University and Wusong because of its vital port facilities at the mouth of the Huangpu, where it meets the Yangzi River.

A City on the Move

This map was produced at a time when Shanghai's economy was rapidly changing. It was the most industrialized city when the People's Republic was created in 1949, but was also seen as politically suspect, having been a stronghold of the anti-Communist Kuomintang (Guomindang) and having been occupied by Japan for nearly eight years. The city's factories, shipyards, and workshops were nationalized in the 1950s and it suffered relative underinvestment as the national government prioritized industrial development in distant inland areas. But Shanghai's fortunes changed with the coming of the Reform Era, beginning in 1978. Having been China's most cosmopolitan city before 1949, it was primed to reemerge as 'China's gateway to Modernity.' A 'Shanghai Clique' in the Communist Party rose to prominence and took over national-level leadership in the wake of the Tiananmen Square protests in the 1990s. Jiang Zemin and Zhu Rongji, both mayors of Shanghai in the late 1980s, became President and Premier, respectively. Both had pushed for market reforms in Shanghai and then expanded them at the national level, overseeing an often-painful transition that saw millions of workers laid off but also encouraged entrepreneurship and the profit motive. They also welcomed foreign direct investment, crowning their years in power with China's ascendance to the World Trade Organization.

In Shanghai, a virtuous cycle emerged, with new investment and business activity providing the government with tax revenue, which was plowed into infrastructure projects, which spurred further economic development. The resulting transformation was incredible, especially on the east bank of the Huangpu River, Pudong. Here, the Lujiawan neighborhood was a group of low-lying warehouses and light industrial facilities, so insignificant that it was administered from across the river as part of Huangpu District. Twenty years later, it had become a sea of skyscrapers and luxury shopping centers. None of Shanghai's distinctive landmarks of the 1990s - such as the Oriental Pearl Tower, Shanghai Metro, or Nanpu Bridge - were completed at the time of publication, and only the Nanpu Bridge is shown as under construction, but with no indication yet of its distinctive loop. The downside of such rapid development was the widespread demolition of Shanghai's distinctive shikumen apartments and other alleyway residences, land seizures in villages surrounding the city, and rampant corruption.

Publication History and Census

This map was produced by the Shanghai Institute of Surveying and Mapping (上海市测绘院) in 1990, with the Shanghai Zhonghua Printing Factory printing and the Chinese Map Publishing House publishing it. The OCLC notes editions held by a handful of institutions going back to 1956, but no examples of this 1990 edition, which may have been the first to assume such huge proportions (earlier editions are about half the size).