Scythe and the City: A Social History of Death in Shanghai

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

© 2016 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Henriot, Christian, author.

Title: Scythe and the city : a social history of death in Shanghai / Christian Henriot.

Description: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2015050120 | ISBN 9780804797467 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780804798747 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Death—Social aspects—China—Shanghai—History—19th century. | Death—Social aspects—China—Shanghai—History—20th century. | Shanghai (China)—Social conditions—19th century. | Shanghai (China)—Social conditions—20th century.

Classification: LCC HQ1073.5.C62 S534 2016 | DDC 306.90951/132—dc23

LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015050120

Typeset by Newgen in 10/12 Sabon

Scythe and the City

A SOCIAL HISTORY OF DEATH IN SHANGHAI

Christian Henriot

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

STANFORD, CALIFORNIA

To my father, Albert (1927–1995), a craftsman who taught me what good work means

To my mother, Madeleine (1932–2012), who embedded music in my heart

To minanna Antoinette (1910–1989), for her unmatched resilience and generosity

With love

Contents

List of Illustrations

Introduction

1. Scythe and the City: The Measure of Death

2. Guilds, Charities, and the Community Management of Death

3. Funeral Companies and the Commoditization of the Dead Body

4. A Final Resting Place: From Burial Grounds to Modern Cemeteries

5. Foreign Cemeteries and the Colonial Space of Death

6. Invisible Deaths, Silent Deaths

7. Funerals and the Price of Death

8. The Cremated Body: From Social Curse to Political Rule

9. The Management of Death under Socialism

Conclusion

Abbreviations Used in the Notes

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

Tables

1.1. Age at death of Huzhou people in Shanghai (1933–1940)

1.2. Number of deaths and death rate in Shanghai (1950–1965)

1.3. Population density in Shanghai in the postwar period

1.4. Number of vaccinations in the Shanghai municipality (1946–1949)

2.1. Guilds involved in managing death in Shanghai (1950)

2.2. Range of funeral services offered by guilds in 1950

2.3. Year of foundation of guild graveyards

2.4. Size of the guild cemeteries in 1950

2.5. Length of stay in Shanghai of a sample of Ningbo sojourners (1942–1943)

3.1. Rise of funeral parlors and coffin repositories in wartime

3.2. Annual income of four coffin repositories (February 1941)

3.3. Status of the stored coffins in guild repositories in 1951

6.1. Number of exposed corpses and abandoned coffins collected by the SPBC in Shanghai (1915–1954)

6.2. Number of exposed corpses and abandoned coffins collected by the Tongren Fuyuantang in the French Concession (1929–1941)

7.1. Funeral service packages offered by the China Funeral Home in 1933

7.2. Price list of the Nanshi Funeral Parlor in August 1948

7.3. Storage fee and number of coffins per rate level of four coffin repositories in 1941

7.4. Coffin storage rates in August 1946

7.5. Rates for burial space and vaults in SMC cemeteries (1938–1943)

7.6. Rates for burial lots in the Jiating Cemetery (1947–1948)

7.7. Proposed rates for private cemeteries (1949)

7.8. Shipping rates for coffins in 1939 and 1942

7.9. Funeral packages offered by a group of cemeteries (1947–1948)

8.1. Number of cremations at the Bubbling Well Crematorium (1897–1940)

9.1. Membership and income of the funeral industry (1949–1955)

9.2. Members of the Federation of Corporations, Guilds, and Cemeteries in 1951

Maps

1.1. General map of Shanghai

1.2. Population density in 1935

2.1. Distribution of guild cemeteries in and around Shanghai in 1918

2.2. Coffin repository of the Zhe-Shao Guild in 1946

3.1. Spatial timeline of funeral parlors and coffin repositories (before 1937–1945)

3.2. Distribution of funeral parlors, guilds, and commercial coffin repositories (1940s)

3.3. Growing inventory of stored coffins (1937–1941)

3.4. Growing inventory of stored coffins (1942–1946)

3.5. Major coffin shipping lines in Jiangsu, Zhejiang, and Anhui

4.1. Distribution of charity cemeteries in and around Shanghai in 1918

4.2. Distribution of private cemeteries around Shanghai in 1948

5.1. Shantung Road Cemetery, New Cemetery (Pahsienjao), and Pootung Cemetery (1900)

5.2. Foreign cemeteries in Shanghai

5.3. Bubbling Well Cemetery and the resisting lineage’s land lots

6.1. Distribution of adult exposed corpses in the French Concession in 1938–1940

6.2. Distribution of children exposed corpses in the French Concession in 1938

7.1. Four funeral processions in Shanghai

7.2. Itinerary of the Wandering Ghosts Festival in 1896

7.3. Itinerary of the Wandering Ghosts Festival in 1937

Figures

1.1. 1937 cholera epidemic in the foreign settlements (Chinese population)

1.2. 1938–1939 smallpox epidemic in the French Concession

2.1. View of the Yangzhou coffin repository

2.2. View of a common room at the Yangzhou coffin repository in the 1940s

2.3. Individual coffins awaiting loading on a Shanghai wharf

3.1. Number of stored coffins in the International Settlement

4.1. Coffin left aboveground in a field

4.2. View of a charity cemetery near Fuzhou

5.1. Number of burials in the Lokawei Cemetery (1918–1938)

5.2. Squatter huts in the Pootung Cemetery

6.1. View of a baby tower near Fuzhou

6.2. Children encoffined in a single coffin at the Shanghai Public Benevolent Cemetery

6.3. People watch as SPBC employees encoffin an exposed corpse

6.4. Tongren Fuyuantang pedicab used to pick up the exposed corpses of children

6.5. Truckload of coffins taken to burial by the Tongren Fuyuantang

7.1. Chinese coffin shop in Shanghai (1940s)

7.2. Coffin on the move in the street

7.3. Decorated funeral parlor for Fu Xiao’an’s funeral service (1940)

7.4. Funeral procession of a Chinese official on Nanking Road

7.5. Funeral procession (1890s–1900s)

7.6. Chinese elite coffin catafalque with thirty-two pallbearers

7.7. Large paper figures in a funeral procession

7.8. Funeral of a commoner in Beijing (1920s)

7.9. Funeral procession in the countryside around Shanghai

Introduction

This book was born from an unexpected, almost accidental encounter. It had never occurred to me that I would direct my attention to the topic of death. Like many of my fellow historians, I can trace the underlying forces that led me to study the various historical issues that eventually turned into books, even if the choice was neither conscious nor deliberate.¹ My work on war resonates with the background of my family during World War II. Prostitutes, refugees, slum dwellers, and other social nobodies probably have to do with my growing up in a multicultural milieu of hard-working manual laborers. Studying death was not related to anything personal, even if this book is my tribute to those who brought me up.

My first step into studying death in Shanghai was related to the cycle of workshops on history and visual sources Professor Yeh Wen-hsin (University of California, Berkeley) and myself started organizing in 2003.² For our second meeting in Tokyo in 2004, we took the body as the main theme of the workshop. As my own research at the time focused on wartime Shanghai, the visual representation of bodies of combatants offered a potential line of investigation. I was not interested in the images of soldiers in action produced mostly for propaganda purposes. My focus was on the suffering body, on the pain and scars warfare inflicted upon the human body, on death in combat, and on remembrance. To my great dismay and surprise, my first foray into the archives revealed very little on military deaths, despite the magnitude of the carnage in 1937. Except for the partial records of hospitals for wounded soldiers and crude statistics, there was no record of the fallen Chinese soldiers. Eventually, but years later, I managed to dig up some materials on the casualties in the 1932 Battle of Shanghai.³

The exploration of archives, however, proved extraordinarily rewarding. It opened windows on a whole range of issues on death in wartime Shanghai that eventually raised much broader questions about death in the city. The issue of death loomed large in Shanghai and Chinese cities in the modern era. In the rich body of historiography produced in the last two decades, however, this topic is almost absent. While works in urban history have brought an increasingly sharper focus on life in a whole spate of cities, on specific categories of the population, on cultural processes, death is hardly mentioned. In earlier historical studies, death was associated with political violence, repression, and summary executions (e.g., 12 April 1927), but these were collective and anonymous deaths. At the other end of the spectrum, death struck particular individuals, especially in times of revolution and war. Political assassinations, from Manchu officials before 1911 to Song Jiaoren or Shi Liangcai in the Republican era, reached their apex with the brutal murders the nationalist, collaborationist, and Japanese secret services perpetrated in the early phase of the Sino-Japanese War. Yet this remained within the realm of political violence.⁴

What could we learn then about ordinary death in Chinese cities or in a large metropolis like Shanghai? The short answer was very little indeed, as discussed below. In view of the numerical importance of deaths in Chinese cities and their conspicuous presence in the public space through funerals, the movement of coffins on the streets, or exposed corpses, I expected that studies devoted to popular or street culture would touch on this issue.⁵ Even in works devoted to hygiene and public health, death was simply alluded to, sometimes not at all, in relation to sanitary conditions, epidemics, or public health policies.⁶

As an object of scholarly focus, death in China has been the privileged domain of anthropology.⁷ The most serious attempt to address the issue of death in modern Chinese society was the volume edited by James Watson and Evelyn Rawski in 1985, Death Ritual in Late Imperial and Modern China. By and large, however, this volume focused on rural society.⁸ Mechthild Leutner’s work on modern Beijing offered a glimpse on death in an urban setting, but its wide temporal coverage somehow undermined its purpose.⁹ In Chinese scholarship, death is almost totally absent from historical research, except for a couple of papers.¹⁰ All existing related studies—most appeared in the 1990s—are centered on the history of funerals (sangzang shi) and the study of customs, burials, and tombs from antiquity to Qing times.¹¹ The modern period is rarely touched upon and only in philosophical terms.¹² The geographical scope encompasses the whole country, though three studies focused on more specific areas like Jiangsu-Zhejiang, Sichuan, and the Lower Yangzi region.¹³ Cities as such were never taken as a relevant space for the study of death.¹⁴

For an understanding of death in China, we are left mostly with the classic works of de Groot and Doolittle on nineteenth-century Fujian.¹⁵ These extraordinary studies, especially de Groot’s, are extremely detailed in their own way. Yet they focus essentially on the rituals associated with elite funerals and burials in the Quanzhou area. They do not tell us how cities dealt with death as they developed after the mid-nineteenth century. We come closer to the management of death in urban settings with the studies of the native-place associations in Shanghai and Hankou by Bryna Goodman and William Rowe. They have contributed most to what we know about various aspects of death in late imperial and Republican cities.¹⁶ Japanese historian Hiroyuki Hokari has also produced a well-informed study on the role of community networks in managing death in Shanghai.¹⁷ This brief review shows that there was little historiographical basis to take up the issue of death in modern Shanghai. This fell short of the rich and varied historiography to be found in European history.

In Europe, the history of death is linked to the work of French historian Philippe Ariès. His major studies of death in Western culture had a large influence and shaped the field.¹⁸ Yet the interest of historians in death predated Ariès’s work by two decades, with major books and dissertations since the 1960s. These studies fit in the broader historical trend of histoire des mentalités.¹⁹ The expression itself, history of death, faded away in the following decades, even if there was a new surge in the history of death by historians as well as anthropologists and sociologists.²⁰ Of particular interest for my own research were the studies that focused on death and the dead body in the urban context, even if most examined the premodern period.²¹ British historians have contributed significantly to the study of death from a historical perspective.²² By and large, the Victorian era has caught the attention of most historians.²³ Using both conventional historical materials and private papers, British historians have examined the transformation of the space of death in cities, especially the move away from churchyards to modern cemeteries to cremation,²⁴ the economy of death, in particular the commoditization of the dead body,²⁵ and the private realm of grief and mourning in an attempt to unveil the emotions of individuals.²⁶ These were inspiring readings in my own attempt to situate the experience of death in the Chinese cultural context and in the specific urban setting of Shanghai, where both foreigners and Chinese were involved in redefining the norms and conventions under which the dead were disposed of.²⁷

Before its opening to foreign trade in the mid-nineteenth century, Shanghai was a secondary city in the Lower Yangzi area, yet one that played a significant role as a commercial hub for major goods such as cotton. A customs station since the Song dynasty, the city thrived on trade that brought increasing numbers of sojourners from various parts of China. By the eighteenth century, these communities had organized into native-place associations—guilds and corporations—that played a crucial role in managing their communities, in regulating economic activities, and in sustaining strong ties within each group and with their respective native places.²⁸ With the establishment of foreign settlements in the 1840s, the social and spatial configuration of the city changed drastically. The development of trade, then of industry, attracted hundreds of thousands of people in search of jobs and economic profit. Sojourner communities swelled and diversified, making Shanghai a large immigrant city. Yet another flow of immigrants—Westerners, Japanese, Indians, and so on—transformed the city into a complex multinational metropolis. And on death, every group had its own beliefs and set of funeral practices.

Originally centered on the walled city and its commercial and harbor suburb along the Huangpu River, Shanghai underwent a formidable spatial and administrative transformation after the two small foreign outgrowths—the English and French settlements—became the economic, cultural, and political center of the city. By the turn of the century, the balance tipped in favor of the areas dominated politically by foreigners, with the Shanghai Municipal Council in the International Settlement, the French Municipal Council in the French Concession, and Chinese authorities in the walled city and the new urban district, Zhabei, that sprang up in the north, across the Soochow Creek (see Map 1.1). Shanghai developed as a tripartite city, with three autonomous territories within the same urban area, each with its own governing bodies, regulations, and administrative traditions. State power in the city was diluted. On most issues of urban management, there was hardly any form of collaboration between the three jurisdictions. Death was precisely a grey area that the authorities left to the responsibility of families and native-place associations. They refrained from direct involvement beyond mere statistical recording until the Sino-Japanese War in 1937.

Does the singularity of Shanghai obviate a social history of death in Chinese cities? First, I argue that under the diverse social landscape of sojourner communities, the dominating group belonged to the common culture of the Jiangnan area, from where the bulk of sojourners came. The extended diversity to be found among the Chinese was not unlike that in many commercial or political centers such as Hankou, Nanjing, and Beijing. Second, the foreign presence added another shallow layer of different social, cultural, and religious practices onto the urban fabric. Although this had a certain impact on the management of death in the city, the major factor that drove change was modernity en marche, a process in which the Chinese were the main actors, as would also happen in other Chinese cities. In the realm of death, regulations, representations, and practices evolved through the friction between the set of time-honored values and the transformative force of urbanity and modernity.

In Shanghai, but throughout southern Chinese cities, the care of the dead was the responsibility of families and native-place or benevolent associations. Whereas religion intervened in rituals, religious organizations played virtually no role in the management of death, nor did the Chinese state until the advent of the Nationalist government in 1927. The overriding concern for all Chinese was the issue of a proper individual burial site, a place that was one’s own, alone or in a lineage burial site. Mixing up bodies, as in the charity cemeteries, or dumping them anywhere, as in the practice of coffins aboveground, challenged social norms and was believed to have a potentially disruptive effect on the living. Improper burial not only was perceived as dangerous—the wandering and angry ghosts that resulted from bad deaths—but also was a sign of social disorder to be prevented at all cost. Finally, the overriding concern of sojourners for burial in the native place produced a culture where the sense of place, not, as in the West, a single sacred site, defined and molded a distinctive and elaborate system and economy of funeral practices.

Throughout the Republican period, Shanghai was like a gigantic funnel that swallowed up lives by the thousands, even in times of peace. The city was not different from the premodern French cities that drained population from the countryside to maintain their lifeline or the British cities, especially London, of the first industrial revolution.²⁹ By the twentieth century, however, mortality rates dropped sharply in Europe. In Shanghai, however, migration continued, not just to provide the city with the crucial manpower that sustained its industrial and commercial growth, but also to compensate the persistently decimated ranks of laborers. Poor people without relatives or whose relatives could not support them died or were dumped in the street, on the pavement, in squares, on marketplaces, in back alleys, virtually anywhere. Their exposed bodies became a threat to social order as well as a risk for public health. In Shanghai, taking care of the poor and destitute, alive or dead, actually became a major activity of benevolent societies.³⁰

In studying death in Shanghai, my interest lies in the forms and expressions of death in a major urban setting, how the Chinese popular practices and beliefs associated with death evolved over time, and the modalities of managing death from the late imperial period to the first decade of the People’s Republic of China. While beliefs and customs tend to change only gradually, different factors and events have an impact that propels adaptation and eventually the adoption of new practices. War comes to mind as a type of event that creates circumstances under which society may lose its grip on established rituals. State power constitutes another major factor for change, not the least because each institution and regime tried to introduce or impose policies and rules to effect a major adjustment and transformation in society. While the foreign settlements sought to implement regulations that addressed mostly issues of public health, both the Nationalist and Communist regimes endeavored to regulate and transform more radically almost the whole spectrum of practices and beliefs associated with the disposal of the dead. From the relative laissez-faire posture of the late Qing to the prescriptive regulations of the Communist regime, the dead body became a central object of concern and a constant source of tension between state and society.

The temporal scope of this study was defined by the sources as much as by the selection of the issues to address. Even looking into the nineteenth century from the time of the opening of the city to foreign trade, 1865 represents a new landmark with the beginning of the five-year census in the foreign settlements. As a historian, I am concerned with people, not just with norms, rituals, and regulations, and counting people provides an essential basis for an examination of death in a population. The final term of this study was dictated by two elements. In Shanghai, archives are open up to 1965–1966. There was too little beyond this threshold to uphold a research based on primary materials. Furthermore, the Cultural Revolution brought down most previous practices related to death and even destroyed the physical structures that still sustained these practices. This was the time when cremation eventually became the norm for the disposal of dead bodies.

Part of the documentation in this text comes from European and American libraries and archives, but most of the source materials were collected at the Shanghai Municipal Archives. The archives of death are both very rich and sketchy. A large segment was drawn from the archives of the two foreign settlements in Shanghai. This was not a deliberate choice. It reflects the state of archival documentation. The administration of death did not rank high in the concern of the post-1927 Chinese municipalities until the Sino-Japanese War, while the archives of the Qing administration or those of the benevolent associations remain largely untraced.³¹ The archives of death are also partial for another reason. The authorities produced a considerable amount of documents on the routine management of infrastructures such as cemeteries, but they refrained largely from interfering with, or even regulating, the various institutions involved in the management of death in the city. Newspapers were a major source to supplement the archival trove. They infused the research with a more concrete sense of the tensions that stirred up the social body.

Finally, a broad range of visual documents were collected and used, although here again there was a strong bias in favor of war-related pictures. As Ruby Watson points out, Chinese popular religion did not put much emphasis on salvation, which however was a major concern in Christian religion.³² From medieval times in Europe, a rich imagery presented believers with a wide array of representations of death, not the least with the body of Christ himself: Visual culture prepared people for death during their own life-times.³³ Not so in China, where, in contrast, death was believed to have a pervasive negative influence and should be kept at bay. The only forms of visual representations of death were the portraits of the dead, later replaced by photographs. Chinese painters did not produce anything akin to the representation or the presence of death so common in European painting.³⁴ Even in the twentieth century, photography never exhibited the body or the coffin of the deceased. Overall, however, the camera caught various aspects of funeral customs and funerary space that sometimes helped fill in the blanks of textual archives. Quite significantly, several attempts to identify literary texts that engaged with death beyond the mere mention of the passing away of a character failed to produce any substantial evidence. Chinese culture surrounded death with a thick wall of silence.

My ambition when I started this research was to probe the hearts and minds of those who died in the past in the hope of writing a history of the social and cultural apparatus that framed the behaviors and the rules around the dead body as well as explore the individual emotions related to death, grief, and mourning. The private realm of people’s emotions, however, remained beyond my reach. I was able to touch on the change of sensibilities over time in studying how people reacted to certain situations, especially when facing official measures that challenged their beliefs or customs. This book is an attempt to delineate a social history of death in nineteenth- to twentieth-century Shanghai through a succession of vignettes on selected aspects of death in this large metropolis. Mostly, the focus is on the regular facets of death, excluding therefore the various forms of exceptional and brutal death such as military deaths, murders, and even suicides.³⁵ Murder is a fascinating subject, even if Shanghai was far from being the murderous place popular stories depict and sometimes historians are prone to imagine. Yet there were murders and there are lots of murder cases in the archives that can take the historian to the murder scenes.³⁶ Suicide is a topic on which much has already been written, especially female suicide. Except for Hou Yanxing’s and, in a different register, Bryna Goodman’s works, however, most studies have focused on statistics and failed to peer into the mountains of individual cases that await historical investigation in the archives.³⁷ The study of death and death culture in Shanghai, and even more so in other cities in China, remains an open field.

1

Scythe and the City: The Measure of Death

Who died in Shanghai? What were the dynamics of mortality in the city? This chapter seeks to take the measure of death, to examine how death struck across age and social status and what caused people to die. The first difficulty in assessing what death meant in Shanghai is our ignorance of how many people lived in the city at any point in time. While the Chinese imperial administration had a long history of population count, the territorial unit in the premodern censuses—the county, not the city—encompassed both urban and rural areas. The main issue, however, was the absence of municipal administration and the loss of most archives during the rebellions of the nineteenth century. The situation in the foreign settlements was much better, even if actual population censuses started only in 1865. Yet the population in these areas represented only a small part of the total population until the turn of the century, when the settlements came at par with the Chinese-administered city. Moreover, the authorities in the two settlements conducted their population census independently and with different criteria and age groups. This chapter thus attempts to reconstruct the demography of the city to assess how many died in the city and to examine what managing death meant in such a large urban center.

Numbers, however, do not tell the whole story. This chapter also explores such issues as the levels of mortality and the life expectancy of Shanghai residents to highlight the social distribution of death. Of course, reaching old age with generations of children and grandchildren was a strongly shared social ideal in Chinese society. Living in a city with modern amenities, medical infrastructure, and a higher standard of living should have created the conditions for a better and longer life. In the case of Shanghai, however, as in many other Chinese cities, other factors affected the life chances of the population, in particular epidemics that hit the city on a regular basis. Modern techniques of vaccination helped curb the death toll, but epidemics often left many dead on their trail for lack of access to proper medicine. The issue of infectious diseases became a matter of serious concern by the authorities that collected, albeit unsystematically, crucial data on the sanitary conditions in the city and on the health of the population. Wars and social disorders contributed their share of premature deaths, but diseases, especially the diseases of poverty, cut short the life of most people in large numbers and across the whole spectrum of age.

Let us say it once and for all. We shall never know how many people actually lived and died in Shanghai. There is only a very dim hope that a complete set of statistical and demographic data will be dug up from some buried archives, especially for the nineteenth century, when archives were destroyed by fire. The historian needs to make do with this reality and work with the available series, which in spite of their inconsistencies shed enough light on the demographic transformation of the city to unveil several fascinating facets of the dark side of life and death in Shanghai.

Population Change in Shanghai

Over a period of 120 years, Shanghai experienced a dramatic population growth. In 1845, when the first foreigners moved into Shanghai, the city was a thriving and vibrant regional commercial center. Yet it was still a long way from the three-million international metropolis it became by the 1930s, a formidable demographic dynamic that went on after 1949. According to the post-1949 censuses, the Shanghai municipality had 6.15 million inhabitants in 1953 and 10.86 million in 1964, of which 5.35 million and 6.42 million lived in urban areas, respectively.¹ This astonishing growth had serious implications on the demand for services to dispose of the dead.

The Demography of Shanghai: A Preliminary Assessment

The demographic history of Shanghai is associated with Zou Yiren (1908–1993). His study of population change in Shanghai before 1949 remains the classic work on which generations of historians have relied.² Zou’s work, completed in 1962, presents a compilation of demographic data gathered from published sources. As a result, the tables and figures on population form more a patchwork of available series than a systematic study of demographic sources.³ Zou’s difficulty in reconstructing the population data of Shanghai before 1949, however, could not be solved even with a full access to archival materials. My repeated forays in the collections of the Shanghai Municipal Archives have convinced me that crucial documents were lost or destroyed.⁴ Although the surveys were made with detailed forms, these primary documents were not preserved or remain locked in archives to which scholars do not have access.⁵

In studying population change in Shanghai, the historian has to confront yet another difficulty: the heterogeneity of available data due to the existence of three separate administrative jurisdictions. After the establishment of foreign settlements in the city—International Settlement and French Concession—in the mid-nineteenth century, Shanghai developed under three different administrations, the Shanghai Municipal Council (International Settlement), the French Municipal Council (French Concession), and successive administrative bodies in the Chinese-administered districts before the creation of a modern municipality in 1927 (see Map 1.1).⁶ In the foreign settlements, the administrations carried out a population census every five years, with the last population count in 1942.⁷ Yet the two foreign administrations did not bother to coordinate their census practice until 1930. From 1865 to 1930, they used different statistical categories for age, sex, and so on. What they mostly cared about for a long time was simply to know how many people lived in their territory. They cared even less about how many died beyond crude statistics. It was not until 1937 that the issue of Chinese deaths became a matter of bureaucratic concern. In the Chinese-administered districts, the imperial administration made surveys of the population at the level of the county, not the city proper. Moreover, this population count was rather approximate and no archives from the nineteenth century have survived. The Shanghai Municipal Government (Shanghai Shi Zhengfu) carried out its first modern census in 1929, which thereafter it updated through the periodic registration of the population.⁸

MAP 1.1. General map of Shanghai. Source: Virtual Shanghai

The demographic history of Shanghai became blurry again with the war with Japan, both in 1932 and 1937. On the one hand, there were massive movements of population within the city and displacement out of the city. After 1941, because of food shortages, the Japanese military enforced a deliberate policy of evacuation to the countryside. After 1945, the city finally came under a single municipal administration that resumed the previous practice of systematic population registration. After 1949 and the takeover of the city by the Communist regime, the People’s Government strove to establish its administration on a serious basis. Both for political and economic reasons, it was essential for the new authorities to know how many people inhabited the city. For many years to come, the country would be placed under a rationing system that required the registration of all residents. Even if this was never fully accomplished—spontaneous migration interfered with a complete registration—the municipality definitely had a better grasp of its population count. Nationwide, a census was carried out in 1953, then again in 1964.

Finally, one of the major stumbling blocks for a full comprehension of the demographic dynamics in Shanghai is the powerful flows of population that rushed into the city at times of disaster, resulting often from natural elements such as floods, but more frequently from conflicts and violence in the neighboring provinces. In the same way as people came, they left in high numbers once the crisis was over. The sudden influx of migrant population is especially relevant for our study of death in the city as these temporary residents increased the general mortality, sometimes substantially. Yet it is very difficult to estimate the number of people who moved in as they most often fell through the net of an inadequate registration system. It is even more difficult to assess how much they added to the mortality rate in the city. In the foreign settlements, the authorities introduced a system of death certificate for foreigners in 1870, but they failed to enforce this measure for the Chinese population.⁹ In the Chinese municipality it became compulsory after February 1928, but migrants and even permanent residents would simply evade these formalities.¹⁰ In 1942, the superintendent of the Shanghai Municipal Police stated that approximately 40 percent of deaths in the International Settlement occurred without medical attention, therefore without the issuance of a death certificate.¹¹ The generalization of death certificates was not in place until 1945, but even then the lower classes mostly did not bother with official documents.¹² As late as 1951, more than 40,000 exposed corpses were collected in the streets of Shanghai.¹³

In its original spatial configuration until 1845, Shanghai consisted of the walled city and its commercial and port suburbs along the Huangpu River. Zou Yiren assessed the population in 1850 at 544,413, but this figure clearly included more than just the residents of the walled city and its suburbs.¹⁴ It encompassed the whole Shanghai County. The successive editions of the Shanghai County Gazetteer (Shanghai xian zhi) provided population estimates that ranged from 527,472 in 1810 to 544,413 in 1852. Linda Johnston, in her study of pre-1842 Shanghai, placed the level of urban population in the early 1840s at about 250,000 adults, which a decade later must have been closer to 300,000.¹⁵ It increased steadily with the opening of the city to foreign trade as commercial opportunities drew thousands of new migrants from South China along with Westerners or lured them to Shanghai by the promise of jobs and trade opportunities. The 17-month-long rebellion of the Small Sword Society in 1853–1855 caused a serious setback, as thousands fled or died in the hands of the rebels. When the imperial forces regained control of the city, they carried out a merciless and indiscriminate repression, with entire neighborhoods burnt to the ground. Thousands of people were killed in the bloody conquest.

There was no further massive massacre of population until the next century. On the opposite, the city received hundreds of thousands of refugees from the areas under the control of the Taiping armies.¹⁶ The total population was said to have reached 1.1 to 1.2 million living in extremely crowded conditions.¹⁷ While the largest part found their home behind the relative protection of the city walls, large numbers settled in the foreign settlements under the protection of extraterritoriality and foreign gunboats and soldiers. The momentum of sharp population increase lasted until the mid-1860s when the Taiping Rebellion eventually collapsed under the final assault of the imperial armies. With the return to peace and stability, the former residents of the main Lower Yangzi cities hailed back to their hometowns. Nevertheless, the Taiping Rebellion had left an enduring legacy of destruction that, combined with the expansion of foreign trade, definitely displaced the urban and commercial center of gravity in the Lower Yangzi area from Suzhou and Nanjing to Shanghai. The relative depression of the late 1860s made way for a renewed and steady increase of the population in the various districts of the city. An entirely new neighborhood emerged north of the International Settlement across Soochow Creek. Zhabei was on its way to becoming one of the most vibrant districts of Shanghai and, more tragically, one of the main purveyors of civilian casualties when war knocked twice on its doorstep in 1932 and 1937.

For most of the nineteenth century, there is no population record to speak of in the Chinese-administered districts. From the 300,000 inhabitants of the 1850s, the walled city, its suburbs, and the new northern addition of Zhabei slowly grew to about 600,000 in 1910. With the development of modern industry after 1895, the population surged to 1,173,653 inhabitants by 1915. The first census in 1929 recorded 1,516,092 residents, but this included all the rural districts. In the city proper, the population stood at 961,846.¹⁸ At the time of the next census in 1935, the increase was formidable, as the population had passed the 2.0 million ceiling, with 1.3 million people in the urban districts. The Sino-Japanese War completely disrupted the distribution of the population as all the Zhabei residents left en masse to seek refuge in the foreign settlements and the residents of the southern districts proceeded likewise, though not entirely. In 1942, under a combination of political pressure and economic duress, the urban population decreased to slightly more than one million people.

Demographic change in the foreign settlements was much better recorded. During the first decade of its existence, the British settlement had only a tiny population of a couple hundred to five hundred. During the Taiping Rebellion, however, the rule of exclusive residence by foreigners in the settlements was abandoned and the foreign settlements came to be populated by Chinese, hence the rapid growth from about 20,000 in 1855 to 92,000 in 1865. There was a slight depression until the mid-1870s, but in 1890, the figure had doubled from 1876 (97,335) and in 1905 it had more than tripled from the 1890 figure (171,950). Thereafter, a few benchmarks will highlight the constant progress: 500,000 in 1910, 1 million in 1930, and 1.2 million in 1937. The French Concession experienced a very slow development with only a few thousand residents before the Taiping Rebellion. There was a strong upsurge as reflected in the 1865 census, but the 55,925 recorded residents dropped to 33,460 in 1876. The area regained its 1865 population only thirty years later. In 1910, the population had doubled, but it took another fifteen years to triple to about 300,000, and then flirted with the 500,000 ceiling throughout the 1930s.

There was an enormous population increase in both settlements after the outbreak of hostilities between China and Japan when nearly one million former residents of Zhabei and Nanshi sought refuge in the foreign areas. Even in 1942 when the population had decreased due to voluntary or forced repatriation to the countryside, the two settlements were home to 1,585,673 and 854,380 residents, respectively. Economic difficulties in the latter part of the war induced many inhabitants to leave the city. In 1945, the total population of the city had dropped to 3.3 million for the whole municipality, a loss of more than half a million since 1942. The civil war, however, soon pushed the figure upward. In 1946, the city had returned to its 1942 level, and in 1947, the police recorded a total of 4.2 million residents.¹⁹ In March 1949, on the eve of the Communist takeover, it had passed the 5.5 million ceiling.²⁰ The new regime implemented a policy of evacuation of the population to decrease the pressure on jobs and food supply. Yet economic difficulties in the countryside again brought in large numbers of impoverished migrants.²¹ In July 1950, one year after the takeover, the total population stood at 4.8 million and by June 1951 it had gained 400,000 new residents.²² The introduction of hukou and a food-rationing system succeeded in reining in the fast demographic upsurge of the postwar period. At the first general census in 1953, the total population in the urban districts stood at 5.35 million. A decade later, the next census revealed an increase to 6.43 million.²³

The demographic trajectory of Shanghai is impressive, although compared to London the growth may seem moderate—the population of London increased from 1 million in 1800 to 4.5 million in 1881 and 7 million in 1911.²⁴ Both cities met with similar issues of housing supply, deteriorating public hygiene, litter in the streets, and polluted drinking water. Yet London’s built-up area kept expanding by swallowing rural land, while Shanghai’s remained much more concentrated, which resulted in much higher population densities. London’s highest density in 1941 was not even half the density in the Central District of the International Settlement. The experience of Shanghai resembles much more that of Bombay in the same time period.²⁵ Moreover, Shanghai experienced sudden swings of population that placed considerable pressure on the city’s infrastructure. The much more hostile natural environment, renewed military conflicts, and lack of a unified municipal authority made the urban experience in Shanghai a bigger challenge which took its toll on the population.

Who Died in Shanghai?

The measure of death in Shanghai establishes clearly that old age was not the most prevalent cause of death. Due to diseases, lack of proper medical attention, poor diet, and other factors, people of all ages died and in great numbers. Moreover, the various instances of violence, especially in 1932 and 1937, had a strong impact on mortality and its measure, both because more people died and because more deaths went unregistered.

The International Settlement offers the longest series of vital statistics. The longest set covers the deaths of foreigners from 1880 to 1936. The data for the nineteenth century are partial and probably quite far off the mark. Although Jamieson, a prominent physician in the International Settlement, placed the mortality rate among the Chinese at 4.34 per mil for males and 6.13 per mil for females, the mortality rate was much higher until the turn of the century, between 18 and 25 per mil. Jamieson was aware of the deficiencies of his estimates, especially without a proper record of infant mortality or women’s death during or after childbirth, which could be as high as one in every five.²⁶ In fact, Shanghai exhibited death rates that were about the same as in Paris in the same period, except in times of epidemics, especially cholera.²⁷

The years 1910, 1925, and 1930 show high and stable mortality rates of 18–20 per mil among foreigners. As these figures were based on the five-year census, we do not know how the mortality rate fluctuated in the years between two censuses.²⁸ In absolute numbers, however, foreign deaths in the International Settlement represented only a few dozen, 55 in 1880, to 560 in 1936. The Shanghai Municipal Council started recording vital statistics for the Chinese population only in 1902. In the first three decades of the twentieth century, the mortality rate was fairly stable. It fluctuated between 11 and 16 per mil, with an average of 12.3 per mil.²⁹ The major difference, however, was in the absolute number of deaths. Every year, from 6,000 to 17,000 people died for whom no accommodation was made for burial in the municipal cemeteries. The land regulations proscribed the burial of Chinese in the foreign settlements, except for exceptional and limited cases such as preexisting charity or guild cemeteries. The several thousand bodies either had to find a place of rest in the local charity or village cemeteries (and after 1927 in the Chinese municipal cemeteries) or were shipped back to their native places, giving rise to a thriving business for transportation companies and guilds (see Chapters 2 and 3).

In the Chinese municipality, from 1929 to 1936, the mortality rate slowly decreased from around 12.5 per mil in 1929–1931 to about 8 per mil in 1932 and 1935 and 10 per mil in 1934 and 1936. In absolute numbers, the total number of deaths hovered between 19,000 and 21,000, with a peak at almost 23,000 in 1930.³⁰ In 1947, the population exhibited a low mortality rate of 6.4 per mil—26,700 deaths for a population of close to 4.2 million—which may have been due to the large influx of refugees, although it also reflected the lack of proper registration. The population increased by 600,000 residents in the course of the year. This compared with 65,206 births. Even if there was a clear reversal of the pattern of the death rate overshadowing the birth rate, the net increase in the population was due to immigration.³¹ In 1948, the situation continued to change with another 400,000 new residents, of which 121,295 were due to new births. The total number of deaths reached 39,799 for the first ten months of the year, or a mortality rate of 7.8 per mil.³²

All the figures about deaths, however, present a fundamental issue: many deaths were not reported. Only foreigners were duly recorded. Most Chinese residents did not report deaths. The highest number of unrecorded deaths, however, was of people whose bodies were discarded in back alleys and on vacant land throughout the city. As we shall see in Chapter 6, this was a widespread and massive phenomenon that needs to be reintegrated for a better understanding of population dynamics and the management of death in the city. Except in years of particular crisis, for example, 1932 or 1937, children under five represented on average 85 percent of the bodies collected in the streets of Shanghai. To take a simple example, the authorities recorded 8,888 deaths among those under fifteen in 1947. In the same year, the Shanghai Public Benevolent Cemetery (SPBC), one of the major charity organizations in charge of collecting exposed corpses, picked up 13,638 bodies in the same age group.³³ To come closer to the real level of mortality, therefore, it is not unreasonable to double the death rates for most years in the 1900–1936 period. This would place the rates at par with those in Hong Kong, where deaths were registered more systematically.³⁴

Infant mortality was extremely high in Republican Shanghai. Whatever the set of figures, they point to a massive loss of lives among infants and children under five years. In 1938, 53.7 percent of all collected exposed bodies in the French Concession were infants under one year.³⁵ In 1947, official statistics placed the infant mortality rate at 27.7 per mil. Yet this did not include the bodies picked up in the streets. By applying the same proportion of 53.7 percent to the 13,638 bodies collected by the SPBC, the mortality rate came to 127 per mil, almost five times more. Such high rates of infant mortality were more in line with the situation in nineteenth-century European cities.³⁶ The mortality rate for all infants in Paris declined from 16 per mil in 1881–1885 to 10 per mil in 1906–1910, even if higher rates could be observed in the poorer districts of the city.³⁷ In London, infant mortality in the 1840s–1850s hovered between 12 and 16 per mil before declining to about the same level as Paris by 1891.³⁸ Shanghai’s astounding high infant mortality rate certainly explains the widespread practice of dumping bodies without sepulture.

Shanghai was a city of sojourners with a high ratio of unmarried residents, both males and females. In modern factories, for instance, female workers often worked a few years before returning to their home village to get married.³⁹ All the other occupational sectors exhibited a clear pattern of male demographic dominance over women. Apart from the entertainment industry and prostitution, women gained a slow entry in the urban labor market as employees in administration, financial service, or department stores.⁴⁰ Thus there was at all times far more male dead than female. The longest available series on the sex ratio come from the International Settlement. The ratio changed from nearly 3 to 1 in the 1870s to 2 to 1 at the turn of the century, to 1.5 to 1 after 1930. The sex ratio in the French Concession between 1910 and 1936 reflected very much the same pattern as in the International Settlement. In the Chinese municipality, however, there was a lower ratio, with 130 men for 100 women throughout the 1930s. This was the pattern still observed in 1947 with 126 men for 100 women.⁴¹ By 1950, the average stood at 1.2 to 1, but with great variations among the various districts.⁴²

Given the transient nature of the foreign population in Shanghai, it is impossible to compute any kind of life expectancy. Yet a rich source provides some insight about age at death. Chinese guilds played a central role in the management of death in Shanghai, as discussed in Chapter 2. Depending on the size of their community, the guilds built coffin repositories where coffins were stored pending their shipping back to the home village. The guilds kept very precise records of the coffins entrusted to them. The age of the deceased was always recorded, which gives us the possibility to study the age at death of guild members and their families. I discovered several registers from the Huzhou, Guang-Zhao, and Yizhuang guilds for the modern period, from 1928 to 1941, with most of the data on the 1931–1940 decade. The people whose coffins were stored in the repositories represent a slightly biased sample of the population. The most well off probably would not place their dead with the guilds, while the poor were most often buried in the charity cemeteries. Yet it is also possible to consider that precisely the population that used the services of the guild fit in a large bracket of social status and occupation. They were representative of the common shimin, the petty urbanites who formed the majority of the population.

This study used only the data from the Huzhou Guild because it is a very large sample that covers the 1933–1937 period before the Sino-Japanese conflict. Altogether, the coffins of 2,845 people were recorded. This is not strictly speaking a demographically representative sample. It represents a section of the population—the Huzhou people—who died and entrusted their deceased to their guild. Yet it represents a sufficiently large group of people for whom we know the age at death to provide some insight into life and death in Shanghai (see Table 1.1).

The share of children under 15 years stands at 24.2 percent. This is less than the percentage found in the official statistical records, especially when infants are included. Probably, many families did not incur the cost of placing a coffin with the guild and pay for the repatriation of their dead children. With one-quarter of the whole sample, this highlights the toll that diseases exacted on children. The second major observation from the table is that even in adulthood life was cut short in large numbers. There is a very regular distribution of age at death between 15 and 45 years. People in these 5-year age brackets died in quite similar numbers. In the sample used here, almost one-half of the people died before they reached their thirtieth birthday and nearly three-quarters had died before they turned 50. This is very different from current demographic data where age at death is pushed back to above 60 and very few die in childhood.⁴³ Those who died in their later years represent a small proportion, 9.6 percent above 65 and 5.6 percent above 70.⁴⁴ Life was short in Republican Shanghai as death could be expected at any age. Life expectancy rose substantially after 1949. Between 1951 and 1953, it increased from 44.6 years at birth to 58 years, to reach 65 in 1956. In less than 15 years, the Shanghainese gained 20 years, something that speaks for the general improvement in alleviating poverty and providing more adequate medical protection and services to the population.⁴⁵

TABLE 1.1. Age at death of Huzhou people in Shanghai (1933–1940)

Source: Huzhou Guild, Xiaotongjian jigui dice [Register of entries], no. 3, 1936, Q165-6-33; Zuotongjian jigui dice, no. 5, 1936, Q165-6-33; Xiaotongjian jigui dice, no. 3, April–August 1936, Q165-6-34; Youtongjian, 1933–1937, Q165-6-37; Youtongjian, 1936, Q165-6-40, Tebiejian, 1931–1937, Q165-6-37(2); Tebiejian, Zhongzhengjian, 1936–1937, Q165-6-39; Zuotongjian, Tebiejian, Zhongzhengjian, 1933–1936, Q165-6-45; Xinjin jijiu haobu, 1932–1936, Q165-6-41; Nan nü daxiao lingjiu yunhu qingce, Nanxun, 1936, Q165-6-46; Dachang puyi gongmu di’er gongmu jizang lingjiu zhengshu, 1936–1940, Q165-6-44; individual forms, 1936–1940, Q165-6-43; Jijiu yi lan, April 1938, Q165-6-38, SMA.

After 1949, the number of deaths increased in line with the swelling population, even if the death rate went down. Of course, statistics in the early 1950s still underestimated the number of deaths due to the substantial number of people whose deaths went unregistered and whose bodies were dumped in the street. The Bureau of Public Health (Weishengju) admitted its vital statistics were incomplete and biased due to this phenomenon.⁴⁶ It took about a decade to bring this long-standing situation to an end. After preliminary experiments in three urban districts, the bureau eventually designed a scheme that brought all births and deaths under a unified and compulsory system of reporting.⁴⁷ For the period from July 1950 to June 1951, the total number of recorded deaths reached 64,834, but the total number of street bodies amounted to 44,661. In other words, the total number of deaths was at least 98,595, a figure that produced a death rate three times higher. These subtleties have been lost in later statistical reconstructions. In the yearbooks and similar compilations, the published figures diverge very much from those found in the archives. The number of deaths in the municipality and the urban districts remained stable until 1955 and then decreased until the end of the decade (see Table 1.2). From 1959 and throughout the first half of the 1960s, there was a steady decrease that reflected the probable improvement in the quality of medical services and living conditions in the city.

TABLE 1.2. Number of deaths and death rate in Shanghai (1950–1965)

Source: Number of deaths: Shanghai shi guomin jingji he shehui fazhan lishi tongji ziliao (1949–2000), 364; urban districts: Shanghai shi renkou tongji ziliao huibian (1949–1988), 31–32; municipality: Shanghai shi renkou tongji ziliao huibian (1949–1988), 33–34.

In the early years of the Communist regime, the pattern of a high infant mortality did not change at once. Yet the return to peace and stability and the decrease in refugee population lessened the risks of major epidemics. The basic policy of the Bureau of Public Health (Weishengju) was to give priority to prevention.⁴⁸ In 1950, the bureau established 21,000 public health groups (weisheng xiaozu) in the thirty-three districts of the city to support a citywide health movement (weisheng yundong).⁴⁹ Last, the authorities also organized massive campaigns of vaccination of the population throughout the city in 1950 and 1951. The second major factor was direct institutional enhancement. The bureau assigned medical establishments in six districts, each with six to ten beds to receive pregnant women. Each district was required to set up a women and children health care cell (fu’er baojianzu) to oversee all related issues.⁵⁰ The final component of this policy was the establishment of small health offices down to the level of the lilong, the residential alleyways where most of the population lived.⁵¹ The major factories were required to set up similar health rooms (baojianshi), while smaller companies organized health stations (baojianzhan).⁵² The number of tuoersuo (kindergartens) where young babies could be taken care of increased from 196 in 1950 to 363 in 1951.⁵³ More generally, there was a remarkable effort to expand medical facilities in the city. The combination of cleaning campaigns, massive vaccination, proper registration of the population, and expansion of public health facilities radically changed the demographics of the city. Infant mortality faltered, while general life expectancy improved markedly.

Death, Diseases, and Epidemics

Cities have historically been places that had to recruit their populations from the countryside to compensate for the devastating impact of diseases. Before the advent of public hygiene and modern medical treatments, people lived for centuries in unsanitary environments that exposed all individuals to infection at any time. Overcrowded housing, lack of proper treatment of refuse, and deficient water sources helped produce and diffuse potentially lethal bacteria and viruses: From the beginnings of agriculture and urbanization till well into the present century infectious disease was the major overall cause of human mortality and the most important stabilizer of population levels.⁵⁴ Life and death in peacetime depended very much on establishing and maintaining proper standards of private hygiene, safe environment, and of course public health. While wars and rebellions caused the direct annihilation of numerous lives, they also disrupted the normal order under which populations received food supply and sanitary protection. War magnified the effects of all the factors that affected health in normal situations.

Shanghai was located in a wealthy area where food was plenty and, in general, affordable. Yet many sectors of the population did not receive adequate nutrition, which had a debilitating impact on their immune system. People also suffered from the lack of medical attention, with the result that even relatively benign affectations could turn bad and lead to death, especially among children. Due to the warm climate in the summer and the presence of water in and all around the city, people were exposed to the risks of bacteria, mosquitoes, and the like. Unfit drinking water could generate a sudden and violent epidemic.⁵⁵ Finally, the role of Shanghai as a port brought to its harbor hundreds of thousands of travelers, migrants, sailors, and so on, who were the unwilling and unaware carriers of infectious diseases. The massive increase of population over a century until 1949 dramatically amplified public health hazards. Only the combination of modern drugs and the implementation of citywide public health policies managed to bring the sanitary situation close to that of modern nations during the early decades of the Communist regime.

Public Health in Shanghai: A Divided Realm

One of the issues in preserving public health and protecting the population from infectious diseases was the very high density of population. Before 1900, most of the population resided in the walled city and its southwestern suburb along the Huangpu. In the 1860s, if we discount the population in the rural areas, Shanghai may have harbored about 350,000 people, or 109,000