VOL.95/2026.06

 

[New Ways of Walking Through Cities ⑩]

A World Carried by the Yangtze River: Shanghai

 

2025.10.02

 

 

Shanghai has always been a paradoxical space in Chinese history. What is now the city of Shanghai was once Shanghai County (上海縣), under Jiangsu Province (江?省), functioning as an administrative town and regional market-port, though it was no match for Suzhou (?州市) or Hangzhou (杭州市). Everything changed in 1842, after the First Opium War and the signing of the Treaty of Nanjing, when Shanghai was designated as a treaty port. European powers established concessions, exercising administrative and policing authority and enjoying extraterritorial rights. From China’s perspective, it was hardly different from colonial subjugation.
Yet Shanghai rapidly developed alongside the influx of foreign powers. Rival empires competed to exhibit their strength, and individuals carved out their own spheres through wealth and information. The reason why the Provisional Government of the Republic of Korea was established in Shanghai on April 11, 1919, was also because the city was a battleground of world powers, where Japan’s influence had its limits. The site of the provisional government itself lay within the French Concession, allowing relative freedom from Japanese repression. In this way, Shanghai is not only internationally significant but also holds a special meaning for Korea. Today, it is bustling with trade and tourism, but beneath that flow are much deeper, intangible ties that have stretched on like the Yangtze River itself.

 

A serial killer in Old Shanghai, brimming with foreign flair

 

 

A vast space where people of different backgrounds and purposes weave their lives together becomes a story in itself. In such places, where language, culture, and race collide, conflict is unavoidable. The changing landscape of Shanghai under foreign powers thus offered an especially compelling setting for creators. In those days, Shanghai was a city where nothing was too surprising and no one too unusual, not even a jiangshi (Chinese hopping vampire).

 

 

Author Kim Yi-Sak, long a fan of Chinese and Hong Kong dramas and music, set the story in Old Shanghai at the height of its chaos. The short story, Cannibals in Old Shanghai (Goldenbough), features a jiangshi, a Chinese vampire that was also hugely popular in Korea during the 1980s and 1990s, as both protagonist and narrator. It won a prize in the 1st Urban Fantasy Literature Contest and served as the title story of a collection drawn from popular short works on the publisher’s online fiction platform, BritG.
In the story, “I” am resurrected as a jiangshi who died centuries ago, now surviving in Shanghai by feeding on foreigners. A suspicious encounter, disguised as chance, pulls “me” into a string of serial murders, where “I” come face to face not with supernatural horrors, but with man-made hell. The story deftly blends the centuries-old Chinese legend of the jiangshi with Western tales of cannibalism, recalling the murderous barber from the movie, “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street,” who supplies victims’ bodies for meat pies. Fans of gore movies will also recognize the echo of the 1993 Hong Kong film “The Untold Story: Human Meat Roast Pork Buns.” Layered onto this is also a case reminiscent of Britain’s legendary killer Jack the Ripper, infusing the story with a deep undercurrent of tension.

 

A haven for artistic freedom

 

 

Shanghai has been as irresistible to scholars as to creators. Few other East Asian cities have drawn such a diverse mix of people and exerted such global influence. And yet, its importance cannot be confined to just two centuries of modern history. The author of City of Freedom, Old Shanghai (Dongguk University Press), a professor of Chinese literature and former head of the Society of Chinese Literature, sought to make this story known to a broader audience.

 

 

The power vacuum created by competing forces in Shanghai bred an unusual kind of freedom. And, that freedom, in turn, nourished the growth of art and culture faster and healthier than elsewhere. For artists facing oppression in their countries, especially writers whose creativity was stifled under totalitarian regimes, it was only natural to flock to Shanghai as they confronted a new era. The author, who has long studied Chinese literature, vividly and engagingly recounts the Shanghai that artists lived and created in, or the Shanghai they longed for or despaired of.
The book reads less like an academic treatise, but more like a warm, companionable guide written from the perspective of someone who loves culture and the arts. What especially stands out is its fresh reinterpretation of not only literature, but also film and music through the space of Shanghai from the early to mid-1900s. Writings and records left by Korean literary writers such as Lee Kwang-Soo, Shim Hun, and Pi Cheon-Deuk, as well as Japanese writers like Ry?nosuke Akutagawa (芥川龍之介) and Haruki Murakami (村上春樹) about Shanghai, serve as essential compasses for understanding what the city meant to artists of that era.

 

“Old Shanghai,” which gave birth to the modern city

 

 

While City of Freedom, Old Shanghai, introduced earlier, presents Shanghai’s history and its culture and arts through people and works, Day and Night in Shanghai (Greenbee) heads a little deeper. It offers an academic account of the emergence of urban culture and the formation of the urbanite in Shanghai during the early 20th century. Yet, that does not make it a stiff or difficult book. Through concrete cases and records from the time, it shows in greater detail the process by which Shanghai came to hold its present stature.

 

 

The author explains that the nostalgia for “Old Shanghai,” which surged around the turn of the 2000s, began in China in the 1990s and spread across the globe. In that process, ideologies such as imperialism and communism were diluted, and a characteristically Chinese market economy began to take shape. In particular, Chapter 2, “How media reveals the world,” explains in detail, through a variety of cases, the process by which Shanghai absorbed Western influences. It shows how newly emergent or rapidly developing media, magazines above all, penetrated the everyday lives of Shanghai’s citizens.
Things were the same for film. It notes that the 1930s, when leftist cinema, cloaked in the trappings of melodrama, was popular among white-collar employees and wage workers, marked the heyday of Shanghai film. It then offers a clear, well-organized analysis of how these new media affected not only Shanghai, but China, East Asia, and ultimately the wider world. Reading the book makes clear why that period has come to be symbolized, centered on China, as an “age of nostalgia.” It also leaves you with the sense that nostalgia for “Lao Shanghai,” or “Old Shanghai,” is still very much ongoing.

 

 

Today, as of 2025, Shanghai is home to some 25 million people across 6,341 square kilometers. It is the only city in China that has its own official emblem, in a country where local self-government is not recognized. Hong Kong and Macau have their own symbols as well, but they differ from Shanghai, as they are special administrative regions returned from British and Portuguese rule. Shanghai’s emblem underlines its singular importance within China. This shows just how exceptional Shanghai’s significance is, even within China.
A Chinese saying goes: “To see China’s past, look to Xi’an (西安市); to see its present, look to Shanghai; to see its future, look to Shenzhen (深?市).” As such, the brilliance of China today is most vividly displayed in Shanghai. By the 1910s, Shanghai had secured its place as Asia’s premier city, and by the 1930s, swing jazz was in vogue. The city’s cosmopolitan sensibility was so advanced that it absorbed jazz nearly at the same time as the US, where the genre was born. That is why even today, many people travel not to experience China, but to experience Shanghai itself, anticipating the dazzling present they will encounter in a city that is China’s brightest, yet the least characteristically Chinese.

 

 

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Written by Jung Hwan-Jung