A Fishing Village on the Huangpu: Shanghai Before 1842

The salt tang of the Huangpu River clung to Lin Fu’s fingers as he pulled a frayed fishing net through his calloused hands. It was late August 1842, the tail end of the summer monsoon, and the 12-year-old sat perched on a weather-worn granite boulder at the river’s southern bank, his legs swinging over the muddy shallows where small silver fish darted in and out of the reeds. His father, Lin Da, had left an hour earlier to mend a tear in their largest net out on the open water, warning Lin Fu not to wander too far from the settlement of thatch-and-wattle huts huddled just south of Shanghai county’s crumbling mud-brick walls. The wind carried the faint smell of his father’s pipe tobacco as he rowed away, the oars creaking against the wooden rowlocks, and Lin Fu had watched until the small fishing boat was just a dark smudge against the glinting water.

He’d been mending nets since he was old enough to hold a shuttle, his index and middle fingers permanently calloused from the rough hemp twine, tiny nicks from stray net fibers and broken clam shells crisscrossing his knuckles. The net in his lap was their best one, the one they used to catch yellow croaker in the early autumn currents, and he picked at a frayed edge with a polished bone shuttle, humming the old fishermen’s tune his mother had taught him: a song about the Dragon King of the Huangpu who rewarded honest fishermen with full nets and punished those who stole from the river. His mother had taught him the song when he was five, after he’d tried to sneak a small fish from the basket to eat raw, and he’d sung it to himself a hundred times since, every time he mended a net or hauled in a catch.

By noon, he’d have to take the small bamboo basket of fish he and his father had caught that morning into the county town, to sell them at the bustling market near the City God Temple. The market was always loud, full of the shouts of hawkers, the clink of copper coins, and the smell of steamed pork buns and fried dough fritters mixing with the river’s salt and the sharp scent of raw silk from the weavers’ stalls. He’d trade the fish for a few copper coins, enough to buy a couple of glutinous rice balls for dinner, and maybe, if they were lucky, a stick of candied hawthorn for his little sister, Mei, who’d been begging for one for three days straight. Mei was six, with pigtails tied with red string, and she liked to follow him around the settlement, picking up shiny pebbles and small shells from the riverbank to add to her collection of “treasures” stored in a broken clay jar under their hut.

Shanghai county was not the tiny, unknown fishing village many people imagine it to be in 1842. It was a walled town of 20,000 households, home to roughly 250,000 people in total, including the fishermen and farmers who lived in the huts scattered along the riverbanks outside the walls. It was a regional hub for grain transport, silk, and cotton, the southern starting point of the Grand Canal that carried rice from the Yangtze River delta up to Beijing to feed the imperial court and the northern population. Huge grain junks, their sails patched with indigo cloth, crowded the river, along with smaller boats carrying silk bolts from the weaving towns of Songjiang and raw cotton from the fields of northern Jiangsu. There were no foreigners in Shanghai in 1842, no stone Western buildings, no steamships puffing black smoke into the sky. The county town was all black-tiled roofs, whitewashed mud walls, and narrow, unpaved lanes that turned to sticky mud in the rain. The city walls were 20 feet high, made of rammed earth and brick, with four wooden gates that were locked at sunset, guarded by soldiers with rusty spears and matchlock guns that hadn’t been fired in years. The only “foreign” things Lin Fu had ever seen were the occasional Persian or Arab traders who came through on camel caravans from the west, selling spices and glass beads, but they were rare, and stayed only for a few days before moving on. He’d once touched a blue glass bead a Persian trader had given him, holding it up to the sun to watch it glow, and his mother had taken it away from him, saying “foreign things bring bad luck.”

For the past month, rumors had been swirling through the market, carried by peddlers and boatmen from

For the past month, rumors had been swirling through the market, carried by peddlers and boatmen from Ningbo and Guangzhou who docked their junks at Shanghai’s crowded river wharves: stories of “red-haired barbarians” with iron ships that sailed without wind, of cannons that could blast holes in stone city walls thicker than ten men standing shoulder to shoulder, of a great war fought up and down the Chinese coast that the Qing government had lost so badly the emperor had been forced to sign a humiliating peace treaty. Lin Fu had heard the rumors first three weeks earlier, when a burly boatman from Zhejiang had stopped at their fishing settlement to buy a string of fish from Lin Da, waving his hands wildly as he talked. “They took Dinghai last year!” the boatman had shouted, his voice hoarse from shouting orders on his junk. “Our soldiers fired a thousand rounds of cannon at their ships, and the cannonballs just bounced off! They fired back once, and half the city wall collapsed. Killed the garrison commander, too.” Lin Fu had been sitting on the ground next to his father, mending a small hand net, and he’d looked up at the boatman’s red face, his eyes wide. He’d never seen a cannon, never seen a city wall collapse, and the idea of a ship that didn’t need wind had sounded like a fairy tale, something out of the stories his mother told him about the Monkey King who could fly on clouds.

He’d asked his father about the rumors that night, as they sat in their thatch hut eating millet porridge, and Lin Da had just grunted, poking at the fire with a stick. “Don’t listen to boatmen’s tall tales,” he’d said, but his eyes had been worried, and he’d stayed up late after Lin Fu went to sleep, mending nets by the light of an oil lamp. Lin Fu had asked his mother a week later, when she was washing clothes by the river, and she’d shaken her head, wringing out a wet shirt. “Foreigners bring bad luck,” she’d said, her voice tight. “Stay away from the docks if they come. Don’t look at them, don’t talk to them, don’t take anything they give you. You hear me?” He’d nodded, but he’d already found the proof of their existence: a shard of blue-and-white porcelain he’d dug out of the mud at the wharf three days earlier, painted with strange, wavy patterns and a row of symbols he couldn’t read. He’d hidden it under his sleeping mat, running his finger over the smooth glaze when he thought no one was looking, wondering who had made it, and how it had ended up in the mud of the Huangpu.

By the time he finished mending the tear in the yellow croaker net, the sun was high enough to warm the back of his neck, and he could hear the distant shouts of the market vendors drifting across the river. He folded the net carefully, tucking the bone shuttle into the leather pouch at his belt, and called for Mei, who was squatting at the water’s edge a few feet away, poking at a small crab with a stick. She looked up, her pigtails tied with frayed red string, her face smudged with mud, and held up a shiny white shell she’d just found. “Look,哥哥!” she shouted, holding it up to the sun so it glowed pink. “It’s a treasure!” Lin Fu laughed, reaching down to ruffle her hair. “That’s just a clam shell. We can make soup with it tonight.” Mei pouted, shoving the shell into the broken clay jar she kept under their hut, which was already half full of pebbles, broken pottery shards, a shiny piece of mica, and the half of a red glass bead a Persian trader had dropped a year earlier, which their mother had forbidden them to throw away. “It’s still a treasure,” she said, clutching the jar to her chest, and Lin Fu smiled, slinging the bamboo fish basket over his shoulder. “C