ABSTRACT
The quarter-century following our last snapshot year saw Shanghai change in many dramatic ways, often due to the arrival or increasing popularity of an imported machine or technology. Some of the most obvious alterations of this sort had to do with transportation. Rickshaws, just starting to make their mark in our last snapshot year, were by 1900 regular modes of conveyance, and in the foreign-run parts of the city still newer vehicles were regularly seen. The railway line that provoked controversy and inspired curiosity in the 1870s was abandoned after a few years in operation, but a new one was established successfully in 1898. One of the many imported wonders that the Dianshizhai presented to readers living in and far outside of Shanghai were horse-drawn buggies, while by 1900 some Shanghailanders could be seen riding bicycles. The plans to have trams run through Shanghai streets that were floated in the 1870s came to naught. But early in the new century, trams finally arrived, and they quickly became almost as iconic a form of Shanghai transportation as rickshaws-one reason that replicas of them are almost as commonly seen as faux rickshaws in the “Old Shanghai” displays that twenty-first-century visitors to the city encounter. Other changes linked to technology included electric lighting gaining popularity in the foreign-run districts (right around 1900) and the creation of the city’s first extensive telephone system allowing people at one hundred different stations to talk to one another (in our snapshot year itself).1
