ABSTRACT
Shanghai has evolved from a small fishing village in the tenth century to become China’s ‘global city’ of the twenty-first. The city is located in the fertile Yangtze River Delta region, from which it faces Hangzhou Bay towards the south, the densely populated Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces towards the west and the East China Sea to the east. Merchant families from Ningbo were instrumental in making Shanghai an integral part of the coastal trading system, a role that was reinforced by industrial development in the late nineteenth century and by banking and other commercial services in the twentieth century. By 1853 Shanghai had surpassed Guangzhou as China’s premier trading city (Wu 1999).
