Browsing through the Shanghai Municipal Police Archive with an eye to materials related to health and hygiene, and influenced by my ongoing research interest in Shanghai during the Second Sino-Japanese War, I decided to zoom in on the Archive’s dedicated sections concerning the period of Japanese occupation in Shanghai. And I came across an interesting Special Branch report on the fate of a Chinese-owned sanitarium in 1939.¹ In the aftermath of the Japanese takeover of Shanghai, a sanitarium owned by the Chinese doctor Ting Wei Kong at No. 310 Hongqiao Road underwent a change in proprietorship. Located outside the International Settlement and the French Concession, which were exempt from Japanese occupation, Dr Kong leased the original premises to an Italian doctor, Dr Muto-Nardone, while the institution itself was relocated to No. 990–992 Foch Avenue in the French Concession. Perhaps to obviate Japanese suspicion regarding the legality of the lease, the contract was made to appear as though the lease had taken place ‘before the hostilities’. Dr Muto-Nardone, despite never occupying the house or taking a single penny in rent, flew the Italian flag from the premises so that it would not be occupied by the Japanese. While a Russian proposal to take over the sanitarium in July fell through because of Japanese prohibitions on patients being taken to the premises, in September the lease was transferred to the Italian Consulate after Dr Muto-Nardone moved to Switzerland to attend to his ill children. By the time the report was compiled in December, the Japanese had struck a deal with the Italian Consulate to take over the sanitarium in exchange for payment. The anecdote of this sanitarium on Hongqiao Road forms an interesting conversation with the works of various authors who have addressed the idea of hygiene and its relationship with space. Specifically, it complicates the close identification of colonial administrative space with hygienic excellence, as illustrated by the existence of hygienic institutions outside Shanghai’s foreign concessions.

In the Asian — and very often colonial — context, conceptions of cleanliness, health, and hygiene were heavily regulated by colonial authorities and therefore conceptualised through frameworks of racial categorisation and spatial segregation. More specifically, white populations and the areas inhabited by them were often privileged in hygienic policies and imagined as spaces of modernity, civility, and cleanliness. In contrast, native quarters were characterised as filthy hotbeds of disease, while their populations were deemed inexorably retrograde, impervious to civilised reasoning, and incapable of hygienic behaviour. The idea of hygiene, far from being a neutral and innocent enterprise of progress, was closely bound up with racialised colonial thinking and the racially skewed spatiality that it produced. In the case of Singapore, Asian communities were stigmatised by colonial authorities as the prime culprits in spreading zymotic diseases because of their supposedly savage and unhygienic behaviours.² The Chinese, in particular, were castigated for their habits of huddling together and promiscuous spitting, while the dense neighbourhoods of Chinatown—characterised by overcrowding and inadequate ventilation—became an anathema to colonial hygienic sensibilities. A similar spatial-hygienic conceptualisation manifests itself even more lucidly in the French Indochinese city of Hanoi, where the stark juxtaposition between the European and indigenous quarters of the colonial city came to be seen as one of the most powerful proofs of France’s mission civilisatrice. As Michael Vann vividly puts it, ‘With its wide avenues lined with shady trees, large and luxurious villas with ample rooms, and regular—even stiflingly rigid—grid structure, the white (or European or French) quarter stood as a contrasting example of modernity in the face of the dirty, overcrowded, and backward native quarter, the Vietnamese neighbourhood of the Thirty-Six Streets’.³ Hence, as Vann traced later in his work, the enormous backlash when rats came to be discovered in the fine European sanctuaries in Hanoi.⁴ What we can take from the cases of Singapore and Hanoi is that conceptions of hygiene and colonial space corresponded closely with one another. European quarters were characterised by clean streets, healthy environments, and, above all, an adherence to hygienic sensibilities and behaviours; indigenous quarters, on the other hand, represented their antithetical opposite, characterised by a lack, or even absence, of health and hygiene. While not a full-fledged colony like Hanoi and Singapore, Shanghai was nevertheless a city characterised by extraterritoriality and a pseudo-colonial social hierarchy. The apparent lack of direct colonial authority should not blind us to ‘an entire social system and lifestyle that came to East Asia’, one characterised by social and commercial hegemony and a privileged foreign presence.⁵ It might therefore appear attractive to apply a similar spatial-hygienic framework to Shanghai: supposedly, the concessions represented spaces of superiority and cleanliness, while indigenous Shanghai represented a space of backwardness and ill health.

Yet it is important to bear in mind that a dichotomous spatial-hygienic conception — conveying a sense of complete segregation between the two — is an impartial one, complicated as it was by porous interaction in reality. In her work on Singapore, Brenda Yeoh details British efforts to regulate hygiene in indigenous quarters, first through hygienic surveillance and later through more systematic reconstruction, over the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This testifies at least to a British awareness of the need to regulate hygiene in indigenous quarters, regardless of what their motives might have been or whether they were ultimately successful.⁶ The story of the Hongqiao Sanitarium in Shanghai tells an alternative but related tale. The very fact that there was a sanitarium outside the French Concession and International Settlement, and that it was owned by a Chinese doctor acknowledged as such by the Special Branch, is telling. While the report does not speak to the size or nature of the sanitarium, its subsequent relocation to the heart of the French Concession is suggestive: the sanitarium may have been quite sizeable, while its owner, Dr Ting, may have been well connected with foreign medical personnel or institutions, enabling the sanitarium to relocate to the French Concession and the premises to be leased to an Italian doctor. While perhaps not trumpeting it, this case complicates the spatial-hygienic segregation that the cases of Singapore and, to a greater extent, Hanoi might suggest. Just as British hygienic initiatives in Singapore penetrated the imagined boundaries of hygiene, the Hongqiao Sanitarium offers evidence of how health and hygiene might not have been strictly confined to areas of foreign presence in Shanghai. It has to be noted, however, that a great deal of ambiguity persists in this case. We do not yet know Dr Ting’s background, nor do we know whether the sanitarium was a strictly Chinese or a joint Sino-Western enterprise. I also need to acquire a fuller picture of the specific spatial-hygienic imagination—or imaginations—that developed in Shanghai under circumstances similar to, yet distinct from, those of Singapore and Hanoi. This does not, however, detract from the value of the source. Rather, it provides an interesting perspective on the conceptions of hygiene and space in an Asian (pseudo-)colonial setting.

1. Shanghai Municipal Police Archive, 9599[C], ‘Hungjao Sanitarium – taken over by Japanese Military’, 15 December 1939, Roll 59. [↩]
2. Brenda Yoh, Contesting Space in Colonial Singapore: Power Relations and the Urban Built Environment (Singapore, 2003), pp. 90-101 [↩]
3. Michael Vann, ‘Of Rats, Rice, and Race: The Great Hanoi Rat Massacre, an Episode in French Colonial History’, French Colonial History, 4 (2003), p. 192. [↩]
4. Ibid., pp. 195-196. [↩]
5. Jeremy Taylor, ‘The Bund: Littoral Space of Empire in the Treaty Ports of East Asia’, Social History, 27:2 (2002), p. 125. [↩]
6. Yoh, Contesting Space in Colonial Singapore, pp. 123-125. [↩]

I have taken to exploring various works focusing on empirical cases of Japanese urban planning in occupied Manchuria during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Reading how Japanese authorities and intellectuals conceptualised, planned, and justified their renovation of the Manchurian urban landscape provides a highly rewarding perspective that deepens my conceptual understanding of space and spatiality. Crucially, the study of space must consider, first, how spatial conceptions were imbued with assumptions about power relations and, second, how spatiality was shaped by the ways in which people inhabited—or were excluded from—a given space.

Spatial imaginaries often embody power relations, including domination and subjugation. As Henri Lefebvre put it, space—as a product of the social—is very often the negotiator, if not the servant, of power.¹ Such an association can naturally take place in the most explicit of forms, whether in the style of architecture, the display of flags in public spaces, or the inclusion and exclusion of people from particular spaces. Yet the relationship between space and power permeates far beyond physical appearance or printed regulations, and can also be glimpsed in the ways in which people conceptualise space and approach it. As Louise Young points out, in the Pan-Asianist mission civilisatrice that characterised Japanese imperial expansion, one of the central motifs underlying this imagination of cultural superiority was Japanese prowess in urban planning.² Hence the scheme to redevelop the cities of Manchuria. An awareness of space itself — and of the need to regulate it — therefore had a direct bearing on whether a people was considered civilised or not. In this process, space per se was appropriated as a subtle vehicle through which the Japanese Empire could establish hegemony over its subjects.

The fundamental assumption of civility also runs through the specific way in which the Japanese conceptualised the urban renovation of Manchurian cities. Seeing Manchuria as a clean slate where their work would not be hindered by “the demands of commerce, the opposition of property owners, or already existing disorderly spatial arrangements” that they faced domestically, Japanese architects and Guandong Army authorities considered the region a utopia for major architectural ventures.³ Indeed, such an impression could be traced to its geographical conditions: Manchuria boasted large swathes of fertile land that contrasted sharply with the mountainous terrain of Japan.⁴ Yet was Manchuria truly so utopian as to constitute a complete blank slate for the Japanese to work upon? By no means was Manchuria empty. The Japanese themselves, among others, were clearly aware of this, as their 1930s tourist guides to Manchuria made reference not only to renovated cities such as Changchun/Xinjing, but also to obscure towns characterised by “chaotic market[s] and picturesque slums.”⁵ The depiction of Manchuria as a pristine utopia is therefore untenable given the extensive presence of traditional Chinese settlements. Yet Japanese authorities and architects nevertheless proudly proclaimed their ability to transform the face of Manchuria, speaking of it as “an empty page on which they inscribed cities.”⁶ The claim of Manchuria as a utopian space, an architectural tabula rasa, therefore lay not so much in the physical and geographical reality of the region as in the grotesque imbalance of power between the incoming Japanese and the indigenous Chinese population. Geography itself did not make Manchuria an architectural utopia; the occupation did. As Young puts it eloquently, the Japanese ‘modernity utopia rested on the foundation of the absolute power of the colonial state’.⁷ Apart from the street names and monuments in Xinjing that proclaimed prosperity and unity under the protection of the Japanese Empire, the daunting presence of power—in this case, primarily militarist and colonial—behind space can be further revealed by examining how this architectural enterprise itself was conceptualised by the incoming conquerors. It thus speaks to the deep interlacing of power and space.

People, furthermore, are not merely part of the backdrop of a space; they are constitutive of the space itself and of its spatiality. Indeed, as Lefebvre and de Certeau would delightfully approve, people are not just in space, they also produce space — just like the pedestrians constitute and define urban space as profoundly as the streets themselves.⁸ It may therefore be conceptually fruitful to approach space and spatiality from an encompassing human dimension. For one, the colonial nature of Japanese spatiality in Manchuria can be revealed not merely by examining the appearance of its cities and the rationale behind their renovation, but also by analysing the inclusion and exclusion of people from those spaces. In the 1933 Agricultural Immigration Plan, for instance, Chinese residents of immigrant villages were consigned to an outbuilding of the village hamlets. The broader demographics of modernising Manchuria over the years of Japanese occupation are similarly telling. Across major cities such as Xinjing, Fengtian, and Dalian, the Japanese population grew steadily, while the rate at which the Chinese population increased was dwarfed in comparison.⁹ In Xinjing between 1930 and 1933, the Japanese population surged from 10,097 to 23,715, while the Chinese population virtually stagnated, rising only from 23,307 to 24,356.¹⁰ Looking at people not only illustrates the colonial balance of power embedded in Japanese spatiality in Manchuria, but also unveils the almost morbid obsession with rationalisation for the imperial cause. In the same 1933 plan for immigrant villages, the only tasks ordained for Japanese residents were domestic and agricultural labour, with little, if any, concern for the “multiplicity of urban life” or social differentiation.¹¹ In this case, the extreme rationality of the Japanese Empire’s plans for Manchuria placed even its own subjects on the receiving end. In an almost dehumanising fashion, they were reduced to another cog in the imperial machine, whose primary duty was to produce for the greater cause. In the planning of space, therefore, it is not merely space itself but also people who are regulated. Looking at space consequently necessitates an analysis of the people who inhabit and produce it, and vice versa. People and power therefore constitute two vital conceptual passageways through which we can attain a better understanding of space and its significance.

1. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford, 1991), p. 26 [↩]
2. Louise Young, Japan’s Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism, Twentieth-Century Japan (Berkeley, 1999), p. 243. [↩]
3. Tucker, ‘City Planning Without Cities: Order and Chaos in Utopian Manchukuo’ in Mariko Asano Tamanoi (ed.), Crossed Histories: Manchuria in the Age of Empire, (Honolulu, 2005), pp. 53-55. [↩]
4. Ibid., pp. 53-54. [↩]
5. Young, Japan’s Total Empire, p. 268. [↩]
6. Tucker, ‘City Planning Without Cities’, p. 60. [↩]
7. David Buck, ‘Railway City and National Capital: Two Faces of the Modern in Changchun’ in Joseph Esherick (ed.) Remaking the Chinese City: Modernity and National Identity, 1900-1950 (Honolulu, 1999), pp. 65-66. [↩]
8. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, pp. 26-27; Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley, 2011), pp. 92-93. [↩]
9. Young, Japan’s Total Empire, pp. 250-253. [↩]
10. Buck, ‘Railway City and National Capital’, p. 77 [↩]
11. Tucker, ‘City Planning Without Cities’, pp. 62-63. [↩]

Reading the works and ideas of Henri Lefebvre, Michel de Certeau, and Doreen Massey have provided me with a rich dose of theoretical conceptualisations with regard to space. The texts themselves, if I were to be fully honest, are quite bemusing, even intimidating at times. Indeed, starting with Lefebvre’s own piece of writing has not been the most helpful in establishing a preliminary idea of space and spatiality for a beginner. Andy Merrifield was spot on when he wrote down how Lefebvre, in The Production of Space, “breezes through the history of Western philosophy as if it’s kids’ stuff”.¹  Fortunately, the works by Merrifield himself and Elden Stuart have proven very helpful in presenting Lefebvre’s arguments with a less esoteric register, while pieces by de Certeau and Massey have provided interpretations of spatiality from various refreshing vantage points. I was able to extract two insights from the readings: first, the intertwined relation between space and the social (including modes of production, knowledge, and power); second, the need to place space alongside time, rather than approaching them in hermetic manners.

In various different ways, space is created and conditioned by the social.  With an identifiable Marxist tone, Lefebvre describes space as the direct product of modes of production (encompassing both material production and the production of society and knowledge). ² Similarly, Doreen Massey makes sense of space and place with the rationale that they were shaped by innumerable social relations of various nature, across wildly different scales. This line of thinking does not see the dissecting the genesis of space as its intellectual endpoint, however. Beyond repudiating the conventional perception of space as a meaningless backdrop to more prominent occurrences, space is seen to have momentous importance on its own. Lefebvre’s initial fascination with space comes precisely from his study of everyday life, where he discovered how the transition from rural to urban space had a huge bearing on people’s quotidian experience.³  Thus came his later emphasis on space as the indispensable coordinates of human life. As the locus and medium of human activities, it affects the latter through a triad of spatiality — physical space is concretely perceived; mental space is abstractly conceptualised; and social space is intimately lived by people.⁴  Indeed, “Space has long ceased to be a passive geographic or empty geometric milieu. It has become instrumental”.⁵  In a way, Michel de Certeau provided a lucid illumination on how spatiality itself could have profound influence. Describing the view of New York from the Twin Towers, the elevated viewer evolved into a voyeur, as if Icarus breaking free of the labyrinthine chains crafted by Daedalus — “It allows one to read it, to be a solar Eye, looking down like a god. The exaltation of a scopic and gnostic drive: the fiction of knowledge is related to this lust to be a viewpoint and nothing more”.⁶  Therefore, space deserves to become a subject of inquiry on its own, not least because its formation sheds light on social relations at work, but also for the independent significance it has come to possess. By extension, the relation between space and power is also a prominent thread of inquiry by these scholars. As Lefebvre argues, the close relation between space and mode of production (especially capitalism) led to space’s existence as “a means of control, and hence of domination, of power”. ⁷  Massey’s works, delving into the interlacing of social relations and space, have explained the connection with greater clarity. The triumphalist Western narrative of the age of discoveries, for example, painted the indigenous civilisation as a static existence on the spatial continuum, lacking a trajectory of their own in contrast to that of the conquering Europeans. ⁸  Taking up the gender scope, Massey also elucidated how feminine imageries were intimately bound with the conception of the motherland as well as the home, amounting to a domestication of women who were barred from venturing beyond their own households.⁹  Finally, articulations of a sense of place which have gained traction in the present age of globalisation are also susceptible to being hijacked by defensive, reactionary nationalism/localism.¹⁰  Space, therefore, is neither an empty container, nor a trivial, inanimate product of social relations. As an end in itself, it has the capacity to condition and drive human activities and broader historical developments. For all the struggle I have endured working through the highly abstruse texts, I have gradually come to learn the rationale behind thinking about space and spatiality.

Furthermore, instead of treating them as conceptually sealed off, a sophisticated analysis of space should also take account of the idea of time. As Stuart has rightly pointed out, Lefebvre’s foremost contribution, rather than the elevation of space in lieu of time, was his examination of space alongside time.¹¹  According to Lefebvre, representational spaces, closely linked to the social life of people, are very much ‘the loci of passion, of action and of lived situations, and thus immediately imply time’.¹²  The temporal face of space — and indeed the spatial face of time — was explored more systematically in the works of Massey who laid great emphasis on the concept of “space/time”. In her brilliant introductory chapter to For Space, Massey engagingly set out the interlacing between space and time, as spatial articulations and conceptualisations often imply a temporal dimension. Taking Clinton’s denunciation of countries like Mozambique and Nicaragua who supposedly stood against the tides of globalisation as an example, the author centred on the President’s characterisation of the said countries as “behind”. Through “a sleight of hand in terms of the conceptualisation of space and time”, the simultaneous coexistence of different countries on Earth has its spatial dimension suppressed. Instead, the problem was given a historical temporality, with Mozambique and Nicaragua cast as those among us that are in a more primitive stage. ¹³  Apart from this, the temporal dimension of space was underlined from another vantage point, with space described as inherently dynamic, moulded by the multiplicity of social relations that were also undergoing constant change. Against the essentialist position, therefore, space is instead “unfixed, contested and multiple”.¹⁴  Thus, it becomes the natural conclusion that any reference to space must necessarily take into consideration the temporal implications, and vice versa. Personally, I find this contention very intriguing, despite still having difficulties fully grasping its theoretical intricacies. One potential interest I have derived from reading these works is how time might be experienced variously across different spaces — in a rural village in China’s inland, on the Bund in Yokohama, or aboard an international cargo ship, etc. In these drastically different scenarios, the experience of space and time informs each other. Though as yet heavily based on quotidian impressions, they can be developed into subjects of proper investigation.

1. Andy Merrifield, Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction (New York, 2006), p. 10 [↩]
2. Elden Stuart, Understanding Henri Lefebvre: Theory and the Possible (London, 2004), p. 184; Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford, 1991), pp. 31-33. [↩]
3. Stuart, Understanding Henri Lefebvre, p. 181. [↩]
4. Stuart, Understanding Henri Lefebvre, pp. 192-193; Lefebvre, The Production of Space, pp. 33-36 [↩]
5. Stuart, Understanding Henri Lefebvre, p. 189. [↩]
6. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley, 2011), p. 92. [↩]
7. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, p. 26. [↩]
8. Doreen Massey, For Space (London, 2005), pp. 1-4. [↩]
9. Doreen Massey, Space, Place, and Gender (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 10-11. [↩]
10. Ibid., pp. 151-154. [↩]
11. Stuart, Understanding Henri Lefebvre, pp. 169-170. [↩]
12. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, p. 42. [↩]
13. Massey, For Space, pp. 4-5. [↩]
14. Massey, Space, Place, and Gender, p. 5 [↩]

I have identified two primary sources pertaining to the treaty ports and extraterritoriality. Both concern Shanghai’s International Settlement during China’s war with Japan in the 1930s and 1940s. Taken together, they open up interesting avenues of inquiry into the ways in which Western extraterritoriality in the city was disrupted and how it negotiated the threat—and, later, the reality—of occupation by the forces of Imperial Japan. Specifically, it shows how the concessions initially served as havens from the Japanese invasion, in contrast to the surrounding occupied territory, before later becoming contested spaces in which extraterritorial jurisdictions came into complex interaction with the invading Japanese authorities.

The first source—an article in the Far Eastern Review written by its editor, C. J. Laval—illustrates how Shanghai’s pseudo-colonial power dynamics were inscribed onto the urban landscape through the spatial arrangements of the foreign concessions which created this unique safe haven in the early stages of the Sino-Japanese War. Dating from November 1937, towards the end of the Battle of Shanghai, the article, entitled “How to End the War”, offered the author’s own assessment of the prospects for China’s war against the invading Japanese. Despite praising the valour of Chinese soldiers and the resolve of the nation, Laval urged China to enter into negotiations with Japan in the hope of securing a more favourable settlement, rather than relying futilely on a war of attrition or on international intervention.¹ Yet the aspect of his article that I find particularly intriguing is his description of the foreign settlements in Shanghai, with which he chose to open his discussion:

“…some semblance of the former busy appearance of the streets has been restored in the French Concession and in that portion of the International Settlement south of Soochow Creek where the shops, the theaters and the dance halls have reopened, transportation services again are operating and the familiar throngs of Chinese crowd thoroughfares and narrow passages to all intent and appearance indifferent to the encirclement of Japanese bayonets around the entire area that now is under Japanese military domination”²

At the time of writing, Japan had not yet entered into war with the Western powers and had therefore not occupied the International Settlement or the French Concession following its conquest of Shanghai. Indeed, it is a well-known folkloric story in China that the numerous residents of the International Settlement, Chinese included, quite literally watched the Japanese offensive against the Chinese garrison at Sihang Warehouse from across the Suzhou Creek. Laval’s account thus offers an intriguing perspective on the coexistence of Western extraterritoriality and Japanese military presence in Shanghai before December 1941. Writing of the Bund, the emblematic space of the International Settlement, Jeremy Taylor described it as a “spatial reminder of an entire social system and lifestyle that came to East Asia”.³ In Laval’s article, the stark juxtaposition between the prosperity and tranquillity of the foreign-administered areas and the warfare ravaging the rest of Shanghai testifies to the continued existence not only of such a distinctive social system, but also of its spatial manifestation. Yet, for all the security afforded by extraterritoriality, it was now accompanied — and perhaps somewhat unsettled — by the burgeoning military presence of the hitherto formidable Japanese Empire. Laval’s text therefore provides a useful vantage point from which to ask not simply how the separate jurisdictions of Shanghai were maintained, but how they were experienced and negotiated within a devastating yet geographically confined theatre of warfare, particularly from a spatial perspective. An overarching line of inquiry consequently presents itself: to what extent were the foreign concessions truly unperturbed by the Japanese presence around them? More crucially, a series of spatial questions follows. The communication and exchange between the concessions and the world beyond them — especially at their borders — would make for an interesting subject of study. And, turning towards people’s interaction with and production of space, how might the meanings and significance attached to particular spaces within the concessions have changed amidst the Japanese incursion? Building upon Taylor’s study of the Bund, it would be interesting to examine how the waterfront’s significance, both as a stage upon which military power could be displayed and as a safe and leisurely space for civilian activity, may have been influenced and disrupted during this period.⁴ Similar examinations of spatial re-imaginings could be extended more broadly to the various meanings attached to the foreign settlements: as spaces of privilege, security, domination, confidence, and, indeed, home.

Naturally, this inquiry can be extended to the period after 1941, when full-scale warfare broke out between Japan and the Allies, where the existing spatiality was disrupted and complicated by Japanese takeover of the concessions. The second source I have encountered is the minute of a special meeting of the Council held on 8 December 1941. The minute clearly reveals the difficult task confronting the American and British members of the Council as they attempted to balance their duties as citizens of their respective countries with their responsibilities as officials of the Shanghai Municipal Council.⁵ As Japan annexed the French Concession and the International Settlement of Shanghai, it nevertheless sought to preserve and work through the existing administrative structure of the Shanghai Municipal Council. The indecision that appears to haunt the councillors thus reflects a broader administrative ambivalence in Shanghai after 1941: the city had formally come under full Japanese control, yet its existing administrative machinery was preserved and expected to cooperate with the new regime. How this spatial reconfiguration of the city unfolded within such a novel and intricate political milieu consequently begs investigation. How did the SMP administer the city under Japanese authority? Was a new urban plan envisaged by its new rulers? Now that their former sanctuary had fallen under the control of another Asian Empire, how was the spatiality of the Shanghai concessions — supposedly a place of privilege and even seclusion from the indigenous world — re-imagined by the Westerners who remained there?

All of this remains, admittedly, highly rudimentary. Taken together, however, these ideas point towards a general direction for potential research: the disruption, reinvention and perhaps also preservation of spatiality in the context of both extraterritoriality and warfare and political change. Such an inquiry would also approach spatiality with a particular human focus, examining not merely physical landscapes and urban layouts, but the ways in which different groups of people conceptualised, experienced, interacted with and manipulated them. For this purpose, the online access to a vast array of historical sources—including newspapers, reports, books, maps and photographs—made available through Virtual Shanghai and the Internet Archive could prove particularly valuable. This, I hope, might provide the starting point for something genuinely exciting.

1. C. J. Laval, ‘How to End the War’, The Far Eastern Review, Shanghai, 11 November, pp. 375-376, [accessed 20 September 2026] [↩]
2. Ibid. [↩]
3. Jeremy Taylor, ‘The Bund: Littoral Space of Empire in the Treaty Ports of East Asia’, Social History, 27:2 (2002), p. 125. [↩]
4. Ibid., pp. 132-140. [↩]
5. “At the Special Meeting of the Council held on Monday, December 8, 1941, at 4.30 p.m” in Shanghai Municipal Council, The minutes of the Shanghai Municipal Council – 1940-1943 (Shanghai, 2001), pp. 354-355. [↩]