3 bar menu

Chapter 200 – Shanghai Rhapsody (1)

Right after summer vacation began, I came to Shanghai, the so-called “Demon City.” The last time I had set foot on the continent was when I came searching for the Liaohe Oil Field.

Shanghai is relatively close to Tokyo. A fast passenger ship capable of making twenty-one knots departed from Nagasaki, so I first spent a full day traveling there, then boarded that fast ship from Nagasaki.

I had assumed that Shanghai was located along the banks of the Yangtze River, but when viewed from the ship, the mouth of the Yangtze was essentially the open sea. Shanghai lies further in, along its tributary, the Huangpu River. After branching off from the Yangtze and traveling some fifteen to twenty kilometers upstream, you reach what was then the center of Shanghai, the so-called “Concessions.”

The Concessions were established as foreign settlements in 1842, after the