Chapter 2202: Renzong Chronicles 11: Greater Shanghai

The twenty-first year of Zhengtong (1062), early autumn, the city of Shanghai.

The Song River still flowed along its established channels, rolling eastward into the sea, never ceasing day or night. Nearly seventy years after its founding as a city, Shanghai had completely transformed into a prosperous and wealthy "international metropolis," the port city with the densest commercial atmosphere and the freest economic and trade activities in the entire Great Han Empire.

The word "city" had existed since ancient times, its meaning clear, but as an independent administrative division, this was a first. "Shanghai City" had long been a magical novelty to the entire empire, above and below.

If one counted the period when Shizu established the "Shanghai Office," Shanghai City had nearly a century of developmental history within the Great Han Empire. A century of development and expansion had given birth to such a unique "monster city"—without neon lights flashing, yet still bizarre and dazzling.

After the wild growth of the Kaibao, Yongxi, and Pingkang eras, and the regulatory constraints of the Jianlong period, Shanghai in the Zhengtong era was far more orderly than before. This was not only because the imperial court had come to face it and value it more seriously, but also because interest groups of every stripe and factions of every shape had filled and occupied it, forming a considerable balance.

For the vested interest groups, once primitive accumulation was complete, what they wanted was consolidation, not expansion—a stable order favorable to their rule. Holding the upper society's resources and operational rules, they were natural conservatives and guardians.

Of course, within the entire ruling class of the Han Empire, the "newly rising" southeastern magnates represented by Shanghai belonged to the radical and reformist faction.

At the same time, the upper-class magnates who controlled Shanghai's operations pursued and achieved an order that merely guaranteed their status and did not affect their profiteering. Therefore, Shanghai had never been peaceful.

As the gathering point of southeastern wealth, Shanghai's hearts were always the most restless. Countless crowds chased fame and profit, and every day and night saw conflicts among various forces. Every corpse sunk at the bottom of the Song River was accompanied by a tale of grudges and romance, a tangle of interests.

On the Song River, masts and sails always stood in forests, an endless stream, with dozens of large and small docks spread along both banks—yet they were never afraid of standing empty, for ships from home and abroad laden with all kinds of goods always filled them.

Shanghai City's dockworkers were an extremely vast group; with shoulders and hands, they carried this city's prosperity upon their backs.

Over the long years, they and other lower-class laborers gradually formed the largest folk (lower-class) organization in Shanghai City—the Red Gang—which, together with the Lianghuai Grain Transport Gang and the River and Lake Boat Gang (Jiangnan and the two lakes regions), were collectively called the "Three Southern Gangs," even though they were more often seen as thugs for the magnates and great merchant guilds.

They were even renowned at home and abroad. Over the past half century, hundreds of thousands of Red Gang sons had taken ships to sea, pioneering and roaming in the nations of the South Seas, and were the most welcomed immigrant group in every major vassal state. Though they did not have much wealth or resources, their cohesion was extremely strong, and they could fight—the best thugs for dealing with native forces.

Extending a dozen or so li north and south along the riverbank were dense warehouses, cargo depots, inns, and hotels. Roads were dense and connected in all directions; buildings of all heights and styles lined up in succession. Carts and horses converged, and the population was thick—this was the most striking feature of the "harbor district."

Year-round without night, lamps and lights blazed brilliantly.

According to a major census by the Shanghai City government in the thirteenth year of Zhengtong (1054), the city's registered and transient adult population had already reached 800,000. Now, nearly another decade had passed, and many predicted that Shanghai would rise abruptly and become the Great Han Empire's third city to break one million in population.

Over the past few decades, the Great Han Empire's overall population had continued to grow, but for the major cities, breaking one million remained a hurdle—an unbridgeable chasm.

In the south, Jinling, Yangzhou, Hangzhou, and Guangzhou were the most promising to break through, but they always fell short. Shanghai, by contrast, step by step, from nothing to something, had caught up, absorbing outside populations with almost no pause.

Shanghai was clearly a city driven by commerce. Since its founding, commerce and trade had been the core of the city's operation. It was as if it possessed a kind of magic, attracting all kinds of resources.

Of course, the southward shift of the empire's economic center, the abundant products of the southeastern prefectures, the vigorous overseas trade, the uniquely advantageous geographical position, political experimentation and support, plus a bit of historical accident—all together had incubated a city like Shanghai.

Throughout the entire Great Han Empire, it was one of a kind, with no second branch anywhere.

In many people's impression, Shanghai was a city paved with gold; what flowed in the Song River was not river water but wealth. This drew countless adventurers from home and abroad to pan for gold, even though many, to their dying day, never understood that they came full of hope, worked and produced with bitter toil, and ultimately were merely fertilizer for this city's development, merely contributing to the bell-ringing, tripod-feasting households of the powerful and wealthy.

Shanghai City's "internationalization" process had also developed at a rate unmatched in the empire. By the twenty-first year of Zhengtong, foreign merchants and travelers residing year-round in Shanghai already numbered over a hundred thousand—besides the "traditional friendly states" of Goryeo and Japan, there were also people from India and Persia.

Since the Guangzhou Incident in Shizu's later years (the purge and massacre of Guangzhou's Muslims), the Great Han Empire had always maintained a sternly exclusionary stance toward foreign merchants, especially those religious elements.

But under the temptation of economic interests, political suppression could not extinguish these people's enthusiasm for embracing the Celestial Dynasty. Especially in recent decades, the "Middle Eastern" merchants traveling to the East mostly called themselves Persians, or simply said they were "Anxi people."

This had its origins. During the reign of Anxi King Wen, Liu Wenze, the Anxi Kingdom had brought the entire Persian plateau under the rule of the Anxi dynasty. Though it was mainly a loose-rein governance, it still dispatched garrison troops and established a basic administrative and taxation system.

Therefore, those Persians calling themselves Anxi people was, from the legal standpoint of the Anxi dynasty, unproblematic. And since the Anxi dynasty was bound by blood to the Great Han Empire, and the Anxi dynasty's main ruling class were Han, those "Anxi people" were approximately Han.

Even those Muslims from the Arab world, upon arriving in the Great Han, all changed their names and surnames, adding a Persian or Anxi disguise to facilitate their business operations. And in the Persian region, some officials and clerks of the Anxi Kingdom specialized in selling identity documents.

Though in the Middle East, Han civilization and Islamic civilization were locked in deep enmity with constant wars, the two were nonetheless the mainstream of East-West political and economic exchange in the current age.

If there was any element of surprise, it was the small number of Slavs from Kievan Rus'. More than thirty years ago, under the push of Grand Prince Yaroslav of Kiev, trade ties were established between the Rus' Kingdom and the Anxi Kingdom, and from then on, exchanges between Slavs and Han began.

Though this exchange was intermittent, frequently disrupted by war and turmoil, under the weight of long years it still left many deep historical marks. Of course, the exchanges between the Rus' Kingdom and the Great Han Empire were not close; more often they used the three Central Asian kingdoms as a relay, shallowly walking a stretch of the Silk Road.

The Great Han Empire had little interest in barbarian petty states ten thousand li away; at most, it found those golden-haired, blue-eyed barbarians curious. The Slavs who appeared in Shanghai could only be described as "a grain of millet lost in the sea."

Even rarer than the Slavs were the Hungarians. Their journey was far more difficult than the Rus' people's—the greatest obstacle being the Slavs themselves. Even upon reaching Shanghai, there were struggles between Catholics and Orthodox Christians. But there was always a fortunate few who, by land and sea routes, reached the territory under the Anxi Kingdom's rule, and then from the Anxi Kingdom took the sea route, drifting eastward all the way.

Judging from the development of these past decades, compared to its military glory in Central Asia, the Anxi dynasty's contributions to East-West economic and cultural exchange were even greater. However, in recent years, with the instability of the Anxi Kingdom's situation, the fragile East-West exchange looked set to fall once again into setback and stagnation.

For Western visitors, compared to the resplendent Two Capitals, cities like Guangzhou and Shanghai were where they preferred to stay—especially Shanghai, because it was "free" and "open."