18 March 2024

By Tim Koch

Tim Koch is back up Suzhou Creek.

In 2017, I produced a three-part history of the Shanghai Rowing Club (SRC). The club existed between 1865 and 1952 and was run by and for British and other Westerners resident in the East China coastal port. I was particularly pleased with it as it combined recovering a virtually lost rowing story with exploring economic, social and political history that is still relevant today. The posts covered SRC in three periods in Shanghai and China’s turbulent history: “From The First Opium War to The First World War”; “From the Jazz Age to the Jet Age”; and “From Mao to Now”. They have since been translated into Mandarin Chinese.

With this background, when I recently came across a reference to an international rowing event that I did not know of (even though it was in its third year), the “2023 Shanghai Head of the River Regatta,” I was particularly interested. However, when I saw the picture below of an Oxford Brookes University crew coming off the water after racing last year, my interest was heightened.

The part of the above picture that caught my interest was the red brick structure on the right. It was once the clubhouse of the Shanghai Rowing Club, built in 1905 and a home to rowing until Westerners left the city around 1952. Currently, it is a fashionable coffee shop and bar. Although it has a plaque outside recording its aquatic past, I had thought it possible that nowadays the building’s origins may be largely ignored or unknown. However, I was delighted when one of the competitors recently confirmed to me that the organisers had made those racing aware of the history of the place and had held a presentation for them inside the former rowing club. The history of this building over the last 120 years mirrors the story of Shanghai during this time.

The Quasi-Colony

Shanghai was one of five Chinese “treaty ports” forced to open to foreign trade following the British victory in the First Opium War, 1839 – 1842. Subsequent “Unequal Treaties” allowed four foreign countries (Britain, France, the US and, much later, Japan) to establish “Concessions” with their own territory and independent administration within the city (later, the British and American Concessions combined and formed the International Settlement).

Thus began what many Chinese regard as “the century of humiliation” where foreigners in the treaty ports were exempt from local law and taxation. They manipulated Shanghai’s industry and economy, established banks and financial institutes and used them to control the economy and politics of China. This was colonialism in all but name. 

It must be remembered that China was not some primitive backwater. For perhaps 1,000 years before Europe in some cases, the country had enjoyed a highly sophisticated government with a meritocratic civil service and also technologies such as movable type printing, paper making, gunpowder, the compass, the abacus, the seed drill and iron smelting.

When the Jesuits arrived in China in the 16th-century, the famously unwoke Roman Catholic order reported back to Rome that the highly developed Chinese could not be treated in the same (at best) patronising manner that the church had used in dealings with other non-Europeans around the world. However, when later “gun boat” imperialists arrived, they were not so empathetic. 

Arguably, China’s loss of pride at the hands of Japan and the Western powers has shaped its current quest for wealth, power and respect. Further, a minority of Chinese hold the view that the foreign occupiers were the catalyst for the change that made today’s China. Michael Wood, the author of The Story of China (2021), quotes some Chinese academics as saying that modern China began in Shanghai in the 1860s. Whatever the truth of this, rowing as a sport was certainly introduced at this time.

The Shanghai Rowing Club had been established in 1865 and its fourth and final clubhouse and boathouse was built in typical British Victorian style at 76 Nansuzhou Road (“76 South Suzhou Road”) in 1905. A swimming pool wing was added in 1906. The North China Daily News described the new building as “a large, handsome and commodious structure of the Shanghai-Red-Brick order of architecture with dressing-room, lavatory, bathrooms, a large ball-room with convenient anterooms on the first floor, and a roof-garden over the actual boathouse.”

For many years, the club and Shanghai’s foreign enclaves seemed immune from history. In the First World War, China was neutral until 1917, after which it joined with the Allied Powers but was hardly involved in the war militarily or diplomatically. The war reached the British dominated SRC in 1915 when nationals of Germany, Austria-Hungary and Turkey were expelled from the club. The war’s real effect on China was the growth of Chinese nationalism in the years after the conflict.

There was a civil war between the Chinese Nationalists and Communists between 1927 and 1937 and this was followed by the Sino-Japanese War beginning in 1937. 

An American journalist wrote of the Battle of Shanghai: “It was as though Verdun had happened on the Seine, in full view of a Right Bank Paris that was neutral; as though a Gettysburg was fought in Harlem, while the rest of Manhattan remained a non-belligerent observer.” This could not last. 

On the day of the Japanese attack on the USA at Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941, Japanese soldiers took over Shanghai’s foreign Concessions unopposed. In February 1943, all Westerners were sent to internment camps on the outskirts of the city. In 1943, while Shanghai was still under Japanese occupation, Britain officially ended 100 years of the city as a Treaty Port and gave control of the International Settlement to Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Government. The French followed in 1946.

With the end of the war in 1945, foreigners returned, hopeful that they could operate profitably under the new Nationalist government. The SRC buildings seemed to have survived the Japanese occupation relatively unmolested (possibly, Germans resident in the city during Japanese rule rowed from the club). The SRC was operational again by 1948 at the latest.

While the end of the Second World War also ended the Sino-Japanese War, the civil war continued as Mao Tse-tung’s Communists fought Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists. In May 1949, the Communists took Shanghai from the Nationalists, the latter soon fleeing to the island of Formosa and establishing Taiwan (officially, the Republic of China). 

The US and some other nations forbade trade with the communist People’s Republic of China (PRC) and this made it impossible for foreign companies to continue in the country. The “half-colonial and half-feudal” foreign community in Shanghai was entering its final stage of existence. 

By May 1951, the Shanghai Communists began to kill thousands of Chinese considered to be “counter-revolutionaries.” There was clearly no future for Westerns there and those remaining foreign firms moved to Hong Kong. Drained of members, the Shanghai Rowing Club quietly ceased to exist in 1952, 89 years after it was first established.

The People’s Republic of China

The SRC’s buildings, the clubhouse with the boathouse wing on one side and the swimming pool wing on the other, survived in communist Shanghai not as a rowing club but as the Huangpu Swimming Pool. From 1953, it became a national training centre for the country’s aspiring Olympic swimmers. 

In 1989, the former boathouse wing was demolished to build a police station. Some time after 1989, the original two-storey clubhouse had two more floors added and both it and the pool building were seemingly clad in concrete. Any memory of the dilapidated complex as a rowing club must have soon disappeared.

The New PRC – Early Days

China’s move from a communist command economy to a socialist market economy under Deng Xiaoping began in the late 1970s. Any terms and timelines referring to China becoming an economic superpower are infinitely arguable, but I default to a favourite saying of Deng: “What does it matter what is the colour of the cat provided it catches mice?”

Initially, anything that got in the way of modernisation and economic progress was literally or figuratively demolished. There was a long running precedent for this as, historically in China, whenever one dynasty replaced another, everything built by the older would be destroyed. 

As the New China matured however, more interest was taken in preserving and restoring its heritage, even that produced by foreigners during the “century of humiliation.” If the historic structures had already gone, then “new old buildings” would be put in its place.

In the 2000s, Professor Chang Qing and Professor Ruan Yisan, both of Tongji University, were researching the Waitanyuan Project, a scheme to preserve culturally significant buildings along the historic Shanghai waterfront, The Bund. 

Initially, it was thought that the beautiful rowing club that they saw on old postcards had been demolished but they eventually found that it still existed under a shroud of 1990s concrete and that the original two-storey clubhouse had been preserved with the other two floors as recent additions.

In 2009, the two professors began a campaign to stop the planned demolition of “the city’s oldest surviving sports architecture” and the clubhouse was eventually saved and was renovated or rebuilt in 2010. 

The old swimming pool wing building was taken down but the pool itself was semi-preserved. Part was hidden underneath a green lawn designed in the shape of swimming lanes, another part was covered in glass and the original white-mosaic pool visible and illuminated with blue light at night, as if it were filled with water. 

The New PRC – Maturity

Between March 2018 and May 2021, there was a project to improve the former SRC and the surrounding public space. The architectural design company commissioned by the Landscape Administration Bureau of Huangpu District was the Tongji Original Design Studio.

The remarkable changes made are best described by the Design Studio’s own words and pictures (originally in Chinese, still in architecturese):    

The design… opens the pedestrian space between the rowing club and the (river) wall, expands the hard ground on the (former boathouse) side of the building, and organically integrates the rowing club with the riverside public space, while retaining and strengthening the spatial layout of the original rowing club.

On the (former swimming pool side of the building) a steel structure frame is used as the basis to modernise the original swimming pool and build an abstract structure frame…

On the (former boathouse) side of the building, (is) a structural pattern similar to that on the (pool) side…

(The) swimming pool needed to be excavated and restored. After preliminary and careful archaeological excavation, the swimming pool structure… and the surface mosaic (were found) basically intact…

The pool space saw the light of day again, presenting the original spatial state: more than 50 meters long and 30 meters wide…

So far, the pool space has become a public space under a steel truss roof. People can enter the pool and look back at the time change from the perspective of the pool bottom. 

The space of the swimming pool can become an exhibition hall, a cafe, a stage, a catwalk or any other multi-functional states, allowing citizens to experience the sense of place and social interaction of the original rowing club with a brand-new lifestyle. Shanghai Rowing Club will continue to participate in the future history as a public space.

The Shanghai Head of the River Regatta, 16-17 September 2023 

The 2023 regatta, the third since 2021, had been expanded to include not only universities and clubs, but also youth and international teams. Nearly 700 athletes competed in men’s and women’s eights, quads and singles. There were invited elite crews from Cambridge University BC, Oxford Brookes BC, the Australian U23 Squad and the Chinese National Team.

The Oxford Brookes BC website has a nice account of the trip:

Athletes were welcomed by the organisers on arrival at the exceptional facilities at the Shanghai Water Sports Centre where the Senior World Championships are set to be held in 2025 after the Olympics next year. Training was held here for the first few days of the trip in the lead up to the races held near The Bund at the heart of the city…

The (Brookes) group of twenty-three were taken around the amazing scenery located around the city on several days. On the first full day after training on the lake, they were lucky enough to visit the Shanghai TV tower – which is one of the original skyscrapers built in the city, followed by photos at several iconic landmarks along the Huangpu River. The day concluded at the Yu Garden Restaurant where visiting parties were treated to some Chinese culture with the teaching of local dialects, making of dumplings, a full taster menu and an opera performance.

After relocating to the centre of Shanghai, the press conference for the event was held in Shanghai Tower, the 3rd tallest building in the world. This was followed by the team presentation at the (former) Shanghai Rowing Club. 

Racing was to be held over two days, the first being a 4.2km Chase Race along the Suzhou Creek. The second being a series of 500m sprint races after a ranking drawn from the previous day…

A great experience all around, culminated with a spectacular gala dinner overlooking the city where crews celebrated a fantastic week in one of the most impressive cities in the world. We would like to thank the sponsors and organisers for their tremendous hospitality and invitation to what was undoubtedly the best rowing experience that any of the members of the Brookes contingent had ever been involved in before.

The generosity and hospitality of the Chinese was part of a much larger and ongoing charm offensive as the country continues its attempts to become a rowing superpower. Interestingly, in the first bulletin of the 2025 World Rowing Championships, Xie Dong, the Vice-Mayor of Shanghai acknowledges that foreigners began competitive rowing on the Suzhou Creek in 1859 (actually the earliest recorded race is 1849) and claims that this made Shanghai “the cradle of Chinese rowing” (while this is arguably true, historically Western confrontational and aggressive competitive sport was the antithesis of the Chinese philosophical tradition of harmony). Xie continues:

Looking to the future, with the 2025 World Rowing Championships coming to Shanghai and China for the first time, we have the confidence and desire to continue the bond between rowing and the city, which has thrived by water, to popularise rowing in Shanghai and China, and to facilitate the development of water sports in our nation. An economic hub and the forefront of reform and opening-up in China, Shanghai is committed to building itself into a “world-renowned sports city” and “a city of international sports events.” 

One final question: Was Shanghai a Regatta or a Head Race? I do not think it matters, whatever colour this cat was, it caught mice.