Shanghai in 1887
The Custom House in the 1880s. PastVu: https://pastvu.com/p/2041429
On the right-hand side, at the foot of the bridge, and at the commencement of the Bund, lay the enclosure of the British Consulate, which is separated from the roadway by a low wall, and, from the Vice Consul's and Interpreter's private residences, by a shrubbery and lawn. The extensive grounds which surround it are carefully kept and artistically laid out, and the lawn is much patronised by tennis players.
Keeping along the Bund in a southernly direction, we passed a long range of magnificent buildings occupied by Messrs. Siemssen, Jardine Matheson, Butterfield and Swire, and other notable mercantile firms, not forgetting the splendid offices of the P. and O. Company. In the centre of these European houses the fantastic roofs and curved gables of the Custom House - then occupying an ancient Chinese temple - rose up in startling though stately comparison from amongst them, and improved the imposing frontage which the English houses make.
At the southern extremity of this settlement, overlooking the river, and the opposite shore of Pootung, and almost on the bank of the Yang-King-Pang Creek, which marks the commencement of the French Concession, stands the pretentious four-storied English Club, looming above its neighbours. This was erected at a cost of 121,000 taels by a body of ambitious shareholders in the prosperous years of 1863-64, and upon whose spacious verandah, and in whose stately halls the elite of this “Model Settlement” meet to enjoy the social pleasures good company ever affords.
I was not a little surprised to see numbers of smart carriages, landaus, victorias, broughams, dog-carts, and other fashionable equipages, with fine, gaily caparisoned horses, darting to and fro along the smooth and spacious roads. Some were occupied by wealthy merchant princes, Government officials, or their stately ladies, and others by the prettiest of “Celestial” demoiselles with their dark almond eyes which hardly deign to notice you while passing swiftly by like a cloud of gorgeous butterflies, in embroidered silk attire.
Having seen almost sufficient for one night, and not wishing to enter the gloomy precincts of the French Concession, with its unpretentious buildings of miscellaneous architecture and uncertain date, which look cheerlessly out upon a dismal avenue of scraggy trees, beneath whose meagre shade a few world-forgotten gensd’armes saunter about in comparative exile, no doubt often wishing themselves home once more in far-off “La Belle France” - I told my humble conveyer to take me back.
From The Mystic Flowery Land: A Personal Narrative (1896), by Charles J. H Halcombe, who stayed in the city for slightly more than a year in 1887.
Shanghai’s English Club in 1887.