On An Oriental Cartography (And Other Shanghai Map-Making Adventures)
Only after about six months of looking for 1920s-1930s maps of Chinese Shanghai (for, as every schoolboy knows, Greater Shanghai was carved between the International Settlement, French Concession and Chinese Districts from 1843-1943) have I found out why English language (nay, even French or Chinese-language) cartographs of these districts are impossible to find.
No, it has nothing to do with racism (or, at the very least, not the type of racism you probably imagine). In fact, both the Settlement and Concession produced basic street maps for travel, and between 1928 and 1945 the Nationalist government manufactured them in their droves. Instead we have the Communists to thank for the discretion of maps...
Maps are illegal in China.
Well - not exactly. Maps aren't illegal per se. Instead, maps that aren't officially published by or through the Communist Party are illegal. Between 1949 and 1952 there seems to have been a healthy surfeit of Shanghai maps printed (with Republican-era names, though all in Chinese), but post-1952 new rules were introduced; each promulgation stamping out a street or symbol or building. First to go were military installations (obviously), swiftly followed by police stations (!), waterworks, river crossings, buildings taller than a certain height, airports (the 2002 map was recalled after it was pointed out that internal Party maps showed Shanghai Airport as a paddy field), and even - at periods between the 1970s and 1990s - scale markings. In some mysterious cases, Shanghai's shape was actually changed.
Of course, around the world, different maps show different things - but rarely has there ever been such a concerted effort to erase old maps. This hasn't been too hard: the only people who meticulously catalogued roads before the Revolution were Chiang Kai-shek's auditors (mostly for tax and law enforcement reasons, natch) and they weren't exactly difficult to find after the PLA marched on up Broadway Mansions (they're in the City Hall, sillies).
So... no maps for me -- certainly not if far more deserving scholars have managed to be given the big run-around (not always deliberately, it seems, since many in the cartographic department of the Shanghai Museum were seemingly rather surprised to discover even they weren't privy to the choicest of historical maps).