Ons of the foremost hindrances to the permanency of our settlement here has voluntarily erected by ourselves we allude of course to the alienation by original landowners to natives of land conceded by the Chinese for foreign occupation.. The history is a long one, but without entering into it at length, we can offer to the consideration of our readers asketeh of the successive phases the settlement has pesed through, without overstepping the bounds of a newspaper article; and it is well that the main facts should be kept in mind and ublic attention directed to the matter afore it is too late to be of any effect. We are all interested in maintaining Shanghai as a European settlement but individually we do little or nothing to keep it so. Only those who have lived at ports not given over to Chinese can appreciate the difference in health and comfort which the isolation of foreign residences affords. If the foreign population here is ultimately to be compelled to live entirely in the fields at the rear and maintain offices only on the banks of the Whangpoo, Shanghai will not only lose its reputation for health—it was once looked upon as the sanatorium of the China ports—but its charm as a residence will have gone and, although it is true we are here for business and, in the eyes of many, for business only, yet, now that lives' are spent here and permanent homes established, the wsthetic side demands equal attention. We might indeed create another foreign city west of the Race Course, but there are almost insuperable obstacles in the way of obtaining municipal control of the land so occupied. The Bubbling Well road already forms the nucleus of such a new Settlement but, as it is, the dwellings there, set down amidst native cultivation, are notoriously exposed to the inroads of fever during half the year—let alone imusquitoes—from all which the Settlement proper is comparatively free. An ideal Settlement in that quarter would
oceupitd by European dwellings, eric be three or four square miles entirely in its own few mow of compound, the gardens abutting on each other: the land raised a foot or two above high water mark, this being the bare level of the majority of the agricultural land in our swampy plain, and so rendered unsuitable for paddy, and distinctly isolated from the surrounding Chinese.
Now it was precisely such an ideal settlement that was contemplated when, in 1844, Mr. Balfour, the first British Consul, superintended the original land purchases by foreigners in the settlement "North of the Yang-king-pang," which had been conceded by the Chinese to the British Government by the treaty of Nanking, signed on board the Cornwallis on the 29th of August of the previous year. The local Chinese authorities worked loyally with the Consul in aiding the foreigners who came to the new port to acquire suitable plots of land in the settlement area, and the consequence was that each firm acquired a lot of five or six mow, giving accommodation not only for the offices and the heads of the firm, but for the native and foreign staffs, for godowns and gardens, all within one ring fence and witha road before and behind. Shanghai
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.