China's first treaty-port concession was carved out of Shanghai in 1845

When Britain won the First Opium War (1839-1842), the Treaty of Nanjing ended China’s centuries-old policy of funnelling all Western trade through Canton. Five ports - Guangzhou, Xiamen, Fuzhou, Ningbo and Shanghai - were thrown open to foreign merchants, a system soon extended to the United States and France through copycat treaties in 1844.

Shanghai’s transformation was the most dramatic. In 1845, the Chinese Daotai (circuit intendant) Gong Mujiu and the first British consul, George Balfour, agreed a set of Land Regulations that demarcated a riverside zone where foreigners could lease land on perpetual leases. This carved out the first foreign concession, governed largely by the merchants themselves under the British consul’s authority.

A muddy stretch of riverbank became the Bund, the commercial heart of a global trading city.

These rules became the template for later concessions across China. Self-governing, tax-light and shielded by extraterritorial privilege, the treaty ports pulled the empire’s economy toward the coast and toward foreign trade - reshaping nineteenth-century commerce and seeding grievances that lasted a century.