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Shanghai, vast and comprehensive, has a magnificence which is unusual even for a metropolis. Shanghai is not only the biggest city in China, the eighth biggest city in the world, and one of the four municipalities of China which is under the direct control of the Central Government. She is also the best and most impressive city, or, in other words, she is the city in China that is most worthy of the title of municipality. Like Beijing, Shanghai is a place of the country which every person of the whole nation yearns for. Shanghai is above all a place held in high esteem by people all over the country. Almost every Chinese knows that China cannot do without Shanghai, in the same way that the United States cannot dispense with New York.
Shanghai is situated in East China, at the place where the Yangtze River and the Qiantang River converge into the sea, and that territory is part of the alluvial plain of the Yangtze Delta.
The Municipality covers a total area of 7,037.50 square kilometers (ranking as the 31st by size among administrative regions of the provincial class). Of this total area, land accounts for 6,340 square kilometers (still expanding in construction work), waters account for 697 square kilometers, and the urban districts account for 289 square kilometers.
At present, there are more than twenty million people living and working in Shanghai and her adjoining areas. The city has a population of 18.5422 million (in the year 2007, i.e. the 25th by size among administrative regions of the provincial class of China). The population density is 3,154 persons per square kilometers (by 2008, or the 3rd among administrative regions of the provincial class of China). The urban population of Shanghai is 14,530,000 persons (by 2007, or the first among the cities of China). The natural growth rate of permanent residents of the Municipality is 3.04 0/00.
In days of yore, Shanghai was no more than a small town engaged in fishing and cotton textile handicraft. In the 19th century, owing to her advantageous geographic position in serving as a port, Shanghai developed at high speed. After the signing of the Treaty of Nanjing in 1842, Shanghai became one of the few trading ports in China for doing business with foreign countries, and she grew by leaps and bounds into a thriving center of commerce and cultural interchange. In the 30s of the 20th century Shanghai rose so much in importance as to become the pivot in China employed by transnational corporations in their effort to evolve foreign trade and develop local business. However, after the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, almost all foreigners left Shanghai, with the result that the city lost her former luster very soon. This situation changed radically in 1990 with the implementation of China’s policy of reform and opening to the outside world. Shanghai regained her former prosperity, though with alterations in many basic characteristics. She has become the biggest economic center of today’s China and the largest trading port on the globe. The Shanghai harbor may now be considered the biggest harbor on the globe because it handles the largest volume of freight in the world. It may also be mentioned here that the urban area of Shanghai now has 6,000 high-rise buildings—three times the number in New York.

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