account for Shanghai urbanites’s mapping of criminality and their anxiety about an increasingly heterogeneous urban space, the duality of transience and immutability in relation to the experience modernity has to be incorporated into our discussion. The dialectic of the two, as I would suggest, is embodied in Shanghai’s newly installed traffic system composed of streets, boulevards, bridges, and carriage routes—features that are also found in the late Victorian detective fictions set in urban London. A brief historical overview of Shanghai’s urban planning and traffic development is necessary for my further textual analysis in light of Lefebvre’s notions of representational space.
As the Taiping army drove the masses into Shanghai from nearby provinces, the refugees’ living space inevitably clashed with the city planners’ spatial logic. To improve the governance over the city, the Municipal Council (工部局) of the foreign administration launched a series of projects to reconfigure the urban space, including the extra-territorial construction of asphalt roads, iron bridges, street gaslights, and the public sanitary systems. From the late nineteenth century to the early twentieth century, with such a process of expansion and redistribution of space, a new, complex texture of the city was gradually taking shape. As the roads and bridges cut through the old narrowed alleys, compartmentalization of space along the lines of class stratification was also taking place: the central business district and the standardized unit residences (石庫門里弄) along the mouth of Suzhou River (蘇州河), the bourgeois residence areas in the southwest, and finally the widely scattered hut slums
(棚戶) along the docks and industrial sections between the edges of the Concession and the non-Concession areas (Luo 45-47). The compartmentalization of space is also reflected in the division of the Concession area and the Chinese walled city. The general visual impression we acquire from viewing the map of Shanghai around the mid-nineteenth century is itself suggestive of the clash between two spatial logic systems. A self-enclosed square, the original walled city of Shanghai County, or Nanshi (南市) is being blocked by the horizontal and vertical street districts of the earliest Foreign Concessions from the north and the west.22 From the 1860s through the early Republican era, as the Concession territory kept expanding, the concentric development of the old city was mostly limited within the city walls. Meanwhile, the checkerboard-like urban district extended beyond the original territory with the help of a special mode of expansion: “extra-territorial paving” (越界築路), which was born of the earliest regulations settled between the Chinese government and the British settlers. According to “Land Regulations” (土地章程) in 1845 (the first contract to authorize English settlers’ jurisdiction over the property in the Concessions), the settlers could levy upon the imported and exported goods and the real estate so as to raise the budgets needed for constructing the infrastructures such as roads, streets lights, bridges, faucets, and other public facilities.
This article yields the ownership of all the newly constructed roads to the foreign control. Consequently, as the foreign administration became involved in every aspect of the life in the Concessiosn, its expenditure increased. Thus, to maximize the tax base (mostly the middle class) became the priority for the administration, and the best solution in hand seemed to be “legitimately” expand the suburban area for the emerging bourgeoisie (Kuo 56-57). Under such pressure to expand the Concession terrority, in 1861, in the name of a better military transportation to defend the
22See The Collected Historical Maps of Shanghai (上海歷史地圖集) (1999).
intruding Taiping army, the foreign administration extended their first extraterritorial paving, “Bubbling Well Road,” to the western suburbs. During the 1860s and 1920s, this cross-border paving served as the major means upon which the Municipal Council managed to reshape the urban space of Shanghai (Xue 96). The administration’s reconfiguration of the city’s traffic lines had gradually changed the urban dwellers’ everyday “spatial practices” by producing new ways for them to negotiate the urban reality. In the May of 1889, the director of the Municipal Council of International Concessions conducted a traffic flow survey during three consecutive days on Garden Bridge of Shanghai (外白度橋). The average numbers of vehicles and pedestrians crossing the bridge per hour were as follows: 45.3 carriages, 0.6 trucks, 76.6 wheelbarrows cars,23 and 980.7 pedestrians. Nearly ten years later, in the May of 1898, the Municipal Council conducted another survey on a nearby bridge, Loong-fei Bridge (龍飛橋), and the numbers were as follows: 153.8 carriages, 4.4 trucks, 58.1 wheelbarrows, and 4032 pedestrians (Chen Wenbin 6-7). Compared with the former survey, the new survey showed that most of the numbers almost tripled or gained fourfold. Judging from these numbers, we can infer that by the 1900s, the urban spectacle of hustle and bustle was already the everyday experience for Shanghai urbanites, the users of the urban space. All these reconfigurations of urban Shanghai—the stratifications and compartmentalization of the foreign and the Chinese, of the rich and the poor, and the traffic lines connecting in between—can be construed as Lefebvre’s “representations of space” and “abstract space,” both of which connote the dominant spatial logic in modernity’s project, serving as the façades standing between the seen/known/present space and the unseen/unknown/absent space of the city. Shanghai’s first “detective traffic mapping”
of urban criminality, I argue, was thus pronounced by the local literati’s literary tropes
23 A unique type of vehicles invented in Shanghai as a kind of bus.
to represent and capture such ambivalent tensions and mediation embedded in the city’s dual spatial logic: between the transient movement of the carriages and the detective’s attempt to master the traffic movement. That is, the users or the practitioners of Shanghai’s urban space might have formed their own
“representational space” to help them negotiate between “spatial practices” and
“representations of space.” It is within this representational space, I suggest, a quasi-detective aesthetics was born.
From three topographical writings by two late Qing intellectuals, Ge Yuanxu (葛元煦) and Wang Tao (王韜), we may infer that the changing transportation system not only expanded the traffic network outside the Concession area but also wielded what Lefebvre conceptualizes as “representations of space,” imposing a ratherconsistent spatial logic upon the ferry business of the slum residents:
舢板即擺渡灘小船也，閩、潮人業此者多。[…] 小蓬遮蔽雨日，
只能載客兩三人。如行數里之遙， 需講定船價，否則半途停櫓勒 索。異鄉孤客清晨深夜斷不可雇坐也。(Ge 104)24
沿浦多以舢板小艇渡人,操舵者皆閩浙無賴子也。雖至深夜喚渡，
無不應者。咸豐六年西人建築鉅橋以通往來，而招招者跡稍稀矣。
(Wang Tao 269)25
Prior to the construction of the first modern bridge across Suchow River in 1855, both the vagrant ferrymen dwelling along the riverbanks and the passengers trying to make their way across the river were performing what Lefebvre might call
24 “The so-called sampans are the little boats used in the ferry business, which is run by many immigrants from Min and Chao. [. . .] Each boat has a shabby hut to provide shelter from the rain and the sun, and it can only carry two or three passengers at a time. If one intends to travel in ferry for miles, he has to make a deal before getting onboard; otherwise, the ferryman would stop to extort you. A lone stranger must not take the ferry at night or dawn.”
25 “The ferry business is the primary transportation from river-crossing, which is mostly run by the vagrants from Min or Zhe, who would answer to your request even in the middle of the night. In the sixth year of Emperor Xianfong [1855], the Westerners built a huge bridge to improve the transportation, and the number of ferry touters dropped slightly.”
“spatial practices” within the realm of the “perceived space”—through the acts of bargaining, robbing, paddling, or struggling and fighting. In the first piece, which is collected in Notes about the Travels in Shanghai (滬游雜記), a tourist guidebook about Shanghai published in 1876, Ge describes a trip onboard the ferry across Suzhou River as a dangerous act, as the ferrymen were usually immigrant vagrants who would extort money from the passengers. To add to the public anxiety about the criminality in relation to the riverside ferries, various pieces of news articles carried by Shanghai News also reinforce a spatial imaginary about the unruly territory on the edge of urban Shanghai. Some of the news articles bear titles such as “Ferrymen’s Lack of Conscience” (船戶黑心) (Shanghai News 29: 17865), “Lawsuit against the Ferry Business” (渡船涉訟) (28: 18049), and “Robbery on the Boat” (划船被劫) (30:
19752). In most of these news articles, the narrator’s seemingly realistic account of criminality actually correspond to Ge’s and Wang’s writings, re-presenting to readers an imaginary realm where random crimes would happen to anyone setting their journey via the ferries. Such an imaginary of a potential criminal territory made this anxiety itself explicit in a specific editorial article titled “On Removing the Riverside Huts” (論拆河棚) (Shanghai News 28: 17832), in which the narrator endorses the administration’s decision to regulate the slummy residential areas of ferrymen. With the indignant moral tone, the narrator blames the residents for their ignorance and shameless opposition to the administration’s regulating project. What is most intriguing, however, is the editorial’s particular focus on the riverside huts’ covering and obstructing of the traffic flow and safety. During the last few decades of the nineteenth century, apparently a rising urban anxiety in relation to the city’s spatial configurations was already engendering a kind of geographical imagination and social evaluating that affirm the relationship between site and event. Through this spatial/social mapping, a particular part of the urban space as the criminal zone is
made tangible to the general public.
In this sense, it may be fair to say that the first modern bridge’s appearance in Ge’s tourist guidebook and its effect on the reduction of Shanghai’s ferrymen can be seen as the projection of a set of representations of space in accordance to a broader social anxiety on the part of the official administrators and its Chinese supporters. In 1855, as the first foreign-sponsored bridge extended northward across the Suzhou River, the “perceived space” seemed to become subsumed under the overwhelming representations of space. The Western urban planners successfully “bridged” the gap that hindered the expansionist logic of capital, which in turn repressed the possible outbreak of criminal space—the dangerous ferry business—under the homogeneous façade of the bridge. Upon such an erasure of inconsistency, Lefebvre clearly notes:
“[Representations of space] play a part in social and political practice: established relations between objects and people in the represented space are subordinate to a logic which will sooner or later break them up because of their lack of consistency”
(41).
The spatial logic of the modern bridge tends to cover up the criminal scene. It is, however, on such a homogeneity-generating bridge that a new watching perspective and narrative position is being produced as a representational space. From several criminal reports published in Shanghai News (申報) from May to August in 1877, we may find that within such a short period of time, at least five reports about unidentified murdered bodies under different bridges were published, not even including the anonymous bodies being reported as nameless dock workers. The following news headlines surely exude a mysterious sense surrounding the reporters’
representation of the murder cases: “Suspicious Cases Keeps Appearing” (疑案迭出) (20: 12754); “Human Head Found under the Bridge” (橋下人頭) (20: 12906); “The Floating Head” (水面人頭); “Body Found in the Ditch” (撈獲屍身) (19: 12266);
“Follow-up on the Case of the Unidentified Body in the River” (爭認屍身餘聞) (19:
12322). Take, for example, “The Floating Head.” We read about “more than 300 witnesses who stood on the bridge watching the bodiless head with blood floating on the river,” and that the narrator’s friend tried to make inquiries about the case but only received some hearsay. The narrator later defends, “當日橋上及兩岸觀者約有三百 餘人云，言人人殊，未知何者為確，本館以無友人目覩，不便實指也” (19: 12218).26 The modern bridge in these narratives, thus, served dual functions. On the one hand, it presented the logic of modernity by concealing the inconsistency of the urban space.
On the other hand, it failed to dominate the spatial logic completely, as the distance it created between the bridge and the river surface ironically revealed a new watching position, which allowed the pedestrians to overview the crime scene and produce their testimonies, if not rumors, to the reporter. If what lies at the core of the detective genre is the formulated, if not static, relationship between site and event, it surely implies more than the representations of space seeking to valorize the inconsistency
“shot through knowledge and ideology.” Rather, as shown by Shanghai literati’s urban re-presentations, their “detective visualization” of the riverside criminality reveals at once the desire to cover up and the attempt to decipher. “Representational spaces [are]
spaces as directly lived though its associations of images and symbols, and the space of inhabitants ad users, but also of some artists and perhaps of those […] who describe and aspire to do no more than describe” (39; emphasis original). As both the users and writers of the urban space of Shanghai, late Qing literati’s seemingly realistic reflections of the urban reality are by no means as neutral as they seem.
Instead, an ambivalent dynamics is palpable, where the descriptive mapping of the urban reality implies the prescriptive reconfiguring of that reality. The spatial-textual
26 “Different people gave different views; each person offered a different version [. . .]. As our news agency did not have any friend to witness the incident, we cannot tell for sure what exactly happened.”
ambivalence created by Shanghai’s urban modernity, in this sense, is prefiguring a quasi-detective narrative position that is not unlike the one manifest in The Sign of Four, in which Holmes’s activities of detection end with the final unraveling of a criminal zone along the dock and yards of the Thames.
Focusing on Holmes’s comments on London’s slummy dock area as well as his negotiating strategy with the ferrymen’s family, we gain a spatial structure resembling the ambivalent spatial logic we find in Shanghai urbanites’ representation of the city: “Below the bridge there is a perfect labyrinth of landing places for miles.
It would take you days and days to exhaust them alone” (Doyle 1: 181). With the aid of a mongrel, Holmes and Watson trace the unknown criminal’s smell from the wealthy suburbs to the margins of the metropolis, the dark proletarian slum under the bridge. For the detective, the world above the bridge is a relatively homogenous space where the criminal can be accurately traced by doorplates, addresses, and the modern traffic system (as is the case in The Study of Scarlet), while the world under the bridge is an unruly space whose particularity needs to be navigated and negotiated. To make inquiries with the accomplice’s family, Holmes emphasizes the importance of such particularity: “The main thing with people of that sort [. . .] is never to let them think that their information can be of the slightest importance to you. If you do they will instantly shut up like an oyster. If you listen to them under protest, as it were, you are very likely to get what you want” (181; emphasis mine). The particular rule needed to negotiate with those below the bridge, in other words, is the reverse of the common rule prevailing above the bridge. Thus, the detective’s success lies not only in his knowledge of the rule of the game, but also in his full awareness of the particularities lying under the surface of the modern spatial logic. However, several pages later, we seem to find a moment of ambivalence, if not hesitation, in Holmes’s thinking inspired by the swarming dock workers:
Dirty–looking rascals, but I suppose everyone has some little immortal spark concealed about him. There is no a priori probability about it. A strange enigma is man [. . .]. [W]hile the individual man is an insoluble puzzle, in the aggregate he becomes a mathematical certainty. [. . .]
Individual vary, but percentages remain constant. (202)
In this sense, the detective narrative is ambivalently shifting between the space of common rules above the bridge and that of particular secrecy below the bridge.
Despite his resort to “mathematical certainty” and “percentages,” Holmes admits that there is no rule with which to foretell potential criminal behavior, which seems to contrast his previous confidence in the particular rule for negotiation with the lower labor class. Between the homogeneous space of bourgeois modernity above the bridge and the particular space of the criminal below the bridge, the watching position of the detective is always already mediating in between. The ambivalent spatial logic of modernity is by nature an indispensible element to the detective genre itself.
To further account for such a spatial-textual ambivalence embedded in both the detective genre and modernity’s spatiality, I will now turn to other distinctive means of urban transportation in both London and Shanghai, that is, the hansoms, carriages, and broughams. They are not only the trademark for Sherlock Holmes’s urban adventures in London, but also a key device to help create the ambivalent duality for the urban space of Shanghai, dividing the city into the transient anonymity of the criminal and the immutable transparency embodied by the detective.
In his travel guide on Shanghai, Ge also notes the emerging Western carriages (or hansoms) and the tax imposed upon its passage through these modern bridges: “擺 渡頭、老閘兩處，西人造大橋二。行人往者每輸錢四文，來者亦然，車與倍之[…]
惟馬車過橋不容馳驟耳”(Ge 7).27 Here, the carriage, along with the passage toll
27 “At Baidutou and Laozha, the Westerners had built two big bridges. Both the coming and going passengers had to pay four coins for each ride. The toll for the carriage would be doubled. [. . .] The
charged by the Municipal Committee, suggests a new spatial logic that collided with the local spatial practices. According Chi Zhizheng (池志徵), the first hansom in Shanghai appeared in 1855—the same year when the first foreign-sponsored bridge was built (qtd. in Lü 247). When such a new means of transportation emerged in urban Shanghai, it was a spectacle creating shocking visual experiences to the pedestrians. Expressions such as “visually dizzied and spiritually dazzled” (目眩神迷) and “flashy display of eyes and ears” (耀人耳目) were frequently used by the literati to describe the speedy carriages dashing and roaring along the modern asphalt roads.28 Immensely awed, these intellectuals transformed such a visual experience of modernity into news reports and commentaries. In a piece of commentary carried by
charged by the Municipal Committee, suggests a new spatial logic that collided with the local spatial practices. According Chi Zhizheng (池志徵), the first hansom in Shanghai appeared in 1855—the same year when the first foreign-sponsored bridge was built (qtd. in Lü 247). When such a new means of transportation emerged in urban Shanghai, it was a spectacle creating shocking visual experiences to the pedestrians. Expressions such as “visually dizzied and spiritually dazzled” (目眩神迷) and “flashy display of eyes and ears” (耀人耳目) were frequently used by the literati to describe the speedy carriages dashing and roaring along the modern asphalt roads.28 Immensely awed, these intellectuals transformed such a visual experience of modernity into news reports and commentaries. In a piece of commentary carried by