Chongming Island

Verified Timeline

Lore & Background

Present-day Chongming first developed as two separate shoals—Xisha and Dongsha—during the Wude Era (AD 618–626) of the Tang dynasty. By the first year of Shenlong (705), a town was established on Xisha known as 'Chongming'. The number, size, and shapes of the islands fluctuated repeatedly over time and with the floods of the Yangtze. In the 14th year of Zhiyuan (1277) under Kublai Khan of the Yuan, Chongming Prefecture was organized within Yangzhou. During the late Yuan and early Ming, migrants from Pudong and other areas of Songjiang Prefecture introduced cotton cultivation. In the 2nd year of Hongwu (1396) under the Ming, the prefecture was downgraded to a county and, shortly afterwards, a major subsidence—sinking the entirety of Dongsha and most of Xisha—provoked a mass emigration back to the mainland. Over the Ming and Qing, numerous shoals arose and sank; by 1681, the unification of remaining islands effectively created present-day Chongming, although it remained much smaller at the time. Reclamation, particularly large-scale work on the island's northern and eastern tidal flats in the 1960s and 1990s, doubled the size of the island between 1950 and 2010.

Reader's Guide

Chongming Island's significance lies in its dynamic geography and its role as the northernmost district of Shanghai. The island is about 81 kilometers (50 mi) running east and west and generally between 13 and 18 kilometers (8.1 and 11.2 mi) north to south, covering 1,267 square kilometers (489 sq mi). It has an average elevation of 1.6–2.6 meters (5 ft 3 in – 8 ft 6 in) above sea level. The island doubled in size between 1950 and 2010 through large-scale reclamation, particularly on its northern and eastern tidal flats. It also contains two pene-exclaves of Jiangsu on its north shore, formed by the connection of Chongming to the formerly separate island of Yonglongsha—Haiyong (around 12.5 km²) and Qilong (stretching 20 km along the north shore, area around 36.8 km²). Chongming is a center of Shanghai's shipbuilding and maritime equipment industries, whose main base is on nearby Changxing. The island's tourism focuses on three zones—East, Central, and West Chongming—featuring Dongtan Wetland Park, Dongping National Forest Park, Mingzhu Lake Park, and cultural sites such as one of Shanghai's three Confucian temples.

Did You Know?

• The island is named for Chongming, an early settlement on the island of Xisha that was named for its placement on relatively high and clear ground.
• A 20-kilometer-long stretch of the north shore of the island consists of two pene-exclaves of Jiangsu, formed by the connection of Chongming to the formerly-separate island of Yonglongsha.
• Reclamation, particularly large-scale work on the island's northern and eastern tidal flats in the 1960s and 1990s, doubled the size of the island between 1950 and 2010.
• Dongtan was a proposed ecocity which was planned to open along with the 2010 World Expo in Shanghai but stalled following the 2006 ouster of the Communist Party Chief Chen Liangyu.
• The Tour of Chongming Island is an annual elite international women's cycling race consisting of a one-day race and a stage race.

A Land Forged by River and Time

What we now call Chongming did not exist as a single landmass for most of its history. During the Wude Era of the Tang dynasty, around 618 to 626, two separate shoals—Xisha to the west and Dongsha to the east—began to consolidate at the Yangtze's mouth, roughly seventy kilometers apart. Over the following centuries, the river's floods and shifting sediments produced a restless archipelago. New islands like Yaoliusha appeared in 1025, Sansha stabilized by 1101, and the Yuan dynasty saw at least a dozen more shoals rise. Yet just as quickly, land vanished: Yaoliusha and Sansha eroded away, Xisha sank, and dozens of Ming-era shoals flooded back into the river. The great unification came around 1644, when western islands merged into a single mass stretching two hundred Chinese miles east to west. By 1681 the coalescence was essentially complete, though the resulting island was still far smaller than today's 1,267-square-kilometer landmass.

From Shoal to Prefecture to County

The political life of Chongming mirrors its physical instability. In 1277, under Kublai Khan's Yuan dynasty, the scattered islands were organized into Chongming Prefecture within Yangzhou, but the ever-shifting sands forced authorities to relocate the county seat more than once. A century later the Ming downgraded the prefecture to a county in 1396, and a catastrophic subsidence that swallowed Dongsha entirely and most of Xisha triggered a mass exodus of residents back to the mainland. Through the late Ming and into the Qing, the county was shuffled between Suzhou and Taicang Prefectures. Under the Republic it fell under the Nantong and then Songjiang Special Administration Districts. The Japanese occupation brought a sequence of puppet administrations—a pacification team, Shanghai's Great Way Government, and finally the Wang Jingwei regime in Nanjing. After the founding of the People's Republic, Chongming waited nine years before being formally incorporated into the Shanghai municipality in December 1958.

Cotton, Salt, and the Tidal Flats

The earliest communities on the Yangtze's delta islands were modest: fishermen and salt collectors who worked the tidal flats, with their principal saltern at a place called Tianci. A more transformative wave arrived during the late Yuan and early Ming, when migrants from Pudong and other parts of Songjiang Prefecture settled the sparsely inhabited shoals. These newcomers brought cotton cultivation, which spread rapidly across the islands before China opened to wider international trade in the later Qing period. Local textile production remained small-scale, but the bulk of the cotton was shipped to the more developed Jiangnan cities of Songjiang and Hangzhou for processing. In the twentieth century the island's physical footprint expanded dramatically through state-directed reclamation. Large-scale land reclamation on the northern and eastern tidal flats in the 1960s and again in the 1990s effectively doubled the island's area between 1950 and 2010, reshaping the coastline and adding vast new ground to the Yangtze's mouth.

Shanghai's Northern Frontier

Today Chongming sits at the very top of Shanghai's administrative map, its 660,000 residents (2010 census) living on a strip of land roughly eighty-one kilometers long and thirteen to eighteen kilometers wide, averaging barely two meters above sea level. The island is about two hours from central Shanghai, separated from Baoshan and Pudong by the Yangtze's twin channels. Its continuous growth has created a peculiar administrative quirk: a twenty-kilometer stretch of the north shore belongs not to Shanghai but to Jiangsu, forming two pene-exclaves after the island absorbed the formerly separate Yonglongsha in 1972. During the Down to the Countryside Movement, many of Shanghai's sent-down youth found their rural posting no further than Chongming itself. The island's most ambitious modern project, the Dongtan ecocity, was slated to open alongside the 2010 World Expo but stalled after the 2006 ouster of Party Chief Chen Liangyu, leaving the vision unfinished.

Gallery