Shanghai: A History in Photographs, 1842 - TodayThe modern city of Shanghai rose up from truly 'muddy' origins, both in the soft subsoil its foundations were build upon and its early economy based on a trade in opium, or 'foreign mud'. Forced open to the British by the unequal Treaty of Nanking in 1842, Shanghai did what it does best it beat the odds to become a 'bawdy and gaudy' metropolis that, 168 years later, commands a place in the contemporary imagination unlike any other city. Despite civil