Shanghai Shanghai is a huge city located in China. This happens to be the largest populated city in the whole world. It is a global financial center, and a transport hub with the world's busiest container port. Located in the Yangtze River Delta in East China, Shanghai sits at the mouth of the Yangtze River in the middle portion of the Chinese coast. In 1842, the British arrived, Shanghai was already densely populated with 250,000 people. This number will grow rapidly in Shanghai in the future. After the British arrived so did the United Stated and France. British then called them coat-tail imperialist. Citizens of many countries and all continents came to Shanghai to live and work during this time period; those who stayed for long periods, called themselves "Shanghailanders”. The reasons they stayed was mostly because of the trade of opium and other things like cotton. This number of people in Shanghai now is up over 24 million and growing every day. One of the main reasons for the vast population in this region was Shanghai had a large concentration of fresh drinkable water that most people wanted and the cotton fields were vast and growing and there was a potential for a lot of money to be made. After people began to settle is when factories were built because there were a vast number of people who needed jobs. This was when the population grew vastly. Also they people began to come to this region because the Opium wars were breaking out in the ghettos of shanghai. The British, Americans and French, were allowed to live in certain territorial zones without being under the Chinese laws. After this happened the Chinese began to be influenced by all these westerner’s customs. After the port was established the population of China began to grow even more. In 1830, a silver shortage in the town of Canton which pegged the paper currency to opium prices. Because of this the British owned the narcotic refined from Indian poppies was shifted and British ended its monopoly on the trade in Shanghai. The late 1840’s Shanghai continued to fall in the economic spiral. It all began when the British textiles and other imports did not sell like they were planning on. Although, British still had great profits coming out of shanghai because they could buy tea and silk for 35 percent of the cost they could get them anywhere else so this is a win for the British. This is a place of encounter because of its excellent port for trading and such. This port was the first established port on the east coast of China so it made it easy for the population to grow. The port of Shanghai comprises a deep-sea port and a river port. As well as a safe haven for costal and international trade. This made it easy for it to start out as a small fishing town and emerge from there. That was early and in the 1800’s the cotton industry began to boom. Also the trade of opium helped this to be a place of encounter.