This is the raster file of the assembled maps from the Shanghai shi hanghao lutu lu 上海市行號路圖錄. Vol. 1‑2. Shanghai 上海: Fuli wenhua shiye youxian gongsi 福利文化事業有限公司, 1939.

The original volumes contained individual maps for each street block in the International Settlement (115) and the French Concession (71). It should be noted that the coverage of the maps did not include the easternmost part of the Eastern district in the International Settlement. The Shanghai shi hanghao lutu lu was designed as a commercial atlas. It was the initiative of a private company. The area not covered was considered as of little interest from the perspective of commercial acitvities. It was indeed mostly an industrial area.

The 1947 edition included a larger area for the International Settlement, mostly to the north, in the Extra-settlement Roads area, as well as Nanshi (former walled city) and the stretch of land along the French Concession southern limit. We use the terms International Settlement  and  French Concession for the sake of comparison with the 1939 edition. The two foreign settlements were abolished in 1943.

We cropped the individual maps, geo-rectified them, removed the colors, and assembled them in a single raster shape file. We chose to save it in ".ecw" format to have a light version of the map for use in GIS software and on the internet (as in Live Maps on Virtual Shanghai: labeled as "1946 - International Settlement Commercial guide" and "1946 - French Concession Commercial guide".

Our purpose was to create a base raster map to be used for digitally redrawing the whole street network in the two foreign settlements in 1939 and to create a historical geocoding system for the city.

The .ecw file will not display automatically on QGIS. You will need to convert it as a geotiif file. If you need help with the procedure, check out this site. The procedure is simple.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License