Stray Birds on the Huangpu: A History of Indians in Old Shanghai

The image of the turbanned Sikh policeman, hong tou ah-san to generations of Chinese, remains the popular image of Indians in old Shanghai. But the reality that editors Mishi Saran and Dr. Zhang Ke unveil in their new bilingual anthology, Stray Birds on the Huangpu: A History of Indians in Shanghai (Shanghai People’s Fine Arts Publishing Company, August 2018) is a much wider, deeper, and more deeply rooted community.

Indians in Shanghai were – and are – a richly diverse group, with a history reaching back to before the Opium Wars. After all, the opium that sparked that game-changing war came from Britain’s colonies in India, some from Indian opium merchants. Indeed, in 1839, when Commissioner Lin Zexu confiscated the 20,000-odd chests of opium that started the Opium Wars, 7,000 of those chests were owned by Indian merchants, according to historians Madhavi Thampi (whose work features in the anthology) and Shalini Saxena.