The finest residences are on the river bank or Bund, as it is commonly called; but the city stretches for several squares back from the river, being densest in the English Concession. The American quarter, Hong-Que, although not as well filled with fine houses, is the next in importance, while the French Concession, nearest to the great city within the walls, is meanly built, and has more of the native element than either of the others. For, although it is contrary to Chinese law for any native to hold property in any of the foreign possessions, in practice large numbers of Chinamen rent tenements from their foreign owners, and even own them, the property standing, for convenience' sake, in the name of some foreign resident in trust. Thus there has gradually grown up around and upon the concessions a large Chinese city, believed by many to contain almost as large a population as the city within the walls. This is not incredible when we consider that the excesses of the Tae-Pings in Soo-Chow, a large city about thirty miles from Shanghai, have driven vast numbers of its inhabitants to the latter place, which, being already densely crowded, has overflowed its walls, and, as the presence of Europeans has made Shanghai, as it were, a city of refuge for the exiles, they have naturally crowded around the foreign settlement. In this manner the population of Shanghai and its environs has been prodigiously augmented within the last two years, and from a place of six hundred thousand inhabitants, it has become one of more than a million of people. It is extremely difficult to obtain even an approximate estimate of the population of a Chinese city. The estimates of the Chinese are totally unreliable, varying sometimes in the most ridiculous manner, and generally being preposterously exaggerated, while the estimates of strangers or foreigners, unacquainted with the marvellous abundance of human life in very small spaces, as it is seen in China, are very rarely correct. For instance, it is not uncommon to find that residents of this city differ as much as a million of people in their views of its population, their estimates ranging from nine hundred thousand to two million. It is not unlikely that a medium between these two extremes will prove to be correct, the figure twelve hundred thousand appearing to be the favorite at present among those conversant with the great changes of the last year.[1]