Lujiazui, also known under its Shanghainese name Lohkatse (, , lit. meaning "[The] Lu family's mouth"), is a locality in Shanghai, a peninsula formed by a bend in the Huangpu River. Since the early 1990s, Lujiazui has been developed specifically as a new financial district of Shanghai. The decision to earmark Lujiazui for this purpose reflects its location: it is located on the east side of the Huangpu River in Pudong, and sits directly across the river from the old financial and business district of the Bund.
Lujiazui is a national-level development zone designated by the government. In 2005, the State Council reaffirmed the positioning of the Lujiazui area as the only finance and trade zone among the 185 state-level development zones in mainland China.
Geography
Lujiazui is located in the Pudong New District on the eastern bank of Huangpu River. It forms a peninsula on a bend of the Huangpu River, which turns from flowing north to flowing east. The importance of Lujiazui stems from the fact that it lies directly across the river from the Bund, the old financial and business district of Shanghai, and just south of the confluence of the Suzhou Creek with the Huangpu River. Until the 1980s, Lujiazui was a relatively low-built area, featuring residential houses, warehouses, and factories. Following the allocation of Lujiazui as a special investment zone in 1992, the development of Lujiazui's skyline begun. This was largely driven by Chinese state owned enterprises investing and developing the property within the area, with the inaugural landmark, the Oriental Pearl Tower, being completed in 1994.
Economy
The success of Lujiazui in the past 20 years has fueled tourism and business related travel to Shanghai. Pictures of the Lujiazui skyline dominate Shanghai tourism materials, and there are 5 five-star hotels in the area, providing approximately 2,443 rooms, and three more five-star hotels are expected in the area in the coming years, adding more than 1,200 luxury units.
History
Formation
The modern configuration of the Huangpu River and Suzhou Creek beyond the old county town of Shanghai is the result of engineering works completed during the early Ming dynasty. The result is that the wider Huangpu River, flowing north past the county town, then turned east at its confluence with the now narrower Suzhou Creek, proceeding along the former downstream channel of the Suzhou Creek to enter the sea at Wusongkou, the former mouth of Suzhou Creek.
The bend in the Huangpu River resulted in the formation of an alluvial beach east and south of the bend. This alluvial floodplain was called a "mouth" (zui) after its shape. It was named after the family of Lu Shen, a 15th-century scholar-official of the Ming dynasty. Lu's family became one of the most prominent in Ming dynasty Shanghai, and lived in the Yangjing canal area, east of the Huangpu River and close to today's Lujiazui.
Settlement
During the Ming dynasty, fishermen were recorded as living in Lujiazui. During the Qing dynasty, the construction of levees on the peninsula encouraged settlement in greater numbers, with a number of villages forming in the part of the peninsula within the levees. Mudflats remained outside the levees.
The opening of Shanghai as a treaty port in the mid-19th century led to rapid development of Lujiazui as an industrial and commercial area servicing Shanghai. The middle part of the peninsula became a town called Lannidu (烂泥渡, literally "Mud Ferry"), named after one of the wharves on the river bank. British, American, French, German and Japanese interests built a series of factories, warehouses and storage yards, and wharves to service them. A busy commercial street developed in Lannidu to service the commodities trade as well as the daily needs of the many workers employed by the industrial facilities.