International Settlement

The International Settlement refers to the Northern and Eastern portions of the city under foreign administration—despite the name (which remains from a centuries-old arrangement between multiple European states) the area is under nominal British and American control. If the French Concession is where the elite of Shanghai live and play, then the International Settlement is where they work: bookended by factories, warehouses, and markets in the West, highrise offices, banks and five-star hotels crammed against the boardwalk empire of the Bund in the East, everywhere there exists a brutal and constant reminder of Chinese industry and European hegemony. So comfortable are expats that one could spend a week here without barely once having to encounter Chinese. Its streets flash, twinkle, blind and dazzle in neon, argon, incandescent and candela; merchants hawk day and night, trolleys almost keeping pace with rickshaws and cartpullers were it not for constant pedestrian and vehicle traffic.   This mob is kept in check by whistle-blowing, truncheon-pointing Sikh and Gurkha detachments, local constabularies, or, occasionally—and always to great effect—Springfield-swinging US Marines. The majority of foreign soldiers are rarely inclined or capable of maintaining contact with the gangs that otherwise run the city, but their local counterparts have no problem investing themselves in the local economy. All together, they are at best frightfully competent, and at worst laterally or directly complicit to criminal acts—as long as the correct person in the correct office is paid off at the correct time, it may as well constitute diplomatic immunity. Such loyalties are also often short-lived and self-serving, befitting the nature of the Settlement.