For many, the term “pidgin English” evokes awkward, broken speech — an ungainly linguistic legacy that is neither “pure” English nor standard in any sense. In Shanghai, however, its local incarnation, Yangjingbang English, carries a far more layered history, one that weaves into the city’s treaty-port past and early efforts among Chinese workers to interact with foreign traders.

The name itself tells a story. In the Wu dialect spoken in Shanghai and parts of Zhejiang and Jiangsu provinces, bang means “creek,” with the Yangjingbang a former tributary of the Huangpu River, filled in 1916 to make way for Avenue Edward VII, now East Yan’an Road. In the 19th century, this modest waterway marked a line of power, with the British Concession to the north and the French Concession to the south. With the arrival of foreign traders in the mid-1800s on the heels of the First Opium War, Yangjingbang’s name moved from obscurity to notoriety, eventually becoming shorthand for a particular way of speaking.

The term “pidgin English” has since expanded to refer to similar hybrid forms of English around the world, but the word “pidgin” itself, which in linguistics refers to simplified languages born of necessity, also began its journey in China. A widely accepted origin of the term traces back to Canton, one of the first Chinese ports open to the West. There, “business” became “pigeon” based on local pronunciation, something British missionary and sinologist Robert Morrison cited from a conversation he overheard back in 1807, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. Eventually, this form of communication made its way to Shanghai, where it took on a life of its own. There, locals referred to their rendition as Yangjingbang English, after the waterway, while foreigners called it “pidgin English” after the linguistic adaptation that began down in Canton.

Yangjingbang English was certainly a language of necessity. When British merchants began pouring into Shanghai after it opened as a treaty port, they faced an immediate obstacle: they could not speak Chinese, and most locals could not speak English. Necessity gave birth to a stripped-down form of English, its grammar bent to Chinese patterns and its pronunciation shaped by sounds within Chinese. It was the language of dock clerks, compradors, houseboys, rickshaw pullers, and street vendors, a tool for getting things done in the absence of formal study.

Yet while English purists at the time classified Yangjingbang English as a lesser, corrupted form of the language, it is in fact a fascinating fusion that flourished among merchants and the Chinese lower working class that has continued to shape Chinese to this day. It was truly a language of necessity created at a time when the language barrier was nigh insurmountable — one that was studied, adapted, and used for trade.

Consider a curious little 1860 guidebook, “An Explanation of English Phrases.” Compiled by a merchant from Ningbo in the eastern Zhejiang province who lived in Shanghai, the booklet used Chinese characters to phonetically represent English words, as spoken in the Ningbo dialect, and offered handy phrases for dealing with foreigners, which locals learned by rote. Entries of the book include everyday phrases such as “come,” “go,” “yes,” and “no,” along with more trade-based terms, such as “steamer,” “rickshaw,” and “shoe” — all with phonetic pronunciations alongside them. Today, its rhyming expressions feel almost like folk verse, but behind them lies the determined effort of working-class people attempting to bridge a vast cultural and linguistic divide.

By the mid-19th century, as Shanghai overtook Canton as a trade hub, Yangjingbang English reached its height, with a vocabulary of perhaps 700 words. It would eventually disappear as formal English education took off and other lingua franca appeared, yet those early efforts by Chinese workers left behind more than just memories, as traces of Yangjingbang English live on.

A handful of Yangjingbang expressions seeped into Shanghainese, and from there into Mandarin, taking on new lives of their own. The common expression fa dia — meaning to “act coy” — originated from the Yangjingbang word for “dear.” Likewise, bie san, a term for a vagrant, originated from Yangjingbang’s “beg sir,” just as laohu chuang, which means “dormer window,” came from “roof window.” These phrases are still in use today, even if few remember their origins.

Some fossils of Yangjingbang English have even persisted in English. The most famous of these is “long time no see,” a direct translation of hao jiu bu jian, first recorded in 1894 and now common in casual speech across the English-speaking world. There is also “can do” and “no can do,” from keyi and bu keyi, which appeared in print in 1845 and 1868, respectively, functioning much like today’s “OK” and “no way.” “Look-see” also derives from kan kan, first recorded in 1862, and is still used both as a verb and a noun. Other survivals include direct translations from Cantonese, like “chop-chop” and “chow.”

Yet unfortunately, Yangjingbang English also lives on in the stereotype of broken English. Early representations of Chinese Pidgin English appeared in “Pidgin-English Sing-Song,” a derogatory comic account by Charles Godfrey Leland in 1876, and shaped perceptions of a “backward” China, echoes of which can be found in modern times. In John Le Carré’s 1970s George Smiley spy thriller, “The Honourable Schoolboy,” a character speaks in a derisive tone when ordering at a Hong Kong bar, demanding his beer to be “cold this time, hear that, boy? Muchee coldee, and bring it chop-chop.” This is a direct carryover from other terms that originated in Yangjingbang English, deriving from foreigners mocking Chinese accents, such as “allee samee” (from “all the same”), “makee” (from “make”), and “muchee” (from “much”).

Whatever the lingering traces of Yangjingbang English, it is undeniable that the language is a reminder of a time when East and West met at Shanghai’s wharves and markets with only the loosest of shared vocabularies. At times rife with stereotypes, at others fully integrated into modern languages, the legacy of the hybrid language and compromise lives on. The story of linguistic exchange, too, is one still waiting to be told. 

(Header image: Details of a page from the 1860 guidebook “An Explanation of English Phrases.” VCG)