The Huangpu River (Hu獺ngp? Ji?ng), formerly known as the Whampoa or Whangpoo River is a 113 km-long river that flows through Shanghai. It is the last significant tributary of the Yangtze before it empties into the East China Sea.

Shanghai began life as a fishing village, and later as a port receiving goods carried down the Yangzi River. From 1842 onwards, in the aftermath of the first Opium War, the British opened a ???oncession??in Shanghai where drug dealers and other traders could operate undisturbed. French, Italians, Germans, Americans and Japanese all followed. By the 1920s and 1930s, Shanghai was a boom town and an international byword for dissipation. When the Communists won power in 1949, they transformed Shanghai into a model of the Revolution.