The foreign words in Shanghainese, and Yangjingbang pidgin

For a century Shanghai was the place where Chinese and English had to do business in the same street, and the language kept the receipts. A sofa, a roof window, a foreman and a bowl of borscht are all English or Russian words wearing Chinese characters.

Updated 20 September 2026 · 5 min read

Tap 🔊 to hear an example. Shanghainese examples play the recordings from Verbavia’s course, made with a Shanghainese voice; Mandarin examples play a Mandarin voice.

The creek that gave pidgin its Chinese name

Yangjingbang (洋泾浜) was a creek. It ran east to west across what is now central Shanghai, and after the treaty ports opened it became a boundary: the British settlement on one bank, the French concession on the other. In 1914 and 1915 the two administrations agreed to fill it in. The road they laid over it was named Avenue Edward VII at the eastern end and Avenue Foch at the western, and today the whole length of it is Yan’an Road.

The creek is gone and the word is not. Along its banks, dockers, hawkers and compradors traded with foreigners in a broken, workable English, and Shanghai named that English after the place it was spoken: 洋泾浜英语, Yangjingbang English. What foreigners called Chinese Pidgin English, Shanghai called the creek’s English.

It then did what useful words do and became an adjective. To this day 洋泾浜 means makeshift, broken, not the real thing — of a language, of a skill, of anything improvised. A century after the water was buried, the creek is still how Shanghai says pidgin.

What the pidgin was like

Chinese Pidgin English began further south, in the Canton trade of the eighteenth century, and moved north with the treaty ports. Its grammar was neither English nor Chinese but a reduced third thing:

• One first-person word. My did the work of I, me and my alike.
• A classifier, because Chinese needs one. Piecee stood in for the whole Chinese classifier system: one piecee lawyer.
• Question words built out of parts. What time for when, what man for who — the same transparent compounding Chinese uses.
• A copula from a verb of possession. Belong and have carried to be, and often it was simply left out.
• Questions by tone, not by word order. Nothing inverted; the voice rose.

None of this is corruption. Every one of those features is a sensible solution to the problem of two grammars that share nothing, arrived at by people who needed to close a deal before the tide turned.

The rhyme people learned it from

In 1860 a handbook called 《英话注解》, English Words Explained, put the pidgin into verse so it could be memorised — each English word glossed by Chinese characters that sounded like it. Lines of it survived into the twentieth century and are still quoted:

• 来是康姆去是谷 — come is 康姆, go is 谷.
• 廿四洋钿吞的福 — twenty-four is 吞的福.
• 是叫也司勿叫诺 — yes is 也司, no is 诺.
• 打屁股叫班蒲曲 — a beating is a bamboo chop.

There is a catch worth knowing, and it is the kind of detail that gets left out. The handbook is reported to have been written by six men from Ningbo, so the characters encode Ningbo readings rather than Shanghai ones. Sound the verse out in Shanghainese and it half works. The other versions of these lines that circulate online vary in their wording, and I have quoted only the ones I could trace to a source.

The words that stayed

Most of the pidgin died with the concessions. A layer of vocabulary did not, and some of it is so ordinary now that nobody hears it as foreign.

老虎窗 lau hu tshaon ‘dormer window’ is the one to keep. A dormer window is not tiger-shaped and has nothing to do with tigers; someone heard an English builder say roof, wrote down two characters that sounded about right in Shanghainese, and the metaphor was invented afterwards by everyone who read it. The shikumen attics of the 1920s filled up with tiger windows and the name stuck.

Others in the same layer, from the same period: 巧克力 for chocolate, 凡士林 for Vaseline, 开司米 for cashmere, 麦克风 for microphone, and 德律风 for telephone — that last one a word standard Chinese tried and then abandoned in favour of a native compound.

The etymologies that are probably wrong

Shanghai enjoys these stories, and enjoying them is how some of them survived without evidence. Four that are repeated as fact and are genuinely disputed:

• 瘪三 pih sae ‘a bum, a deadbeat’ — said to be beg sir or beg say. The competing account has it built from native material, with 瘪 meaning deflated. Both are in print; neither is settled.
• 嗲 tia ‘charming, coquettish’ — usually traced to English dear. The problem is that the same word turns up in Hunan and Nantong, which had little to do with the Shanghai concessions, so an English origin cannot be the whole story.
• 戆大 gaon da ‘a fool’ — said to be gander. Against it: gander is not an ordinary English word for a fool, and 戆 already means foolish in Chinese.
• 阿飞 a fi ‘a hoodlum, a flashy youth’ — from fly, or from figure, depending on whom you read.

The honest position is that a loanword etymology needs a paper trail, and for words that spread through speech in a port city there often is not one. Where this page says from, the derivation is documented. Where it says said to be, it is a story that may be true.

The other borrowing: 洋

Beside the phonetic loans runs a quieter and much larger pattern, and it is the one the only popular English article on this subject concentrates on. Shanghai took the character 洋 yan ‘foreign; ocean’ — literally ocean, so from overseas — and stuck it on the front of things:

• 洋葱 yan tshon ‘onion’ — the overseas allium.
• 洋油 yan yeu ‘kerosene’ — overseas oil.
• 洋伞 yan sae ‘umbrella’ — the Western sort.
• 洋气 yan chi ‘stylish, modern’ — literally having a foreign air, and a compliment.
• 洋盘 yan boe ‘a sucker, someone easily fooled’ — the other side of the same coin.

Those two adjectives are the whole of Shanghai’s attitude to the foreign in four syllables. To be 洋气 yan chi ‘stylish’ is to be enviably cosmopolitan; to be 洋盘 yan boe ‘a sucker’ is to be the out-of-towner who does not know what things cost. The same prefix, and it can go either way.

Is any of it still used?

Less than it was, and the direction is clear. A 2019 study of English loanwords in Shanghainese found that older speakers know and use far more of them than younger ones, with Putonghua equivalents replacing them. The loanwords are a layer of the language that is thinning at the same rate as everything else, for the reasons set out on the page about the language’s decline.

Which is a shame, because they are the most Shanghai thing in the vocabulary. A word like 拿摩温 is a whole social history — the mills, the shift system, the English-speaking boss and the man between him and the floor — compressed into three syllables that mean number one. The slang that grew up alongside them is on the slang page.

Sources

1. Wikipedia: Yan’an Road — the Yangjing Creek filled in 1914–15, Avenue Edward VII and Avenue Foch
2. Wikipedia: Chinese Pidgin English — the Canton and Shanghai phases, and the grammar
3. Chinese Wikipedia: 洋泾浜英语 — the 1860 handbook 《英话注解》 and the mnemonic verse
4. Wikipedia: List of loanwords in Chinese — 沙发, 咖啡, 巧克力, 凡士林, 开司米, 水门汀, 麦克风, 德律风
5. RADII: How the Legacy of Imperialism Still Lingers in Shanghainese Vocabulary — the 洋 prefix
6. Visualizing Language Contact (Williams College): Yang King Pang 洋泾浜
7. Ye, Y. and others (2019). When a koiné meets larger lingua francas: attrition of English loanwords in Shanghainese. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 40(8) — abstract
8. Chinese Wikipedia: 罗宋汤