What does Shanghai mean? The name and the verb

What does Shanghai mean? The two characters, 上海 Shànghǎi, read as on the sea or upon the sea, and that is the answer most sources give. The fuller answer is that the city is named after a creek, the Shanghai Pu, and that on the sea is a reading of the characters rather than the reason for the name. Below is how the name is said in Shanghainese, where it came from, the city’s two other names, and how it became an English verb meaning to kidnap.

Updated 16 October 2026 · 4 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 two characters

In Shanghainese the name starts with a voiced z, a sound Mandarin does not have, and the second syllable is a plain e where Mandarin has the glide ai. As a two-syllable word its pitch is set by the first syllable, so it is said as one smooth shape rather than as two separate tones. The people are 上海人 zaon he nyin ‘Shanghainese people’ and the language is 上海闲话 zaon he ghae gho ‘the Shanghainese language’, literally Shanghai talk.

Named after a creek

The characters say on the sea, and one traditional explanation takes that literally: the land here was once low and close to the sea. But the Chinese-language account of the name on Wikipedia, drawing on Song-dynasty records, traces it to a waterway. A Song water-management book from the Xining era (1068–1077) records a tributary of the Wusong River called the 上海浦 Shànghǎi pǔ, the Shanghai Pu.

Both halves of that name meant something more ordinary than on the sea:

• 浦 pǔ, 浦 phu in Shanghainese, first meant a place where waters meet or run into the sea, but in the Wu region it usually meant a small tributary or creek. It is still in the city’s map: 黄浦江 waon phu kaon ‘the Huangpu River’ and 浦东 phu ton ‘Pudong’, east of the Pu.
• 上 shàng in river names of that region often meant the side nearer the source, upstream, rather than on top of.

The name then passed from the creek to what grew up beside it. Before the Tiansheng era (1023–1032) the Song government set up a wine-tax office near the creek called the Shanghai Wu, one of seventeen such offices in its prefecture, and the name spread from there. In 1267 a market town on the creek’s west bank was formally named 上海镇 Shànghǎi zhèn, Shanghai Town. In 1291 the Yuan government made it the seat of a county, Shanghai County, the first time the place had an administration of its own; many English sources date the county to 1292.

None of this is a city of millions. For most of its history Shanghai was a county town, and its growth came after it was opened as a treaty port in 1843. How the language changed through that growth is told in old and new Shanghainese.

Its other names: Hu and Shen

Shanghai has two one-character names, both older than Shanghai itself, and both still in daily use.

The city also has a modern nickname, 魔都 Módū, the magic city or demon city. Wikipedia traces it to Mato (1924), a book by the Japanese novelist Muramatsu Shōfu. If the link between Shanghai and Japan interests you, there is one in the language as well: see why Shanghainese sounds like Japanese.

Why “to shanghai” means to kidnap

In English, to shanghai someone is to force or trick them into something, and originally it meant something very specific: to kidnap a man and put him aboard a ship as a sailor. The verb entered English in the 1850s, along with crimping, the older word for the same trade. The usual explanation is that Shanghai was a common destination for ships that sailed with abducted crews.

The practice grew out of a shortage of sailors, especially on the American West Coast during the California Gold Rush, when crews deserted ships for the goldfields. Boarding masters were paid for each sailor they supplied, so-called blood money, and the crimps among them used drink, drugs, trickery or force to fill a crew. San Francisco and later Portland, Oregon, were notorious for it, and so were London, Liverpool and New York. Under American law a sailor who had signed on could be jailed for leaving his ship before the voyage ended, which kept a shanghaied man aboard; that penalty was finally abolished by the Seamen’s Act of 1915.

Today the word is used loosely, for anyone pressed into doing something: I got shanghaied into organising the party. It is one of a handful of English words made from a Chinese place name. The traffic in words between Shanghai and the outside world mostly ran the other way, though, and the English and French words that entered Shanghainese through the foreign concessions are collected on the loanwords page.

Saying it like a local

Everyone in Shanghai will understand Shànghǎi in Mandarin. Saying 上海 zaon he instead, with the voiced z and the flat e, is the quickest way to show you have heard the local language. Which language you will actually hear in the city, and from whom, is covered in what language is spoken in Shanghai, and the free Shanghainese course teaches the city’s own words from the first lesson.

Sources

1. Wikipedia (Chinese): 上海市, 释名 — the Shanghai Pu in the Xining-era 水利书; 浦 and 上 in Wu river names; the 上海务 wine-tax office; 上海镇 (1267) and Shanghai County (1291).
2. Wikipedia: Shanghai, Etymology — 上 and 海, the Song-dynasty origin of the name, 沪 and 沪渎, 申 and Lord Chunshen, 魔都 and Muramatsu Shōfu’s Mato (1924).
3. Wikipedia: Shanghaiing — the verb from the 1850s; crimps, boarding masters and blood money; the ports; the Seamen’s Act of 1915.