The Hongkou district was known as the Japanese Concession before 1937 — though never formally a concession, it had a large Japanese residential and commercial population. The area around North Sichuan Road and Zhapu Road was the centre of this Japanese community and retains some of the commercial building stock from that era.
The transition from the International Settlement across Suzhou Creek to the former Japanese-dominated Hongkou gives a sense of the spatial division of pre-war Shanghai's foreign communities. The architecture here is slightly different — smaller scale, different detailing — from the grand commercial buildings of Nanjing Road and the Bund. The area is being redeveloped rapidly.