Great post on the China Beat debunking five of the most well-known urban legends involving Shanghai.

Number four on the list concerns something that was the subject of one of the most famous scenes of Bruce Lee’s film career — a sign supposedly posted in front of a Shanghai park banning “Dogs and Chinese” from entering.

Here’s the film clip:

But China Beat says that despite the fact that the “legend of the sign” has often thought to be true, even having been included in Chinese history and tourism books for decades, that it is just a myth.

Here’s another fun one:

Legend #1: Before the Opium War (1839-1842), Shanghai was a mere “fishing village.”

No, no, no! This canard keeps being repeated, but “fishing village” just won’t do as a descriptor of a community containing a couple of hundred thousand inhabitants, made up not just of people who farmed and yes fished, but also of people who worked in shops and restaurants, went to sea, taught at academies, tended lavish gardens, kept up temples, you name it. Shanghai’s history was changed forever when, immediately after the Opium War, it became a subdivided international treaty port with special zones set aside for trade and settlement by first Britons and then other foreigners. But before the Western gunboats came it was already a bustling walled town (see this 1817 map) with a port that served as a major transshipment point for goods circulating between China and Southeast Asia. (Why do you think the British wanted a piece of it so badly?)