Present-day Chongming first developed as two separate
shoals—
Xisha and
Dongsha—during the
Wude Era (AD 618–626) of the
Tang dynasty. These were initially about apart and located south of the larger island of
Dongbuzhou (
t ,
s ,
p Dōngbùzhōu), which came to form part of the peninsula of
Qidong in
Jiangsu. Xisha was also known as
Gujunsha. By the first year of
Shenlong (705), a
town was established on Xisha which was known as "Chongming". During the late Yuan and early
Ming, the sparsely-inhabited shoals of the area began to fill with migrants from
Pudong and other areas of
Songjiang Prefecture. These immigrants introduced
cotton cultivation, which spread widely prior to China's
opening to international trade in the later
Qing. There was small-scale
textile production in the area, but most of the cotton was exported for use in
Songjiang,
Hangzhou, and other more developed areas of
Jiangnan. In the 2nd year of
Hongwu (1396) under the
Ming, the prefecture was downgraded to a
county and finally as a county of the
Wang Jingwei regime, a Japanese puppet state in
Nanjing. Nine years after the establishment of the
People's Republic of China, it was placed under the
municipality of Shanghai in December 1958.
Reclamation, particularly large-scale work on the island's northern and eastern
tidal flats in the 1960s and '90s, doubled the size of the island between 1950 and 2010.
Dongtan was a proposed
ecocity which was planned to open along with the
2010 World Expo in Shanghai but stalled following the 2006 ouster of the
Communist Party Chief Chen Liangyu. ==Geography==