Outside the urban districts were a number of slums known as shantytowns. In 1930 these housed around 150,000 people. This was where the Chinese first arrived when they came in from the Chinese interior, which was plagued by war and famine. The refugees usually arrived on a small houseboat, which they pulled up on the bank of one of the many streams and lived in until it rotted away. Afterwards, they tried making a small hut out of straw and dried mud. The hut was just large enough that its inhabitants could all lie down inside it. Sometimes they also tried turning the remains of the boat on their side to create a makeshift lean-to. The more successful inhabitants of the slums built a larger hut tall enough to sit in. If a member of the family was lucky enough to get real work at a factory, the family's fortunes might rise enough to allow them to move out of the slums, but that was far from a common occurance. Many of the migrants didn't even speak the Shanghai dialect and the Shanghainese couldn't understand what they were saying.
Written accounts describe how the straw huts collapsed or flooded when it rained. When this happened, parents tried putting the youngest children on top of something, while everybody else had to stand in mud that could reach half a meter deep until it stopped raining and the mud dried.
There was no sewer system or other plumbing in the slums, forcing the inhabitants to relieve themselves between the huts. They had to get their water from either highly polluted streams or buy it outside the slums.
When grown men living in the slums secured work, it was almost always as a coolie, an unskilled laborer carrying heavy loads. Some of the adult women were lucky enough to get work at a factory. But most of the inhabitants of the slums subsisted on begging and scavenging for food and useful objects in the refuse of others. Children had to do the same from an early age.
The inhabitants of the slums lived at subsistence level or below. Mortality was exceedingly high and most children died very young and adults rarely reached a high age.
En 5-årig tiggerdreng som den danske eventyrer Ole Krarup Nielsen fotograferede i 1927. Fattige måtte arbejde hårdt for føden fra de kunne gå. Mange af dem døde af sult eller overanstrengelse.