The first detachment of 31 Europeans, effectively borrowed from the Hong Kong Police and led by Samuel Clifton, was recruited almost immediately after the formation of the Shanghai Municipal Council (SMC).

[4] Though the force was mostly occupied in the routine business of crime prevention, detection, and traffic control, it was also seen as the Settlement's first line of defense against Chinese nationalist activity.

In this crowded and officially neutral enclave, the SMP struggled to maintain order in the face of a wave of increasingly violent terrorist bombings and reprisals between the Chinese and the Imperial Japanese Army and their collaborators.

The post-war city police bureau continued the employment of a steadily declining number of the former SMP's Russian cadre, although all Chinese staff remained in post.

[citation needed] A political policing unit had existed within the SMP from 1898, the so-called Intelligence Office, but this was renamed Special Branch in 1925 aligning with the form used throughout the British Commonwealth.

The arrest, the result of close co-ordination with the Special Branches in Singapore, MI6 and French colonial intelligence, broke up the Comintern's secret International Liaison Department in the city.

[8] After 1928, Special Branch worked closely with Kuomintang intelligence services, helping to destroy and disperse much of the urban base of the Chinese Communist Party by 1932.

The Special Branch's archive was acquired by the Central Intelligence Agency in 1949 and was eventually opened to researchers in the 1980s, although the files had clearly been weeded to remove material that might compromise some figures with a Shanghai past.

Sikh personnel wore red turbans while Chinese members of the force were distinguished by the conical Asian hat shown in the 1908 group photo above, until about 1919.