Abstract: Shanghai, in the period of the late Qing Dynasty and early Republic of China, was both an area where foreign and Chinese ideas clashed with each other and the country opened its door, but also a prosperous land of zhuzhi ci (a form of literary writing). The geographical location of its treaty port generated a group of “treaty port intelligentsia”. An analysis of those nationalconcept loaded words like “yi” and “yang” in zhuzhi ci of that time from the perspective of corpus linguistics clearly reveals evolutions of the ethnic concept of treaty port intelligentsia in that period of national and social transformations, shedding light on their state of mind in the struggles between tradition and modernity, and also marking the orbit of their evolution from traditional into contemporary intellectuals.