Shanghailander

The Shanghai hills are the nearest thing to a mountain near the city. Driving there takes about 1 hour from the center if traffic is good. Located in the East of the city, it is quite near from the major expatriates area of HongQiao and HuQinPing. Since the opening of the Meridien hotel, ithas become popular spot for Sunday family outing. While indulging with delicacies, few people seem to be aware of the hill’s history and climb to the top of it.

In the old Shanghai time, SheShan was known as Zose (Sheshan in Shanghainese). The name was also the one of the village at the bottom of the hill. The attraction on the hill was the Observatory established in 1900 by the Jesuits fathers. It was one of the most advanced observatory in Asia. Weather informations were gathered from all over Asia, to be able to predict the weather for sea transportation. Information was sent to Shanghai French Bund for display on the Guslav Tower. The observatory has now been turned into a museum but is still nice to visit.

The location is mentioned as an interesting excursion from Shanghai in the American Express guide for “Sigthseeing in and around Shanghai” from 1934. The return trip to the hill took then 1 full day starting with train  from “Shanghai North Station at 7.10 a.m” arriving at “Sungkiang 8:39am”. (Songjiang is now a part of Shanghai, with a metro line reaching is in less than 1/2 hour.) Traveller would then take a boat on the canals reaching Zose “in about 2 and half hour”. The guide also recommended to take your own picnic (in a picnic basket) to eat after climbing the hill before going back to Shanghai in a journey of about 4 hours by the same way. It even propose “a more leisurely alternative” in taking a boat on the Suzhou Creek from Shanghai to reach Zose in the evening and climb the hill the next morning. People climbed the hill enjoy the landscape of “surrounding plains, with their villages and cultivated fields and waterways winding like silver bands.” Rice paddies in that part of Shanghai are long gone, and villages have been replaced by compound of luxurious villas but the viewing is still very nice from up there.

What is not mentioned on this guide from 1934… is the She Shan cathredral built by the Jesuits and finished in 1935. The cathedral is the largest in Asia, dominating the surrounding planes. It is very impressive and has  been well renovated, after damages done during cultural revolution. Like XuJiaHui Cathedral, it is a strong symbol of the Jesuits presence in this part of the world. It is a nice building and visiting it is a nice complement of a nice meal in the hotel downhill.

Saint-Ignace cathedral was a famous landmark of the Old Shanghai. Built by the Jesuits in 1906 at the spot of any earlier one, its two towers were clearly visible from far away. The Catholic cathedral was located in the Jesuits estate in Shanghai, just outside the border of the French concession. The building suffered a lot during cultural revolution, with both towers severely damaged. It was rebuilt in the 1990’s and now looks more or less like the original. It is open again for religious services for Chinese catholic Church, for Chinese people only.

The Church may look like the original, but two things have changed. First of all the environment has been totally transformed along those years. The cathedral used to be visible miles away, it is now dwarfed by neighboring buildings and shopping centers. Furthermore, the original stained glasses have disappeared, replaced by plain glass. People are working on trying to put back stained glassed in the cathedral. I recently attended a charity concert to raise money to support this project. I was very much looking for it, as concerts in the church are something unheard of and I was not disappointed.

That night’s weather was perfect for it. It had rained the whole day giving a gloomy atmosphere to the city. I was running through the continuous rain, finally getting in after a bit of struggle with the security. The room was full with people, but it was the quietest concert crowd I have ever seen in China. Silence came and shortly after I got in, the Chinese philharmonic orchestra started to play Mozart’s requiem. In this extraordinary of the cathedral and the excellent music, one could quickly feel like we were in 1928, not 2008. It was really a touching moment to be able to experience this great music in such an historical place. That moment was really straight out of the movie “Empire of the Sun“.

The concert finally ended after dies irea, and the crowd of the Shanghai foreign and Chinese high society that was there could have also very well belonged to the 20’s or the 30’s. The succession of big cars and white gloves drivers at the exit perfectly completed the old Shanghai atmosphere. In the night, you could see the car lights only and the rain helped keeping noise from the nearby avenue down. I was walking under the rain in my trench coat, feeling once again in a time travel to old Shanghai enjoying this wonderful and unique evening.

Coming to Shanghai from Europe today is a 10 hours airplane trip. Time difference and the long sitting make it tiring, but it still is quite a short trip. I even know people who go to Europe from Shanghai for less than 24 hours or just a long weekend. Travel between Shanghai and Europe in the 20’s or the 30’s was a much longer journey. Passengers would embark on the cruise in Europe and travel on it for about two months before reaching their final destination in Shanghai. It is certainly difficult to imagine nowadays what it meant to be on the sea for such a long time. Passengers would disembark along the way for sightseeing, while goods would flow in and out of the ship. From writings from this period, it is clear that such a trip was in itself a fabulous adventure.
The main French shipping line was “Messageries Maritimes”. Based in Marseille, they were sailing on the “ligne d’Extreme-Orient”. The company was one of the three major companies of the French Concession (along with “Banque de l’Indochine” and “Compagnie de tramways et d’eclairage electrique de Shanghai”). Its headquarters was located on the French Bund, next to the Consulate (today between Yannan Lu and JinLing lu) in a building that is now occupied by the Shanghai Archives. The current building was erected in 1936, replacing a previous one built in the 1870’s. Following a 1926 brochure of the company, the ships stopped at the following ports of call: “Marseilles, Port Said, Suez, Djibouti, Colombo, Singapore, Saigon, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Kobe, Yokohama. Singapore omitted on return voyages.” One of the ship traveling along this line was the Porthos, pictured above.

Recently I found a few more postcards of the inside of the Porthos and made some research about the ship (most information come from the website of Philippe Ramona). The Porthos had 112 passengers in first Class. It is clear from the pictures that this kind of travel was luxurious with great food served in a luxurious surrounding. Although the first class cabin was not as comfortable as a luxury hotel room it seems to have been still very convenient.

Second class travel don’t look so bad either with 96 passengers. The chairs of the dining room seem to attached to the ground, but this kind of travel was surely still comfortable. I don’t have pictures of the accomodation of the 90 3rd class passengers, but they were not the worst. Although its luxury was far from 1st class, it was still a world apart from the “rationnaire”, i.e “food ration” class. This was the lowest class which counted from 390 to 1000 passengers. I’m not sure how it looked like but people were clearly stacked on the top of each other for 2 months in the ship. 1st class travel was probably a great experience, but “rationnaire” travel was certainly much less fun and certainly not as glamorous as scenes from the movie Titanic. Long flight on today’s coach class are not always so comfortable, but at least they only last for 10 hours.

Shanghailanders like me are used to the mix of architecture that makes up Old Shanghai. Elements of various nations were taken to create buildings in the city and seeing faux-Tudor style next to Art Deco are quite common. All of them are reminders of the past and often much better than the present rows of unimaginative apartment buildings or ugly office towers.

It’s only when coming to European capitals that one suddenly realizes how Shanghai old buildings are most often imitating the style of the home or adoptive country of the one who built them. I remember taking a suburban train to Paris, and looking at houses from the 1910’s, 1920’s that look very much like the ones in my neighborhood in Shanghai’s French concession (see post “portrait of an old neighbour“). Similarly, Mexican or Spanish revival buildings are very similar to the ones found in California (see post “”Spanish revival architecture in Shanghai” and “California Dreaming“), and German house on Xin Hua Lu are very much in the style.

I had a similar déjà vu feeling walking on Marelyborne road in London a few days ago when I ran into the Court of Westminster (center picture) and could not miss the similarities with some of the Bund’s facades, in particular the customs building. The little tower on large buildings that I so much associate with Shanghai is just typical from British architecture from this period. The building even have the same flag poll with a Union Jack floating on it. It does not take much to imagine a Union Jack floating on every tower on the Bund like it floats on the one in the picture.

Walking around the area, I went to neighboring Regent’s Park. Regent College building does also look like some of the large mansions in old Shanghai. Similarly, some of the Lilong or Shi Ku Men houses have a lot in common with terraced houses in London or with row of houses in The Netherlands. They were also designed to maximise use of limited space and they tend to have a similar design of narrow front with deep rooms piled on the top of each other inside the building.

Old Shanghailanders only reproduced the architecture they were used to in their new home. Just like large columns and small towers represented power in t19th century London, it represented power in 19th century Shanghai on the Bund. With gray sky and brick or gray stone buildings, parts of London from this period feel like parts of Shanghai to me. People of the Empire really managed to re-create the illusion of their home countries far away from home… or Shanghai has become so much a part of myself that I see it everywhere I go.