Shanghailander

Dancing in the bank

The Bund was the center of business in Old Shanghai. Major banks and companies had their headquarters on the riverside or in the streets behind. A number of these buildings are finally being renovated in turned once again into greatness, though mostly into fancy bars and restaurants. One of the most popular one is Bund 18, open in late 2004, the old building of the “Chartered Bank of India, Australia and China”. Renovation of this old lady was run by Italian experts in old building renovation. Thanks to their work, this dilapidated piece of art has been turned into a luxury shopping mall and an entertainment complex. Bar Rouge on the 7th Floor opened in late 2004 along with restaurant Sens & Bund. Bar Rouge was the undisputed star of Shanghai nightlife (see my post “Decadence on the Bund“) and has been joined by Lounge 18 (4th floor) in late 2007.

Bar Rouge is all about modern design, using very little of the original building’s features, apart from the incredible terrace with the fantastic view on the Pudong. Lounge 18’s decor really uses the building much more, as the 4th Floor was originally dedicated to be an art gallery. The careful restoration of the windows, ceiling and interior adds a lot to the atmosphere, giving real feeling of history in the building. The most breathtaking part certainly is the staircase seen by most people on their way to the bars.

The original owner, the Chartered Bank of India, Australia and China was founded in 1853 in London, following the grant of a royal charter from Queen Victoria. The Shanghai branch opened in 1858. It developed in the city, financing trade between India, China and other parts the British Empire. Business must have been good, as the bank built its headquarter on the Bund in 1923. The building was remarkable, competing in style with others along the river… but at the end of the day, it was a bank. In here, like in any bank, people would come in to deposit and take out money, collect their salaries and make investment. Exactly like in today’s Bank of China, people would have a little booklet listing all operations executed on the account. I happened to find one of these booklets from 1940 (picture up and left). The last operation is from September 1941, as probably the client left Shanghai then. Everything was handwritten at the time and very well kept. The Chartered Bank merged with the Standard Bank in 1969 to become “Standard Chartered bank”. After leaving the country in the 1950’s, it has come back many years later as one of the main foreign banks now operating in China. Bund 18 is not a bank anymore, but I think about the booklet every time I go there and the building still is one of the jewel of the Bund.

Last serving on Wujiang Lu

Wujiang lu is one of the most popular and peculiar streets of Shanghai. It’s a restaurant street. My office moved on this street about 4 years ago, before it was actually pedestrianized. Their was not many cars crossing, but every now and then a Shanghai driver would force his way through the crowd. The street was blocked for cars last year, and is full every night with people eating small snacks on sale in the many shops.
When we moved in the tower (in the background of picture left below), the owner of the office proudly told me “All these horrible old buildings will be destroyed in 3 months and they will create a nice park instead”. It was so true that although the building is physically on WuJiang Lu, there is also a postal address on Nanjing Xi Lu… for the time when these buildings will not exist anymore. This was more than 4 years ago and the buildings still stand although the neighborhood has already been destroyed (Click here to see post “Another one bites the dust“). Unfortunately, this is all about to change.

Restaurants are still serving, but shops on the Shi Men Yi Lu side of the blockare already closed down and walled up. Soon will come the last serving on Wu Jiang Lu. The city will loose one it noisiest but also most popular street. This part of Shanghai will become more shiny, more modern and more sterile. Like in other areas, the renovation is a great excuse to destroy very nice old buildings that could be renovated. It surely will make much more money for the developers, but will also greatly alter the landscape of this part of Shanghai.

The block separating Wujiang lu from Nanjing Xi lu is one single building. Like many of the old Shanghai, it is a combination of several styles (art deco mixed with beaux-arts and neoclassical columns). Still there is something really nice about the round shape espousing the street corners (see pictures below). To judge form the construction details and location, this was once a luxury apartments and high class shops building. Renovation could have made a great small boutique shopping center out of it, keeping the corner’s historical view while creating high street shopping… just like this was done on Huai Hai lu. Unfortunately, this is not what will happen and soon this building will be gone. I particularly like the balconies, the columns, the shape of the building and the white shape repeating itself all along the facade. They are detailed on the pictures below. Adieu little building on the corner of Bubbling well road and Yates road.

Royal Asiatic Society Shanghai Branch

The Royal Asiatic Society in Shanghai was an association created to promote “science, literature and art” in relation to Asia and China”. Born in 1857 it grew so much that it had a building near the Bund (picture left), that hosted a museum and a library. A large part of the museum collection (mostly stuffed birds and animals) is today in the Shanghai museum of natural history and most of the library ended up in Xu Jia Hui library along with the Bibliotheca Zikawei from the Jesuits fathers… but the RAS building still stands (picture left). The society published a journal 4 times a year, publishing articles related to Asia and China. In the city of money and trade, a small group of people was working hard to develop culture and intellectual activities.
The Shanghai association was a branch of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland. Although the activity of the society stopped in Shanghai in the late 1940’s, it continued in London, HongKong, Korea, Malaysia and other locations.

A group of (mainly) British people resurrected the society in 2007 and got the accreditation from the RAS in London. Since last year, there is again a Branch of the RAS in Shanghai. Although its membership is still small, it is constantly growing. Like its ancestor, the RAS organise conferences, talks, exhibitions as well as events linked to culture in the city. With its root firmly in the old Shanghai, the city’s history and heritage conservation is high on the agenda but the society’s scope is far from limited to this topic. I had the privilege to be recently elected member of the council governing the society in Shanghai.

On 22nd November, the society will organise its annual event, the RAS “soiree” in the ballroom of the Astor House hotel. This will be an opportunity to celebrate the society’s resurrection, hearing a number of highly interesting speakers about the history of Shanghai and meet representatives of the HongKong Branch of the RAS. If you are interested in becoming a fellow of the RAS or attending the Soiree on 22nd November, please email me: hmartin@shanghailander.net

Visit Shanghai in a vintage sidecar

Old side cars driven by foreigners are a common sight in Shanghai streets on weekend. In good weather, they are a cool way to cruise the tree lined streets of the old French Concession. Looking like 1930’s motorbike, they fit perfectly in the art deco surroundings.

The side cars are from the right period, but they were not available in 1930’s Shanghai. Made for the German army in the 1930’s the original model was only available in Europe. It was a fixture of the German army during World War II and is seen in many movies about this period. It’s only after the war that the Soviet army transported the plant over to USSR, renaming it Ural. Sometimes in the 1950’s, USSR helped creating a copy of the factory near Beijing, to equip the Chinese army. Many years later, the bike caught the eye of a few expats first in Beijing, then in Shanghai. The mechanics has been little changed from the 1930’s original, so these side cars are a piece of the European 1930’s in 1930’s Shanghai. By a twist of history, the bike and the city are a great match, and it’s easy to imagine people cruising old Shanghai one similar bikes… but it probably never happened until a few years ago.

Driving sidecars is not such an easy task. I know a few people driving them to work everyday, but they are not many. Most owners drive them only on weekends… and most Shanghai residents would love to enjoy the fresh air but probably not dare to drive around on ths bike. This is where a new service comes in handy. Shanghai Sideways (www.shanghaisideways.com) is the fruit of a friend and myself. The company offers tours of Shanghai, both the new Shanghai and the old city for tourists and residents. My friend Thomas is crazy about sidecars and drive people around. I have been involved in the tour design, commenting for the historic tours and marketing.

Update: I left Shanghai Sideways in 2011, but the company is still continued. Sidecar are now banned in Shanghai and the company closed in 2020 due to the Covid pandemic. It is still operates under then name Insiders in Morocco (http://marrakechinsiders.com).

To do on a rainy day, Shanghai history museum

Shanghai Oriental Pearl tower Shanghai history museum is one of these things that has been on my to-do list since several years. It took a rainy Sunday to get me to visit it. Focusing on 1920’s Shanghai, it would be perfect somewhere in the old concessions, in a renovated old house recreating colonial charm. At the contrary, it is located under the Oriental Pearl Tower, in the hear of Lujiazui skyscraper’s field. Going there on a rainy Sunday I was not expecting much, but it was a nice surprise.

The display is a nice and easy introduction to old Shanghai. Focusing on life like exhibition, it manages to put a great show and is quite entertaining. It definitely gives you the feel of a time travel to this period. I also appreciated that foreigners and their influence on Old Shanghai was not only described as evil and colonialist as it is still often in China. The show is very much unbiased, showing how the mix of foreign and Chinese influence created a very unique culture in Shanghai.

It is a good introduction to foreigner and Chinese visitors to the past of the incredible city we live in. Hopefully, it will help people to understand Shanghai heritage better. With a nice display about itself, Shanghai is becoming even more of a world city.

The Unexpurgated Diary of a Shanghai Baby

I still don’t understand how come I did not see this book in Shanghai… but bought it in Beijing instead. “The Unexpurgated Diary of a Shanghai Baby” is captioned by Graham Earnshaw as his “favorite book on old Shanghai by a long margin”. I knew the name of Graham Earnshaw throught Tales of Old Shanghai website, but I had not heard about the book before. After flipping through the pages for a minute, I bought on the spot and read it over in the train from North Korea.
The book is the mock diary of a one year old baby living with his parents in HongKou district. First published in 1924, it’s a first hand witness of the life of the Shanghailanders. It is a lot of fun to read about the live of the father going to play golf and spending hours drinking at the club or at the race course. Dady probably works to support the family, but little mention is made of it in the book. Mummy’s main occupation is to give away the baby to the Amah (as Ayi were called then) and take care of her appearance. Staying with the family, Auntie (surely Mama’s younger sister) is going out with a boy or another, but does not seem to have a lot of brain. As all the nearby places the baby goes to are located in HongKou district, mainly “HongKew park” (today’s LuShun Gong Yuan), I guess the family lived in an appartment on Sichuan Bei Lu or the neighboring streets not far from the Suzhou creek.
Like a number of today’s expatriates in Shanghai, the kid is mainly raised by the Chinese Amah, giving us a great view of the life of the chinese domestics in foreign houses. The story of the houseboy stealing socks from the master, or using the lady’s fine garments and toiletries for cleaning purposes are hillarious… and not so far from stories I have heard in today’s Shanghai. The Chinese servants run every practical aspects of the house with the foreign owners having little control or understanding of it. This is also not so different from today’s foreigners’ life in Shanghai.
The writing is easy to read and very humorous, with Elsie Mc Cormick making fun of foreign life in Shanghai. It is a great introduction to old Shanghai, but also contains many details of the period that make in an invaluable resource for research on this topic. The writer went back to the US in the 1930’s and started to write for the New Yorker later on. As a proof of a writer’s quality, you hardly can get better.

Brooklyn Court, Routes des Soeurs

People often ask me why I am so fascinated by old Shanghai. The answer is very simple, there is a sense of mystery about it, of uncovering a past that was long lost. In my (nearly five) years in Shanghai, a lot has been re-discovered and documented… but there is always something more to find.

ARCO logo on the wall

Walking on the Ruijin Er lu, we passed an old building near the corner of Huai Hai Lu one spring evening. The buildings on the East side looks old and tarnished, particularly compared to the newly renovated Estrella Apartment, designed by Laszlo Hudec, on the opposite corner. We were looking at an old door in what was probably its grand entrance, when we noticed the sculpture on the wall (picture left). After some research, it became clear that the “ARCO” sign stands for “Asia Realty Company”. This American company was the largest property owner in Shanghai and had a large office building near the Bund. Like many others, the building has suffered a lot from the lack of maintenance, various episodes of Chinese history and the add-hoc transformation by residents. Despite all this, the sign of the original owner still stands in its place.

Street facade of Brooklyn Court (building left)

The facade on RuiJin Lu has seen better days, but would surely look great after some renovation. The bottom floor of the building is occupied with shops, as probably in the original design. Real-estate in this part of town was surely not cheap when this was built, and has become again very expensive. The building has three entrances, a central one large enough for cars to go through and two smaller one for access to other apartments. The main entrance of Brooklyn court leads to a back yard, passing by entrances to the apartments above and a cross shaped light well (picture down). The left entrance is occupied by a temporary socks shop. The ARCO sign is located right above the shop’s display on both sides. The shopkeeper was really surprised that I wanted to take a picture of this “thing on the wall” that she probably never noticed before.

In my old Shanghai documents collection, there is a rental contract for an apartment in building in what I thought was on Rui Jin Lu. The address of the property was “143H Rue des Soeurs”, not so different from the 143-145 Rui Jin Lu, where the ARCO building is. However, from an old map of the French concession, it shows that this particular section of Rui Jin Lu (from Avenue Joffre / Huai Hai Lu to Avenue Foch / Yanan Lu) was called Rue des Soeurs… the 143 Rue des Soeurs is this particular building. “Brooklyn Court” was clearly an upper class residence. This part of Avenue Joffre was an upscale area, with proximity to the “Cercle Sportif Francais”, The Cathay apartments, the Lyceum Theater, the French Park (now Fuxing Park) as well as the French municipality. This old piece of paper that I bought 2 years ago turns out to be a rental contract for an apartment in this particular building. Too bad it’s not valid anymore… Sounds like a great place to live.

For info about Brooklyn Court, go to post “Return to Brooklyn Court“.

Allez les Belges!

The 2008 Olympic games mainly take place in Beijing, but a small bit is happening is other cities. Of course, all finals and prestigious events will be in Beijing, but other cities got some leftovers. Shanghai was generously granted the right to host a few qualifier football game. It was very difficult to get tickets for Olympic events, and only few people I know actually flew to Beijing to attend. Since we got tickets for a game taking place in Shanghai, two metro stops away from home, we decided to give it a go.
The football game was Belgium – New Zealand, and the Belgium Consulate in Shanghai organized a gathering of Belgian people to support their team. Since the French team was not qualified for the tournament, I became a temporary supporter of the team of our friendly neighbors. The game was fun to watch in this crowd of Belgian expatriates who seem to get back some unity far away from the homeland. The French speaking people were shouting “Allez la Belgique”, the Flemish speaking shouting “Belgie” and the consensus ended up with “Belgium, Belgium” the country name in English (different from the one in French or in Flemish, being sort of a neutral ground). I even heard a few (Bilishe Jia You” Go Belgium” in Chinese). It was a nice evening followed by a few beers in local bar. Taking part (even a small one) in a world event like the Olympic was fun. Final score: Belgium 1, New Zealand 0.

Piazza Regina Elena, Tientsin

This post is not strictly about Shanghai, but about its little less known sister, TianJin. Shanghai colonial is well known, researched and documented… but it was not the only treaty port. Along the Chinese coast other international concessions were built on with foreign buildings, including ShaMienDao (Guangzhou), GuLanYu (Xiamen), Qingdao (old German colony) and Tianjin (Tientsin). Tianjin was surely the most developed of the treaty ports after Shanghai, having been the location for up to 8 concessions (French, English, German, American, Austrian-Hungarian, Russian, Belgian and Italian). I had always heard that very little remain of the old buildings until a friend actually went there and took a tour. In fact, although quite a bit has been destroyed, the Tianjin municipality is doing a great job at keeping and restoring the remains. The most amazing part is probably the Italian concession.
The Italian concession was created in 1902 and is probably the only Italian colony in Asia. It was located on the North side of the Hai He river, between the Russian one and the Austrian-Hungarian one, connected with the French concession by the “International Bridge”. The main attraction is Piazza Regina Elena (earlier named Piazza Marco Polo) and the surrounding streets. The area is a gem as most building are now restored in their original state. It was described as bustling with life and noise before 1949 and was surely overpopulated afterwards, but it is now deserted. The renovation project was supposed to come along with an Italian-Chinese touristic development. Renovation was done by the Chinese part, but the Italian partners seem to have disappeared. The Sunday we were there, streets were empty apart from the occasional car and the weather was really hot. Looking at the statue on Piazza Marco Polo, it felt like we were enjoying the hot summer in a small town in Italy, thousand miles away from China.
Having walked through the English and French concession to reach the Piazza, we were dreaming of pizza and ice cream looking at this Italian ghost town in China. The wait was not in vain, since an Italian restaurant has opened its door in one of the villas around the plaza. “Buitoni’s” chef probably never went near a real Italian dish judging by the poor quality of the pizza. However, along with a nice gelato and an espresso, it just did the trick. It was the perfect end for our short trip to this little piece of Italy in China.

Back from the dark side

I did not write posts recently, going on vacation after weeks of writing slowed down by technical problems. The summer break was a great opportunity to take a step backward from life in Shanghai. My first trip was to Thailand, to relax in a Ko Samui detox resort. Shanghai hectic life comes with a price, and fasting for a few days was a great thing to do. People kept on saying I was so relax when I came back, it must really have done something to me… but this was only a preparation for the main event of the summer, a trip to the Democratic People Republic of Korea, i.e. North Korea. Since there is no Internet and mobile phones are forbidden there, I was out of the world’s touch for nearly a week.
North Korea was a real time travel. Having lived now for more than 12 years in countries that had (or have) a communist regime it was final opportunity to live through what I had heard so much of before… and I was not disappointed. The whole tour was about visiting monuments to the glory of “The Eternal Leader, President Kim Il Soon”… who died about 15 years ago. His son took over, but it’s has Korean barely noticed with Kim Il Soon portraits ubiquitous in the city. Just like people visiting the East block in the 1960’s, we kept on visiting enormous and empty monuments, being repeated the same three ideas again and again, i.e. “The Evil American created the Korean war by attacking us”, “Re-unification of Korea should come immediately, starting with Americans leaving the peninsula”, “Kim Il Soon was the greatest leader of the 20th Century and we owe him our wonderful current conditions”. The brain washing was intense, and after 5 days I got sick of it. We saw only the “nice” part of PyongYang, but its state of disrepair is far beyond any Eastern European cities in the late 80’s. Taking a trip to a small town near the DMZ and the train back to China was a shock. There are simply no cars on the streets out of PyongYang, and walking seems the only mean of transport. We only saw the best part of North Korea, I cannot even imagine what is the worst.
The 5 days trip highlight was the Arirang festival, the world famous Mass Games that counts roughly 100.000 participants. The show was fantastic, comparable (if not bigger) to the Olympic games opening ceremony. North Korea is not a high tech country, so the show mainly relies on thousands of dancers. The most impressive is surely the backdrop of the stage, with 30.000 kids sitting there showing colored cards that create a giant animated mosaic. The show itself is well worth the travel, and helps to forget about the rest of the tour that is not the nicest travel I have done so far.
Coming back to China was a real relief. North Korea is surely similar to China in the 60’s or 70’s and going there helped understand what Chinese people have been through. I don’t think I have ever been so happy to be back in China. It was like coming back to reality, 21st century… and freedom (!). My first action back to Shanghai was to go to my favourite French restaurant and enjoy a meal on a terrace with a glass of wine, trying to forget the prison feeling from North Korea as soon as possible. Unfortunately, coming back to China, I also learned about the sudden death of the one friend that I wanted to share my North Korea trip with. He will be dearly missed.