Building Shanghai

I had this book stored on my shelf since I bought it a few months ago. Winter coming, bad weather and renewed interest kind of melted together pushing me to open it again. "Building Shanghai" looks at first like of those coffee table books, that you look at every now and then and you leave around just to look nice when people come and visit you. This book is really nice to look at, but it's also much more than that. It's a history of Shanghai from an architectural point of view. With several maps of the old Shanghai compared with the new one, I was able to locate quite a number of buildings I had noticed in the street and know about their history and architectural style. What is more fascinating is to look at some of those photograph, and to realize that I passed some great buildings every day without notice them... as they have been covered or altered with terrible expansions or additions that make impossible to recognize anymore.
As much as I am appalled by the current destruction of Shanghai architectural heritage, I also have to admit that destroying grand building a few years old to replace them by something even grander has always been part of the Shanghai history, and that some buildings that we revere today as antics were horrible creations mixing very diverse kind of styles in Frankenstein-like creation. Similarly in the old and new Shanghai, architects are pushed over the limits by landlord willing to deliver a message with their buildings... but only end up showing how bad tastes they have.
Finally I enjoyed in this book the great love of the authors for the old Shanghai and it's preservation... as well as the love of Shanghai as a modern city and how to continue it's expansion while avoiding expending it's monstrous aspect to much. I'm not sure this has been the priority of Shanghai's planners until now... but hopefully this attitude is already changing in some districts.

Calling Wallis

Now living in the world of email, VOIP and blogs... it's sometimes difficult to remember the time when all these tools did not exist, and people had to wait for days to be able to communicate from remote places like Shanghai to their home country. Nearer to us, I often explain the difficulties to send a fax to my mother back down in the beautiful Islands of Wallis and Futuna when I lived in Hungary. As this archipealgo lost in the Pacific Ocean is a French (!) territory, the majority of the communication would take place through France. Due to the lack of traffic, operators in other countries would not even program the country code in their phone system. People from there could call us, but could not be called.
Sending a fax was my regular entertainement on Sunday evening. After hand-writing the message, I would start the painful experience of transmitting it. The first time that I tried to do it, I used the normal fax-sending procedure, i.e. I dialled the fax number with the 681 country code. The surprise came when I heard a voice in Hungarian repeating something that I understood after several times to be "the country code your are using does not exist". The only solution was to find the operator for international calls at Matav (the Hungarian telecom company). This took me quite some time, as very few people actually require this service and it's not advertised in phone books. This really challenged my (then burgeoning) Hungarian. I finally reached the operator, explaining that I wanted to send a fax to this weird location with its even weirder country code. I then spent about 5 to 10 minutes to explain to the operator that this country and country code actually existed. This had to be repeated every time I wanted to send a fax. After convincing the operator of the very existence of this place and giving him re-assurance of my mental sanity, I would over hear him calling the France Telecom international operator, going like "Hello, I have this mad guy willing to place a call to a country that does not exist, but claiming that France Telecom may be able to do it." Then, France Telecom operator would answer something like "Yesse, zis is ze country code ove Wallis et Futuna. Pliz old on, I will connect you". Then, I would wait for a few seconds and the phone would start ringing to my Mum's house... in the best case. Most of the time, I would overhear the France Telecom operator saying "I am sorry. Ze line is occupied at the moment. I will call you back when ze line is available". Then I would wait for minutes and sometimes hours for "ze line to be available". As I had to be ready to talk or send the fax at the appropriate moment, my only hope was to sit next to the phone with a book, until (up to 2 hours later), the Matav operator would call back. The only four satellite phone lines to the archipelago were far insufficient.

Though this repeated experience sounds like from the middle-age, it took place in 1996-97. For Chinese and inhabitants of the Eastern Europe, it does not sound so far away, as all international calls used to be like that until not so long ago. I'm sure calling Europe and the USA from the old Shanghai was a similar experience.

Les Francais de Shanghai

The French concession of Shanghai was run by French and under French law, an enclave in the middle of China. Although French people settled it, many more nationalities were added on the way. Portuguese, Russians fleeing the revolutions, Jews fleeing persecutions in Europe and of course Chinese. I recently read a book about the French people that lived in the French concession, “Les Francais de Shanghai” (i.e. "The French people of Shanghai").

This book is not a novel, it’s not a thesis or a real biography of Shanghai either… it’s a little bit of all. The book is built in many small chapters, each of them telling stories and anecdotes about a particular French person or family of the old Shanghai. The author used a lot of research, old documents and interviews of people who actually lived in the old Shanghai, or their descendants. It gives little snaps of the daily life in old Shanghai, details that have not much importance taken one by one but together create an atmosphere, a moving picture of the old Shanghai.

I read the book within a weekend, losing a lot of sleep on it as I was fascinated by the characters and stories. It is full of information I had never seen before, including the history of famous institutions such as the university, hospitals and churches that one still can see today. It also give great information about the influence of the Jesuites priests in the development of the city, as well as more information about some famous people (de Montigny, Dubai, Moller). I particularly enjoyed the part about police and gangsters in the old Shanghai, discovering that a house very near from mine used to be the "Poste de police Petain", complement of the "Poste de Police Joffre" that I already knew of a little further on the road. I was sitting on my sofa while reading, in my 1920’s apartment in the heart of the French concession and I felt like being transported through time.

Readings occupied my mind fully, and when I had to go out for survival shopping it was a shock to re-discover XXIst century cars …when I was expecting 1930’s Renaults or Peugeots. This book was a great travel in itself, making old Shanghai even more vivid. After "Les Francais de Shanghai", I will continue looking for great books like this one, completing my knowledge of the past of this great city.