London recalling

Shanghailanders like me are used to the mix of architecture that makes 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 (in my opinion) much better than the present raws of unimaginative apartment buildings or ugly office tower.
It's only when coming to European capitals that one suddenly realizes how similar buildings in Shanghai are diverse as well as imitating to 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. I have not been to Spain yet, but I can imagine that "Spanish" style houses like the one I live in in Shanghai can also be found there.
I had a similar revelation walking on Marelyborne road these days. I ran into the Court of Westminster (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.

Paramount's suicide

Paramount Club was the hippest dancing hall in old Shanghai. The main hall had a big orchestra playing jazz and twist tunes for the enjoyment of the dancing crowd. Taxi girls, romance and gangsters in the corners, Paramount had it all. Fortunately, the building survived until today, having kept it's tower and a big part of its style. It is still a landmark of Shanghai. The top floor or the building still hosts a broadway style musical. It is far from broadway's quality but one can have diner in style there, while watching a live musical. It's not what it used to be, but the old lady still manages to keep up appareances. Going to the paramount show is one of those old Shanghai moments that I affectionate so much.
The outside of the building has more or less kept it's original shape and inside was also preserved in original state... until recently. This is the much talked about renovation of the Paramount. I had heard about it and ended up one night there. Having seen the original I was expecting the worse... and the worse it is. Some Taiwanese investor spread a large amount of money on this venerable old lady and it just turns into a disaster. The entrance has been transformed with bad design, not to mention the chandeliers (cheap copies of the Bar Rouge ones). This is supposed to impress... it probably does impress peasants from the country side, but Paramount's lobby is very far to be the most elegant or the most original of Shanghai's bars. The entrance is bad enough, but the main room is the worst. If you like nightclubs in second and third tiers cities in China... you will feel right at home in the new Paramount. There is not one single fixture from the old room that can be recognized. Everything has been done to destroy or cover the old walls. Any brand new shopping center or 1970's concrete building could have been built the same way. Forget the original parquet, the balconies and the charm of this old lady.
The worst is not even there. Without the old colonial atmosphere of Glamour Bar or Face, bar Rouge designers managed to hide the age and create a hype and highly original place. Muse or Muse2 (ex Wynn's win) designers did the same in another genre, and all those places definitely have an originality and an atmosphere. One may not like them all, but they are memorable. Paramount is memorable for it's dullness. I am sure that the new owner spent millions to redecorate it, but it does not get anywhere near the above mentioned. Paramount clearly remind me of clubs I visited in Chengdu or in Guilin... not of Shanghai's cream of the crop. The worst is probably that the sound was so bad in the building. Please somebody teach them how to set there sound system properly.
I have read a number of articles flattering this new club... we must not have been to the same place... or the articles were written after a few free boozes generously offered by the club. The saddest part of the story is not that some Taiwanese spent a lot of money on creating something that is just bad. This could have been done anywhere, without destroying one of the few remaining Shanghai's old icons. When some parts of the old Shanghai are used to create mix of the old and the new, Paramount's owners just did not get anywhere.

The return of the Dauphine

Jianguo lu (ex Route Frelupt) is one of these small streets in Shanghai old French concession. Walking around it, one can admire an long line of old villas, sometimes interrupted by a small cubic building from the 1970's. A lot of these villas have not been touched for years, but slowly these old ladies get a face lift and recover their former glory.
I noticed one of those building, with street side Grey and dirty, unwelcoming walls topped with barb wires. My own apartment is not so far from it, so I cycle around it quite often. Looking between the gate doors, I could see that this military building was the Dauphine, one of the landmark of Leonard & Vesseyre, the architecture company that built most of the Art Deco buildings in the French Concession. The walls were Grey and looked uncared for. It is clear that the building was used by the Chinese army and that they did not care about it. The inside of the building was probably not renovated, just covered by layer of dirt but near to its original state. But due to it's military status, the Dauphine Building and its garden were out of touch for old Shanghai's amateurs like me.
I was cycling along one of those lazy Saturdays of summer, when I realized that the door to the Dauphine was open. As a matter of fact, they were doing work on the pavement in front of the building. I rushed home to take my camera backpack. Playing the innocent, I talked my way in pretending to just have a look. The building looks great again as the outside renovation has kept the old look. As opposed to other renovations of Art Deco building, the original shape has been kept untouched. Balconies have been left open and the original iron windows have been kept in place and not replaced by horrible plastic sliding windows. The tiling on the facade has also been kept in it's original state. The Dauphine looks just as it did 70 years ago. The outside is a great work of preservation.
I walked into the garden and then got through the entrance door. Inside view was far from thrilling, as the building interior has been gutted and replaced by modern imitation. Fake marble is everywhere and I am sure gold will be splashed all around. The work is far from finished and I only could stay there a few minutes before being asked to go... but it's clear that interior was not part of the preservation program. The return of the Dauphine is both a good and a bad surprise. It's a great outside renovation (apart from the garden that is getting its kitch touch) recreating the Grand Shanghai atmosphere from a building left in abandon. At the same time, the original interior is gone away as are all the furniture and fixtures, another post-modern minimalistic fake interior replacing the original art deco. I guess I should look at the bright picture and enjoy the bright new outside... and the fact that this great building was at least saved from destruction. Too bad for the interior though.

Life at the end of the lane

Old Zhang is sitting in his home, at the end of the lane, looking at the cranes tearing down the street. “I was born in this street, and now they break it down. It does not look so good but I am used to it and to this neighborhood. ‘Your house is not just a shag, it’s a jewel of XIXth century colonial architecture.’ I’m not sure what it means, but it’s what a passing by foreigner told me with his terrible Chinese. He also told me that the cube of a house next door was a jewel of Art Deco. I am not sure what he meant about either but this all seamed pretty important for him. It does not matter anymore, he has gone away and they torn down this house last week.
They told me that it’s for the best, that our life in a far away suburb, in a new high rise building will be so much comfortable. It’s surely true, but I don’t want to go. It’s not the little money they want to give us to move away, that will be enough in any case. I can’t remember the name of this new place and I don’t even want to learn it. All my friends will be lost, spread into various districts, and I will loose all my life with it. It’s maybe the future, but I’m not sure I want to be part of it. The past was tough some times, but not always so bad. I am so sad for Shanghai and my home that the skyscrapers are rapidly eating.
My son already moved to this new apartment and loves it. He often comes by to take me there, but I still refuse to go. Old Ma, my old neighbor, moved into one of this new tower about a year ago. He was the first ones to go, moving with a smile on his face, realizing the long life dream to have a place of his own. He had been promised long time ago to get an apartment and it finally came. He disappeared for a while, and then started to come back. He comes here everyday now. It takes him hours to cross the whole city, just to enjoy old friends and familiar places. He says life is comfortable there, but there is nobody to talk to. My life has always been at the end of this lane and I can’t imagine it differently. Seeing it disappear makes me feel that I am also going to die soon.

Malacca... the Chinese settlement

My last trip took me to Malaysia for business. I decided to add one day of holiday to it going to the old city of Malacca. Like Shanghai, Malacca was a western settlement in an Asian country. The first to settle were the Portuguese, replaced by the Dutch and then the British until independence in the 1950's. What really links Shanghai and Malacca is the large Chinese communities that settled in Malacca since the 17th century. This give to the city a whole new dimension. Like in Shanghai Chinese design and western technology mixed to create buildings that are very unique.
Most of the Malacca houses have the traditional shape of 2 story's Chinese house with the shop facing the street and the living quarters above them. The typical Malacca style mixes it with western details such as Corinthian style column top, painting of colorful flowers on the walls. This mix of western and Chinese style are quite similar to the one to be found in China's Guandong province, in particular around Kaiping. I could also see number of buildings with colored glass windows like one can see on buildings in Shanghai. Buildings from the 1930's and later often have iron windows like the one in my apartment in Shanghai.
The whole Chinese city of Malacca has a very nice colonial atmosphere. Many cafes are open to the street. My two preferred places where the Lin Loke Wee Coffee Shop, at the corner of Jalan Tokong and Jalan Portugis (just the name of the street is an evocation to travel). This a very local place, in a corner building surely from 1930's. Age old wooden chairs, wooden table with stone top, the decor has not changed for decades, not even the fridge in the back that seems straight out of 50's movie. You can have noodles, drink the local soja drink or a great ice coffee with milk or Sugar. This place is authentic Malacca style.
A little further on Jonker is street is the new and attractive Geographer Cafe. A modern place with a travel feeling to it, it's keeps the colonial atmosphere while creating a modern touch to it. This place reminded me of other travels cafes I have been to, like the Foreign Correspondent Club in Phnom Penh. Decor is great, food was fine (a little too western to my taste... but great to tourists). I enjoy it tremendously... The decor upstairs is all made with antic maps, old pictures and postcards... not far off my dream cafe if I ever make one.
Jonker street, the central street of the Chinese city is also packed with antic shops, that I visited looking for treasures and ending up buying a number of things... including the promotion flyer for "Fantomas", a French film from the 1970's. It was just so out of it's place that I could not resist. Looking for Shanghai related items, I found a postcard send to the "Hotel des Colonies" in the French concession. This will be developed in a further posting.

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.

Another one bites the dust

On the back side of my office building, there is a small lane running between old houses. I often walk it on the way home, to avoid the crowd of the surrounding boulevards. It is lively but quiet, kids playing around and people chatting from one house to the other in a tranquillle atmosphere... right in the middle of modern Shanghai. This is one of my "secret passages" through the old Shanghai shikumens. The picture left shows this little alley going throughout the houses, surrounded by brand new skyscrapers towers. During my trip, I cross two separate sections, one that is of very good construction art-deco style (the first two rows on the picture), the other one of lower quality 1920's houses.
I walked through it recently, and realized that many of the small streets were strangely empty, people having abandoned furniture outside and many windows being left open. I looked around for an explanation, and I suddenly noticed the large posters that were sticked on many walls. Although I still cannot read so much Chinese, it did not take me long to understand that they were official government posters, and that the date of 10th August 2006 (i.e. yesterday) was written on then. I was reading the evacuation notice, the death sentence of my beloved back street. These beautiful art-deco brick houses will soon be destroyed, probably replaced by another tasteless modern complex of building featuring "luxury" apartments, shopping center and offices. I can already see banners repeating again and again arguments for destroying this piece of architecture and history, the race for modernity. I am not so sure those people will love to be relocated from the house they have lived in all their life in the city center to modern aseptic housing settlements, miles away in the suburbs, cut apart from their life long community. The neighborhood is probably happily waiting for the next one of these all-in-ones developments, with another shopping center looking like an advertising for luxury chains of hotels or international credit cards, where the same brands as anywhere else will be sold in an sterile environment.
I do not want sound like opposing progress, as I know that Shanghai still needs a lot of economical development. At the same time, remains of the old Shanghai are disappearing so fast that the city's history will soon be visible in museums only. I mentioned before that this little road crosses through two different groups of building. The second one was clearly not well built and some houses are about to collapse after 60 years without maintenance. I don't think there is much to do about this section, apart from tearing it down and rebuilding above it. However, the first smallest section is made of beautiful art-deco style buildings of high quality, still looking great after all this neglect. Every time I pass here, I try to imagine how this section of eight or ten houses could be restored and transformed into beautiful shops, cafes and restaurants enjoying sunny terraces. Few examples of this kind already exist in China, and the location could have made it an ideal shopping and entertainment area, right next to the main business district. Maybe I am a little too European liking old buildings so much, just dreaming about creating nice living conditions in a city were people are just obsessed by fleeing far away as soon as they have made their money. In any case, this dream of a little corner of enjoyment in the middle of the skyscrapers while keeping some valuable history is just about to disappear. To destroy its past is probably the fastest, but not necessarily the nicest way for Shanghai to become a world city.

Pudong tower at sunset

It was a bright and sunny afternoon. I decided to walk a little in Pudong, after my meeting next to DongFang Lu. I walked back toward Lu Jia Zui, waiting for a friend to call back for maybe having a coffee together. As this friend never called back, I hanged around this area a little, taking pictures as the sky was blue (rare in Shanghai nowadays because of the pollution). This side of the tower was enlighten by the sun, enhancing this golden color.
It's always funny to me, how people associate taking pictures with being a tourist. I guess that only tourist actually take pictures. The rest of us (like me most of the time), just pass in front of buildings and situation, without really seing them anymore. Blue sky days are rare in Shanghai, so I am carrying my camera with me all the time, just to be able to snap with an opportunity comes along.

JingJiang Hotel Cafe, Avenue du Roi Albert (Now Maoming Lu)

I have passed so many times in front of this landmark of Shanghai that is the Jing Jiang Hotel. Tonight, I was walking next to it on the way home and decided to visit it for a change. So I am having a Cafe Late in the upstairs Cafe. One gets through the underground entrance to the hotel, and the Cafe is on the first floor, after climbing the grand stairs. The furnising is certainely not the original from the 1930's and the renovation has been done without really taking care of the original decor, but this place still has an atmosphere. Like in all the JingJiang hotels, the service is mediocre and the company is mostly exploiting the grandeur of the buildings taken over at liberation.

It feels like air of old times in here, looking through cafe glass roof towards the hotel walls. The music is tasteless and very few people sit in the cafe. At roughly 7:00pm, I am about the only customer. It's easy to think about all the activity that was happening here in the 30's, and how this point of the French concession was clearly the center of the activity. The Lyceum Theater, the Club Sportif and the Cathay Cinema are just few steps away, this place must have been the ideal place for a coffee before the entertainment. Sitting here, I cannot help thinking about the Astoria Hotel in Budapest, or another old hotel in Prague that I forgot the name of.

With all the new hotels being build in Shanghai (starting with the new JingJiang next door), it's easy to understand why there is so little activity here, but sitting here is a time travel to old Shanghai.

Xi Shi Bell tower

Xi Shi Bell Tower. This was the result of 2 weeks ago trip to a street apart from Sichuan Bei Lu. It's nicknamed "Famous People Street" by chinese as several famous people lived on this street, including Lu Xun, one of the famous modern Chinese writers.
The street has been pedestrianised, and houses are being renovated. One of the feature is this bell tower. There is not plate indicating the date of construction as on many old buildings in Shanghai, but it's clearly early 20's century. The style is somewhat similar to the one of the now museum of modern art (used to be Jockey Club) on people Square (used to be on the Shanghai horse race track).
The area of this tower is now completely transformed into a modern housing section. There are still old building around, but they probably will soon disappear.