Old Shanghai Beers
By The Little Museum of Foreign Brand Advertising in the R.O.C (MOFBA) // For almost 30 years, a single brand dominated the local Shanghai beer market: U.B. (友啤), created by the Shanghai Union-Brauerei AG. As its name suggests, U.B. had German roots: it was incorporated in 1912 by a German ...
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Shanghai Community Church
The Community Church has been on this spot on Hengshan Road since 1925, a gathering place for song and prayer for nearly a century. It’s been closed for most of the last three (Covid) years, but now, in the midst of renovation, a door was open, the workers were looking the other way, so in we ...
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Last Call: Keven Café, the French Concession’s Diner
Last call at Keven Café, the western restaurant that became the French Concession’s beloved neighborhood diner. The café, which closes today, sat unassumingly on leafy Hengshan Road for 25 years, a comfortingly enduring presence amidst the meteoric transformations of the last ...
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Farewell, Betty Grebenschikoff: A Shanghai Ghetto Survivor’s Lessons of the Holocaust
Shanghai has lost a treasure with the passing, earlier this month, of Betty Grebenschikoff, one of the most active members of the Shanghai Jewish refugee community. Born Ilse Margot Kohn in Berlin in 1929, she and her family fled to Shanghai in 1939, where she lived until 1950. Betty in ...
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The Astoria Confectionary & Tea-Room
When Kyriaco Dimitriades arrived in Shanghai in the 1920s, he was young, ambitious and ready to make his fortune. When he left, in 1949, he had created an icon: the Astoria Confectionary & Tea-Room, which sold bread, pastries and the city's most gorgeous wedding cakes. His daughter, Daphne ...
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Bookshelf: The Sassoons: The Great Global Merchants and the Making of an Empire
In Shanghai, the grand Art Deco Peace Hotel on the Bund is the most recognizable legacy of a global empire that flourished here for nearly a century. Yet the Peace Hotel (originally the Cathay Hotel) and its famous bon vivant owner, Sir Victor Sassoon, were the final chapter in the story of the ...
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The Street Formerly Known As Wulumuqi Road
As Wulumuqi Road street signs were taken down in the wake of protests that began early Sunday morning, rumors were flying that the street name may be changed--again. Although most of the street signs do remain, it seems like a good time to take a look at the century-long history of this street, and the ...
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