About Us
Historic Shanghai was founded in 1998 by Tess Johnston, Patrick Cranley, and Tina Kanagaratnam with the goal of preserving Shanghai’s unique history by raising awareness and appreciation of the city’s remarkable built heritage and social and cultural history.
We do this through city walks, telling the stories of Shanghai through its historic architecture. We might take a deep dive on a single street, or focus on a theme, like Gangsters of Old Shanghai,” or a neighborhood, a time period, a personality, a book, or film. We enhance the walks with a book club, Old Shanghai films, and occasional talks.
Our tours have been featured in the New York Times, Sydney Morning Herald, DestinAsian, Lufthansa, Iberia, and Air Canada inflight magazines — and CNN called us one of the reasons Shanghai is the world’s greatest city!
27 years later, we’re still trying to answer the questions we started out asking: how was it that a Chinese coastal city came to have such a rich stock of prewar western architecture, Art Deco buildings everywhere, a wild, flamboyant, 1930s, a safe haven for European Jews, and the founding city of the Communist Party of China?
The more answers we find — in the ephemera of the old markets, in oral histories, and random conversations with residents, maps, memoirs and memories, directories, photographs, books, music, film, and literature, in the buildings themselves, even in food — the more questions come up, like bamboo shoots after rain.
At the beginning, the pursuit was complicated by the fact that parts of Shanghai’s multilayered history have been deliberately neglected or forgotten. While that’s still a factor, today the complication is gentrification, which all too often goes hand-in-hand with destruction. Our best advice: come see it now, for the one thing that’s guaranteed in Shanghai, old and new, is change.
Curious about Old Shanghai? Join us on a walk through its incredible history, and learn more.
Historic Shanghai operates under the auspices of AsiaMedia/Unity Trading Ltd.
About Our Founders
Patrick Cranley
Tina Kanagaratnam
Tess Johnston
Research Assistance
Researching old Shanghai and/or your family history in Shanghai? Tell us what you’re working on, and if we have material in our collection that can help, we’ll be happy to share, or to point you to an expert in the field.
Contact us at: info@historic-shanghai.com