The Shanghai Foreigners’ Cemetery
Every year on Tomb-Sweeping Day or Qingming 清明, Chinese honor their ancestors by cleaning their graves and leaving offerings. But the graves in the Shanghai Foreigners’ Cemetery remain quiet. The staff, bless them, meticulously clean and maintain the graves, leaving a single carnation on each one. But there are no ...
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Shanghai Spring: Violet Cress, An Ancient Hero, and a Peace Sign
Tiny violet flowers breaking through the wintry ground: It's one of the first signs of spring in Shanghai. The emergence of the Chinese violet cress (Orychophragmus violaceus) every March is a reassuring sign that no matter what else is going on in the world, spring will come. Violet cress appears during the solar ...
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Tower of Vice: Shanghai’s Great World
There’s no more notorious symbol of Old Shanghai’s underworld than the pleasure palace that was the Great World—after all, this tiered wedding cake of a building was owned by one of the most powerful gangsters in the city: Huang Jinrong, aka Pockmarked Huang. Read on, for the story: But when the Great World ...
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Shanghai’s Sun Yat-sen Statue
A hundred years ago today, on March 12 1925, Sun Yat-sen drew his last breath. The untimely death of the man who overthrew imperial Qing rule and put China on the road to modernity ushered in a multitude of commemorations around the country and around the world: a mausoleum, memorial halls, statues in his likeness. Sun was ...
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Betty Grebenschikoff: A Shanghai Ghetto Survivor’s Lessons of the Holocaust
On Sunday February 16, 2pm, we'll visit the former Shanghai Jewish Ghetto, where we'll hear the incredible stories of 20,000 people who fled Nazi Europe for the safe haven of Shanghai. People like Betty Grebenschikoff. To book: https://jinshuju.net/f/keytg2 Betty Grebenschikoff was one of the most active members of the ...
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Memories of Chinese New Year in Old Shanghai
新年快乐！Xin Nian Kuai Le! As we welcome the Year of the Horse in a world of WeChat hongbaos and electronic firecrackers, we wondered: what was Chinese New Year like in Old Shanghai? So we went to the experts: the men and women who grew up here. Here are their memories of Shanghai Chinese New Years past, from the 1930s ...
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The Shanghai Garden in Winter: Wintersweet
Take a whiff - it's the season for fragrant wintersweet (la mei, 蜡梅*), and somewhere in a Shanghai lane or garden, a tree is flowering. They appear in winter's barren landscape right at that moment when it feels that all hope is lost and spring will never come, its yellow blossoms the promise of spring sunshine. Song ...
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