Shanghai’s Sun Yat-sen Birthday Statue
On November 12 1933, grand birthday celebrations for Sun Yat-sen were underway in Shanghai. The birthday of the "father of the nation", whose 1911 revolution ended more than 2,000 years of imperial rule, had been celebrated since his death in 1925, and on this autumn day at the Greater Shanghai City Hall, a grand statue of ...
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McTyeire: The School for China’s Daughters
Young women in smart uniforms run down the wide steps, ponytails flying, laughing and talking. Clusters of girls sit and chat on the green lawn that fronts the grand building with its own turret. At first glance, they seem like adolescent girls anywhere, but look closer, and the girls of the Shanghai No.3 Girls’ Middle ...
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The Chaste Widow of the Shanghai Racetrack
The Chaste Widow’s Monument, an 18th century memorial arch on the old racecourse, was a legacy of Shanghai before the foreigners came, a bow to an ancient Confucian virtue that stood stubbornly on the racecourse infield until the 1950s. Restored in the 1940s by shipping tycoon and Shanghailander Eric Moller, it was one of ...
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1950s Shanghai Fashion: Making New Clothes from Old
In 1957, Shanghai fashion was all about recycling: turning old clothes into new. That year, the Shanghai Clothing Company published a pattern book, “Making New Clothes From Old”, with patterns to turn your bourgeois changshan (men's gown) into something more proletarian. Inside, there are patterns to turn an ...
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Tour Report: Inside Marble Hall, The Kadoorie Mansion
Old Shanghai was a city full of exquisite mansions, yet even so, Elly Kadoorie’s Marble Hall was considered the most beautiful of all. On Saturday, August 5, Historic Shanghai visited this jewel. Here's the story. “It is palatial ….built on a lavish scale, yet not ostentatious.” – North-China Herald, March 22, ...
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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 went! The Community ...
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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 quarter-century. Keven Café, in the ...
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