Historic Shanghai Year in Review 2019
In our 21st year, we spent more time than we would have liked racing to see neighborhoods before they vanish. Laoximen, Xiaonanmen, Jinling Road, Hongkou, Siwen Li – the list goes on. The Laoximen neighborhood is slated for redevelopment, and although most residents have moved out, it remains our most popular ...
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Shanghai’s Hidden Ming Temple
In a narrow lane off the Nanjing Road pedestrian street stands a small, shabby box of a building. It’s no match for the flash and buzz of the famous street, yet its powers are so mighty that it has remained part of Shanghai life since the Ming Dynasty. On the roof, a plain red sign with two bright yellow ...
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The Ultimate Historic Shanghai Gift Guide 2019
‘Tis the season – the shopping season, that is – so it’s time for our annual guide of the very best gifts that celebrate Shanghai’s unique heritage. Pro tip: for one-stop Shanghai heritage shopping, Madame Mao's Dowry is the best place in town, hands down. 207 Fumin Lu/Julu Lu, and tell 'em we sent you. ...
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5 Reasons to Visit the Old City Right Now
This autumn, we’ve seen the atmospheric Old Chinese City disappearing with unprecedented speed. Sure, it’s been slowly vanishing for years, but a recent visit saw one of our favorite sections demolished, and recently living neighborhoods emptied out and boarded up. The recent rapid clip adds an urgency to taking a last ...
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Cicadas: Shanghai’s Summer Song
"All the different kinds of cicada are now in full song .... most noticeable is the longdrawn song of the big black cicada, whose strident screech fills the air for periods of half a minute to a minute at a time, ceases for a while, and then starts again." Arthur de Carle Sowerby, Nature Notes, 1938 The Shanghai Summer ...
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Shanghai’s Forgotten Courtyard
You’d think there’d be no more surprises left in Shanghai - surely drones, digital maps, and amateur historians have unearthed them all. But here, just a building’s breadth from busy Wulumuqi Lu, stands a timeless Chinese courtyard house. Imagine away everything around it, and this house could be from a thousand ...
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Historic Shanghai’s Best Books of 2018
Shanghai’s history could never be painted with a single brush, a single perspective, a single tale. Perhaps that’s true of all cities, but it’s especially so in this cosmopolitan metropolis, where east and west, communism and capitalism, tradition and revolution, coexisted. And to complicate things further, Shanghai’s ...
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