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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Old Shanghai Eggnog
Oh, how they loved eggnog in old Shanghai. But of course: it was very boozy, very fun, and very rich, which is a pretty apt description for the spirit of old Shanghai. And luckily for us, their recipes survive. So just in time for Christmas partying, we bring you a pair of delightful, delicious 1920s ...
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Top 10 Historic Shanghai Gifts: Our Annual Guide
Revolutionary ornaments. 1932 maps. Old Shanghai memoirs. Mao-rabilia. There are gifts, and then there are Shanghai heritage gifts for the true aficionados. If you've got one in your life*, you know we're a little harder to buy for, so we've done the hard work for you: Historic Shanghai has curated the top 10 gifts that ...
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Stray Birds on the Huangpu: A History of Indians in Old Shanghai
The image of the turbanned Sikh policeman, hong tou ah-san to generations of Chinese, remains the popular image of Indians in old Shanghai. But the reality that editors Mishi Saran and Dr. Zhang Ke unveil in their new bilingual anthology, Stray Birds on the Huangpu: A History of Indians in Shanghai (Shanghai People’s Fine ...
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Inside Old Shanghai’s American Club
September, 2025: The 1924 Georgian jewel on Fuzhou Road sits empty, once again. The guards are gone, the Financial Court—its most recent incarnation—has packed up and moved across the river. Too many financial crimes to fit into this six-storey building, hmm? So the building that began life as Old Shanghai’s ...
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