The Early Shanghai Photographs of Pierre Gendron
Sometime between the 1880s and early 1900s, a Frenchman named Pierre Gendron photographed Shanghai. And miraculously, his glass stereoscopic slides, some of the earliest photographs of Shanghai in existence, have survived. As a banker based in Hué (which was then French Indochina), Pierre traveled throughout the region—to ...
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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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Cai Zhen: Painter of Old Shanghai
Inspired by her own heritage, Cai Zhen paints the heritage buildings of old Shanghai, bathing them in sunlight and vibrant color. [caption id="attachment_2288" align="alignleft" width="224"] Cai Zhen, self portrait[/caption] We first encountered Madame Cai at an art exhibition featuring the watercolor paintings of architect ...
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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 years ...
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A Chinese artist, a cartoon boy, and a former French Concession house
by Maura Elizabeth Cunningham Zhang Leping (1910–1992) was a Chinese cartoonist, most famed for his Sanmao the Orphan comics. In the late 1920s, Zhang moved from his coastal hometown to Shanghai, where he quickly found work as a commercial artist and cartoonist. He debuted the Sanmao the Orphan comics — China’s ...
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Inside Old Shanghai’s American Club
Even with decades of unwashed grime and a chipped façade, the Georgian edifice on Fuzhou Road always maintained its grace, unbowed even by the unsavory photographs of crime busts displayed on its stately brick walls in the days when it served as a court. So it’s especially nice to see the onetime American Club getting a ...
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