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 ...
>
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 ...
>
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 — ...
>
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 ...
>
Shanghai Shoot ‘Em Society
If you need proof that living in Old Shanghai really was like being in a Bonnie and Clyde movie, consider the story of the Shanghai Shoot ‘Em Society, reported in colorful detail in The China Press newspaper. It was November 24, 1929, just a month after the dramatic stock market crash in the U.S. A group described by ...
>
The Shanghai Beret Project
Meet the beret-wearing gentlemen of Shanghai. It's a classic Shanghai sight: older Chinese men sporting rakish berets. The iconic headwear of the French never seems to have gone out of style among gentlemen of a certain age in Shanghai, a legacy formed during the period of the French ...
>
Remembering Shanghai: A Memoir of Socialites, Scholars and Scoundrels
We've lost one of the last voices of Old Shanghai with the passing of Isabel Sun Chao on March 13 2023, just a day after her 92nd birthday. Luckily for us, Isabel shared her story with us in her memoir, Remembering Shanghai. Spend a little time in Shanghai and it becomes clear that the history of the city can best be ...
>