The Tycoon & The Artist at No. 3 Baoqing Road
Psst! Wanna get inside two hard-to-get-into heritage villas? You’ve come to the right place. Getting inside the Shanghai Symphony Museum’s heritage buildings is said to be one of the city’s most difficult entrées, but this Saturday (July 12), Historic Shanghai is in. More info here. Read on for the story!
Zhou Zongliang’s family compound sprawls behind a tall fence on Baoqing Lu, the former Rue Pottier. Peer through the slats and you can catch a fleeting glimpse of a lush garden, red roofs … of another world. Zhou bought the grand European-style mansion in 1930, and although Chinese sources say that the original owner was German, the house tells a different story. An original stained glass window, miraculously preserved, depicts the City of Bergen’s coat of arms, suggesting that the original owner was a proud Norwegian.
Zhou installed a pair of Russian guards at the entrance, along with his four wives and sixteen children. He was 55, his lucrative career as a comprador behind him, and this house was the crowning symbol of his achievements.
Zhou Zongliang 周宗良: The Pigment Tycoon
Zhou was born in 1875 to a paint shop owner and part-time Christian preacher in the bustling treaty port of Ningbo. Educated in Christian schools, he acquired an impressive fluency in English, so much so that he acted as a translator for a young German man, Benjamin Gromen, who was visiting Ningbo in the hope of expanding his pigment and dye business. In 1905, Zhou landed a job as runner at the comprador’s office of Gromen’s business, the China Import-Export Bank A.G. (谦信洋行), and Gromen made sure that the Zhou had opportunities to grow. He did well–so well, in fact, that when the firm’s comprador, Jiang Bingsheng, retired in 1910, Zhou succeeded him. The two men had much in common: both were Ningbo natives, with a penchant for beautiful European-style villas. Jiang’s Twin Villas still stands on Huaihai Road, and is now L’École, the Van Cleef and Arpels School of Jewelry Arts.
Compradors were interlocutors between foreign firms and local businesses, born of necessity in China’s treaty ports. Fluent in at least two languages, they took a cut from both sides, invested wisely, and became extraordinarily wealthy along the way. Zhou became even wealthier when a shortage of German dyes after World War I led to skyrocketing prices—he had purchased a stock prewar at low prices—and came to be known as Shanghai’s Pigment King*.
Gromen left for Germany on the eve of World War I, and transferred his assets to Zhou. At the conclusion of the war, Zhou returned the assets and sold the stock of dyes back at the agreed-upon price, earning Gromen’s lifelong respect and trust. Zhou eventually became the second largest shareholder in the company, after Gromen, and a director. With his boss in Germany–Gromen never returned to Shanghai–Zhou effectively ran the company.
*Shanghai had several Pigment Kings: Bei Rushan, architect I.M. Pei’s great-uncle, was also known as the Pigment King, as was his son-in-law, Wu Tongren, and they both built landmark homes. Bei’s home is now the Pei Mansion Hotel, and Wu’s is the Green House.
The Main House
When Zhou bought the property on Rue Pottier, there was just the main house and a garage annex. To accommodate his family and the coterie of servants, he spent the next several years adding three houses to the property: the children’s house, the kitchen, and a guesthouse/servant’s quarters. The existing building was enhanced with new light fixtures and furniture, ordered from Europe.
The main house, from left: original tile in the corridor; the main house façade; the second floor balcony.
The main house: FIreplaces and staircase detail
The Modernist House
Four houses were apparently still not enough, for in 1936, Zhou commissioned Allied Architects to build a fifth. Allied was a bold choice: the firm had been established just four years earlier by Benjamin Chen, Tong Jun, and You Zhaoshen. Graduates of the University of Pennsylvania’s prestigious architectural program under Paul Philippe Cret, they were China’s first generation architects. Wu Tongren–Zhou’s fellow Pigment King–on the other hand, selected Laszlo Hudec to design his home, the stunning Green House.
Allied was creating daringly modernist, Art Deco buildings–theaters like the Metropole and the Lyric, apartments like the Lydia and the Micros, banks like the Mercantile. That Zhou selected this new modern style for his new house is perhaps unsurprising, for in Shanghai, it was overwhelmingly Chinese clients who preferred the modernist, futuristic, progressive style, the style that matched their city so well.
Zhou’s modernist house
Zhou’s Modernist House, from left: Sliding doors with ziggurat; view to the garden; bathroom with tile
For a dozen years after the modernist house was built, Zhou enjoyed his Shanghai home. In 1948, though, he left Shanghai for Hong Kong, leaving his third son Xiaocun in charge of his mainland properties.
Zhou Xiaocun – The Son in 1950s Shanghai
What was life like in 1950s Shanghai for wealthy sons of capitalists, men like Zhou Xiaocun? Remarkably good, by all accounts. In Shanghai Tai Chi, author Hanchao Lu describes the world of privilege that Xiaocun inhabited.
In 1954, Xiaocun bought six cars, all at the same time, all for his own use. He spent US$40,000 for a holiday in Europe. Xiaocun kept the servants, although this was not unusual, as people were encouraged to keep their servants in order to reduce unemployment. What was unusual was that he also kept a stable in the garden, so he could play polo (also in the garden!).
Zhou Yunqin 周韵琴: Disappearing Daughter
It was also in the 1950s that Zhou Yunqin, Zhou Zongliang’s daughter, moved into the Baoqing Lu house with her husband and children. More than half a century later, her son, Xu Yuanzhang, would be the last lone resident of the family home.
Yunqin was a Westernized young woman who enjoyed dancing, playing the piano, and painting. Her multilingual comprador father insisted his children all learn Western languages, and she became fluent in English and French. He also insisted that they have a traditional Chinese education. To that end, he hired a Chinese tutor for her. Xu Xingye 徐兴业 (1917-1990), was a humble, quiet man from Shaoxing who had studied at the Wuxi Academy of Traditional Chinese Culture. He taught Yuqin Chinese and ancient poetry, and against the odds, they ended up marrying (she was seven years younger).
The newlyweds first lived at Zhongnan Xin Cun on Huaihai Zhong Lu, but by 1953, they had moved back to the family home with their two sons and daughter. In 1957, Yunqin left Shanghai to attend her father’s funeral in Hong Kong. She never returned. Her husband and chldren remained in Shanghai, though, ensonced in the house on Baoqing Lu.
Xu Xingye: The Son-in-Law, The Cadre
By the 1950s, tutoring affluent families in the classics was no longer a viable occupation, so Xu applied his literary skills to New China. He continued teaching, but this time at an accounting school and a middle school, as well as at Shanghai Normal University. He and took on an administrative position as head of the education section of the Shanghai Unemployed Workers Relief Commission, and became editor of the Shanghai Education Press. And he served as a cadre at the Shanghai Education Bureau–all of which served as buffer, protecting the family and the house during the turbulent times that followed. In Shanghai Tai Chi, one of Xu’s sons friends describes the surreal scene of reading David Copperfield in Xu’s extensive, untouched library in 1967, as the son worked on his oil painting.
Xu later became a novelist, winning an honorary Mao Dun Literature prize posthumously, in 1991, for his four-volume historical novel Broken Golden Bowl 金瓯缺 – the first Shanghai writer to win the prize.
Xu Yuanzhang: The Artist
By the time we got to know Xu Yuanzhang, Zhou Zongliang’s grandson in the 1990s, he was known for his dance parties with his fellow lao kele–the old Shanghai gents who lived as if they were back in 1930s Shanghai. In the front living room of the modernist house, overlooking the tangled garden, Yuanzhang would crank up the dusty old record player in the corner. As melodies like Rose, Rose I Love You and Ye Shanghai filled the room, dapper men in suits and ties and their stylish partners in dresses and qipaos slowly waltzed and fox-trotted around the room, back in the ballrooms of their youth for an afternoon. It was the first wave of longing and nostalgia for old Shanghai. Yuanzhang’s dance parties was such a uniquely Shanghai scene that author Qiu Xiaolong included it, and the house, his novel Red Mandarin Dress.
Yuanzhang’s Paintings
Even more than the dance parties, Yuanzhang became known for his watercolor paintings of Shanghai’s heritage architecture, another nod to the nostalgia of Old Shanghai. His artwork came with its own pedigree: his mother, Yunqin, who also painted, arranged for him to study under several well-known Shanghai artists—who all came to the house to teach him. These include landscape watercolorist Li Yongsen, Yu Yunji, who painted propaganda posters, and most famously, Zhang Chongren – the artist whose friendship with Belgian artist Hergé inspired Tin Tin and the Blue Lotus, set in Shanghai.
Left: Zhang Chongren, artist, sculptor, and Xu Yuanzhang’s teacher; Right: A panel from Tin Tin and the Blue Lotus
Xu’s watercolor paintings had a moment: during the 1999 APEC Meetings in Shanghai, 62 of his watercolors of heritage buildings adorned the conference hall walls. Then-Mayor Xu Kuangdi created postcards of the paintings as gifts for officials attending the conference.
As a child, Xu also studied the piano, under Fan Jishen, director of the Piano Department of the Shanghai Conservatory (his son, Fan Dalei would teach Kong Xiangdong, the Chinese pianist featured in Mao to Mozart, the 1979 documentary about Isaac Stern’s visit to China). Xu studied English, too, but painting was really the only thing that stuck.
Yuanzhang and The Fate of the House
In an echo of his parents life, Xu Yuanzhang married his student. Huang Henyi was a half German, half Chinese woman who took art lessons from Xu. The couple were married for eight years, with one daughter, but–in another, more poignant echo of his life–Huang took their daughter to the United States for further education in the 1990s, and Xu lived by himself after that. It must have been a strange sense of déja vu.
In the 1990s, word was that subway construction of Line 7 would mean that the houses would be demolished, and Xu embarked on an aggressive campaign to stop the demolition, inviting media, Consulate staff, and foreigners in to share his story widely in the hope that the house could be spared.
In a 2003 interview with the Shanghai Daily, Xu said that he turned down USD 24 million for the house, because “his life would become ordinary without the house.”
In the end, the house was spared, but Xu was not. With four wives and 16 children, Zhou Zongliang’s will was complicated. For the houses at 3 Baoqing Lu, things were further complicated by the lack of a deed and the disappearance of Zhou Yunqin, Xu’s mother, for she was listed as one of the heirs.
Yunqin, you’ll recall, had left Shanghai in 1957 for her father’s funeral in Hong Kong, never to return. She ended up in Paris, but didn’t drop completely out of sight. She saw her friend Zhang Chongren when he moved there in the 1980s. She met her son, Xu Yuanjian (Yuanzhang’s brother) at Charles de Gaulle airport when he stopped in Paris en route to the U.S., for a stint as a visiting scholar. But that was the last time anyone saw her–she seems to have disappeared without a trace.
According to the Shanghai courts, without proof of her death, Xu and his siblings could not be considered heirs to the property. There were 13 heirs, none of whom lived in the house or, for that matter, in Shanghai. They decided they would prefer to sell the house and have the proceeds equally divided.
Xu and his brother appealed, but in 2007, the court ordered the house to be sold to the Shanghai Real Estate Company for RMB 73 million (a steal!). Xu moved to an apartment in Minhang, where he lived until his death in December 2014.
The house remained empty for many years, and the garden where Xu Xiaocun once played polo grew increasingly wild. In 2018, the Shanghai Symphony invested in a major renovation, and today, the houses that Zhou built serve as a museum to 175 years of Shanghai Symphony history – but that is another story.
Shanghai Symphony Museum, 3 Baoqing Lu
Sources:
My Great-Grandfather Zhou Zongliang, by Chen Da
Painter dwells in Privileged Past, Eastday.com January 27, 2003
Shanghai Tai Chi by Hanchao Lu, Cambridge University Press, 2023.
No. 3 Baoqing Road, Shanghai SFAP Architectural Photography, 2018-05-06