April 2010
STREETS THAT SING
Along Wuxing Lu, once called Route Pershing, is a lane.
It curves a little as you walk along, concealing the large gateway towards the end. You’ll need your key. Fiddle fiddle. Proceed through the cat-scented, bike-lined undercroft, turn right and it’s the red gate at the end. Another key, a pad-lock, a barrel-bolt. You’re in! Put on the kettle and make yourself at home.
Now the stories can begin.
Long ago, in the 1920s, this room that you’re snuggled up in, was the ground floor living room of a medium-sized terrace house that was three stories high. If you look behind the wardrobe next to the bed, there’s a door. It once led to the staircase that connected all the floors of the house. It also led through to the back service lane.
The style and layout might remind you of an English terrace house, or a Parisian town house. More Parisian perhaps, with the bow fronted windows and ornate balustrades. Perhaps it was designed by Leonard, Veysseyre and Kruze, the leading architects in the French Concession. Alexander Leonard, Paul Veysseyre and Arthur Kruze all studied at the Ecole Des Beaux Arts in Paris, and arrived in Shanghai at different times; - Leonard arrived in 1921 and formed the architectural partnership with Veysseyre in 1922, while Kruze joined the firm in 1933.
In fact, Alexander Leonard lived in an apartment nearby to our terrace house. I’ll tell you how to get there. If you stand at the beginning of our lane and look directly across Wuxing Lu you’ll see the entrance to another lane. It may look like a dead-end, but it’s not. Walk down the lane, weaving to the right in the middle, until you emerge at Gao’an Lu, formerly known as Route Cohen, named after a French patriot who lived in Shanghai and died in WW1. Turn right and proceed along a short distance until you get to an apartment building, number 14, on the corner of Kanping lu (Route Marcel Magniny).
It’s worth crossing the road and standing on the opposite corner to admire this masterful piece of streamlined architecture. Completed in 1941, it was Leonard’s last major work before the Japanese occupation of the city. Leonard and his wife lived in the penthouse on the top floor. I love the way the building folds asymmetrically around the corner with longer curved balconies on Kanping Lu and shorter straight balconies on Gao’an Lu. The architect was exploring horizontal movement. Look at the entrance door which is framed by two red pilasters which move vertically upwards threading themselves through the floors like huge knitting needles which end as a pair of white columns supporting the roof. Now cross back over the road and look closely at the entrance door. The glass panels are covered by an intricate metal grill which looks like a Chinese lattice pattern turned jazzy! Peering through into the foyer you’ll see the original terrazzo floor with a large circle enclosing the letters AL – for Alexander Leonard….?
Now that you’re out and about, why not do some more sight-seeing! Keep walking up Gao’an Lu until you come to Lane number 18. Turn right into the lane and walk along until you come to the entrance to the Shanghai Oriental Musical Instrument Museum on the left. Walk on in. Don’t be shy.
The large house occupying the grounds was also designed by Leonard, Veysseyre and Kruze and completed in 1939. Their client was the wealthy industrialist, Rong Desheng.
Rong Desheng’s family mansion is a practical, even business-like, dwelling built to accommodate his large and extended family – which included four sons, and I’m not sure how many wives and daughters. The functional, no-frills qualities of the stream-lined moderne style would have suited this captain of industry and commerce. The long eastern façade is broken up into six alternating recessed and projecting bays, like a pattern of Chinese courtyards in elevation. The semi-circular windows in the end bays give the house it’s most recognizable ocean-liner quality. The fact that a wealthy Chinese businessman had engaged the services of a French architectural firm to design a house in the latest western architectural style is a reflection of the cosmopolitan nature of Shanghai in the 1930s.
The house served the Rong family until 1956 when the family patriotically ‘handed over’ their 24 businesses and property to the People’s Government. The house then became the Xuhui district’s Children’s Palace, proudly displaying the star and torch at the centre of the parapet. This may have marked the end of the family’s fortune, but in 1978 Premier Deng Xiaoping called on Rong Yiren, Desheng’s fourth son, to help develop industry in China. Yiren set up CITIC (China International Trust and Investment Corporation) that same year, which developed into China’s largest window company for foreign financing. Yiren became Vice-Chairman of the National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference and Vice-Chairman of the All-China Federation of Industry and Commerce. Now in his 80s, Yiren was once listed with Forbes magazine as being the richest man in China. The topsy-turvy fortunes of the Rong family epitomize the roller-coaster nature of life and wealth in Shanghai.
In 2009, the Shanghai Oriental Musical Instrument Museum opened in a building next to the Rong family mansion. This is one of hundreds of small museums in Shanghai – all focusing on aspects of life and industry in Shanghai. Some of my favourites are the Postal Museum, the Tobacco Museum, the Waterworks Museum and the Money Museum.
Now walk back to Gao’an Lu, turn right, and walk up to the big intersection of 5 streets. The area of the former French Concession that we’re standing in now, was ceded to the French in 1915 and was the third, final and largest section of land given to the French by the Chinese (the first section of land around the Old City was ceded to the French after the first Opium War of 1842). It meant that the French Concession now ran from the French Bund, facing the Huangpu River, right down to XuHui where the Jesuits had their enclave.
The street planning in the French Concession was carried out by architects and planners in the offices of the “Conseil d’Administration Municipale”, located in Avenue Joffre, now Huai Hai Lu. The street plans included a number of diagonal streets, which sliced through the orthogonal street grid to create interesting intersections and triangles of land. On a number of these triangular slices of land were built large apartment blocks, which became giant markers in the flat landscape. You’re looking at one of these now, located at the intersection of Gao’an Lu and Hengshan Lu. Originally known as The Washington, it rises up eleven stories, and is painted green. (For a long time I was curious as to whether this was the original colour, or not. So, one day I took my pen-knife and when no-one was looking, I scraped back the paint to find the original colour, which was yellow ochre. I then carried out more ’research’ on other old buildings and found that most of these were also originally painted yellow ochre.) The Washington apartments were completed on 1928 to a design by Russian architect Alexander Yaron.
Now, cross over the intersection, and continue to walk along Gao’an Lu taking note of a side entrance to The Washington. As you look up above the entrance you’ll see panels of floral volutes with swirling leaves and giant scallops cascading down the building. This is a hall-mark of art-deco design which sought to move away from the confines of classical ornamentation and venture forth into a new world of geometric decoration, using zig-zags and circles.
Are you feeling hungry? You might like to stop for stretch noodles – lah mien – at the XingJiang noodle store, hidden just past the back lane entrance to The Washington. The noodles cost around 10rmb per bowl, and have lamb and coriander added to the spicy soup.
Keep going until you reach Jianguo Xi Lu (Route Frelupt ). Turn left. Look out for number 622. This was where American expat, Ann Summers, and her Chinese husband once lived. Ann had a dance studio in Nanjing Road, and in the summer months she also held classes in the large garden of her home in Route Frelupt. Her pupils, mainly the daughters of wealthy expats, would perform on an outdoor stage in the garden. One of her pupils was a young Peggy Hookham, who later changed her name to Margot Fonteyne. Each year Ann put on a revue at the Lyceum Theatre (located at the corner of Maoming Lu and Changle Lu), called “The Shanghai Follies”, which ran for three days to packed houses. Ann would return periodically to the States for a holiday and come back full of ideas from Broadway shows for the next Follies. After 1949, her house was acquired by the Shanghai government, and like so many buildings at this time, it was pragmatically re-used for a similar function – as a kindergarten.
At the next corner, Anting Road, is a well-known expat watering hole – Cottons. It’s worth going inside to check out the French Concession villa, also designed by our friends, Leonard Veysseyre and Kruze. When you’ve refreshed at Cottons, turn left into Anting Road and keep going until you reach Number 43, a dark brown apartment building on the corner of a lane, and opposite the Anting Villa Hotel (said to be owned by the Internal Security Bureau).
In 2009, I lived in this building, in the 4th floor apartment facing the street. In October that year, my partner Tim and I had a fascinating experience – we met two sisters who had lived in the apartment in the 1940s. The Ifland sisters, Ana and Susie, had been standing downstairs, trying to find a way to get in, when I opened the door. When I discovered that they had once lived here, I invited them up. Susie, the older sister, was quite overcome when she entered our apartment and recognized it from her childhood. The younger sister, Ana, had been born in 1949, with the family waiting for her birth before they boarded one of the last ships for evacuation to Chile, just before the Liberation of Shanghai. The family has continued to live in Chile ever since. This trip to Shanghai had been the first for the sisters since the family had left in 1949.
Turn right down the lane, and then turn left into Urumuqi Lu at the end, taking note of another fine apartment building from the 1930s on the corner– the one with the florist shop below.
Walk along Urumuqi Lu, across Yongjia Lu, and turn left at Hengshan Lu (Avenue Petain). On the corner of Hengshan Lu is the Community Church. Walk inside the entrance and you’ll find yourself in a tranquil cloistered space.
Built in 1925 as the International Protestant Church it became a focus for the American community in Shanghai, lying as it did opposite the Shanghai American School. The Boy Scouts and the Campfire Girls met there, and the church had a music committee, a recreation committee and a social committee in addition to the usual church administrative ones.
Here is what former parishioner, John L. Rawlinson, has to say about the church:
“The Community Church of my boyhood was turned during the Cultural Revolution into a gymnasium and warehouse, but when I revisited it in 1981, when it was known as the International House of Worship, it had been entirely refurbished in the old style by the congregation, and the building and service were almost indistinguishable from what was so familiar to me, save of course that the service was entirely in Chinese–and the house was packed.”
As you continue west along Hengshan Lu, look across the road and you’ll see an ornate roof lantern peeping up above a two-story red brick building with roof dormers – this was the Shanghai American School (SAS). Designed by American architect Henry Killam Murphy, and completed in 1923, the building resembles Independence Hall in Philadelphia.
The main building with the roof lantern was a combined Administration-Auditorium-Classroom-Boys’ Dormitory in classic American Georgian style. The rear of the building, away from the street, faced a large green quadrangle, around which were arranged the remaining school buildings; - a Girls’ Dormitory, Dining Hall and picturesque Water Tower. This area is now occupied by the Shanghai Library (1996), with its entrance from Huai Hai Lu.
By 1934 enrollments in SAS had reached a peak of six hundred, with nearly fifty teachers. However in 1937 Americans began evacuating Shanghai and by 1941 numbers had dropped to 160. In 1943 all remaining Americans in Shanghai were interned by the Japanese in Chapei Internment camp where SAS headmaster Frank Cheney continued to run an American-British-Dutch school until 1945. Cheney was allowed to bring 4,000 books from the SAS library into the internment camp. Classes resumed at the Avenue Petain campus in 1946 until final closure of the school in 1950. It was then used by Russian advisors to the new Chinese government, and now houses a naval research facility and is closed to visitors.
A new American school reopened in 1980 inside the US Consulate, located in the same block as the old SAS campus, on the corner of Huai Hai Lu and Urumuqi Lu. Today, SAS operates two schools in Shanghai, in Puxi and Pudong, with over a thousand students and is the largest school for the expatriate community in Shanghai and the largest international school in China.
Keep walking and soon you’ll be back at the familiar Five-Ways intersection dominated by The Washington. Keep walking down Hengshan Lu until you reach the next cross street, which is Wuxing Lu – you’re almost home! Turn right, cross over Kanping Lu and you’ll soon be back at the entrance to our lane.
I hope you’ve enjoyed the walk!
I’ve left a copy of my book, Shanghai Architecture, on the book shelf – in case you’d like to read more about Shanghai’s history and architecture. You’ll find more walks in there too! And if you discover anything else – why not leave a note about it inside the book! Feel free to email me if you have any questions or comments – warr.anne@gmail.com. I’ve enjoyed our chat.
Anne Warr
April 2010
