Will the Great World Amusement Centre Survive an EXPO Refurbishment?

As part of the manic tarting up of Shanghai in advance of not that many visitors coming for the EXPO in 2010 the former Great World Amusement Centre, facing onto the wide intersection of Yanan Lu and Xizang Lu, is being refurbished. For years now it’s been a rather poor theatre for acrobatics but was the biggest and most famous entertainment complex of old Shanghai, with simultaneous all-day performances of music, films, opera, magic, with a host of ancillary attractions available, including brothels and fortune-tellers. The streets around the back of the centre (where my office is incidentally) were home to numerous brothels and dens of intrigue both social and political. The best description of the place comes from Josef von Sternberg (the film directors) memoir Fun in a Chinese Laundry:

“THE ESTABLISHMENT had six floors to provide distraction for the milling crowd, six floors that seethed with life and all the commotion and noise that go with it studded with every variety of entertainment Chinese ingenuity had contrived. On the first floor were gambling tables, sing-song girls, magicians, pick-pockets, slot machines, fireworks, bird cages, fans, stick incense, acrobats and ginger. One flight up were the restaurants, a dozen different groups of actors, crickets in cages, pimps, mid-wives, barbers and earwax extractors. The third floor had jugglers, herb medicines, ice cream parlours, photographers, a new bevy of girls their high-collared gowns slit to reveal their hips, in case one had passed up the more modest ones below who merely flashed their thighs.

“The fourth floor was crowded with shooting galleries, fantan tables, massage benches…the fifth floor featured girls whose dresses were slit to the armpits, a stuffed whale, story tellers, balloons, peep shows, a mirror maze, two love-letter booths with scribes who guaranteed results, ‘rubber goods’ and a temple filled with ferocious gods and joss sticks. On the top floor and roof of that house of multiple joys a jumble of tight-rope walkers slithered back and forth, and there were seesaws, lottery tickets, and marriage brokers. “And as I tried to find my way down again an open space was pointed out to me where hundreds of Chinese, so I was told, after spending their last coppers, had speeded the return to the street below by jumping from the roof…”

Of course it hasn’t been much fun or entertainment since the revolution, still it was an imposing structure. Now the builders are in and ripping plenty out. The shots here (I know, I know they;re terrible – new camera phone I haven’t quite mastered yet and taken at dusk) are from the back of the building along Ninghai East Road.

Bad as they are the pictures show that the edges of the structure are being seemingly gutted though the main part of the structure including the signature tower appear intact. However, the complete interior appears to have been gutted now. Just how all this will end I have no idea but the ‘refurbishment’ so far has appeared none too subtle – ironically the building is swathed in EXPO ‘Better City, Better Life’ posters while the vandalism continues.