Taipei Weekend 2 – Old Shanghai in Taipei

Bit of a stupid post this – as it’s the artwork for an exhibition that is now over and I missed. But it was held at the Futai Street Mansion in Taipei that I posted about yesterday and it is quite pretty.

Interestingly the exhibition argued that the Cheng-Chong district of Taipei was once the most fashionable area of town and heavily influenced by Shanghainese who skipped out on communism, went to Taiwan and took their classy and sophisticated bourgeois Shanghai ways with them and decided that Mao could stick austerity and communism. The exhibition does rightly argue that the area around the Cheng-Chong district, and the Futai Street Mansion itself, do retain a certain feel of old Shanghai which is obviously getting harder and harder to find back in Shanghai itself as the bulldozers, dodgy property developers and historically ignorant grasping Party officials destroy the place. In fact it can only be a matter of a decade or so now before Futai Street might actually the only place people will have to go to find a taste of old Shanghai if the current Shanghai government has its way.

While Shanghainese who stayed in Shanghai soon found themselves having to live a lifestyle the Party and Mao determined for them and regulate their habits, clothing and activities accordingly, a Shanghainese community continued to exist and direct itself in Taipei for many decades after 1949. Qipaos, fans and strolling Cheng-Chong as opposed to Mao suits, queuing for cabbage and being hectored by ignorant cadres in Shanghai – you choose!