Liars as Well as Vandals – The Shanghai Rowing Club Building

The area that runs behind the Bund by the new Peninsula Hotel is now extremely bland and dreary courtesy of the clearly well connected Rockbund Corporation. Much has been cleared including several key buildings and little of public interest added – the Peninsula Hotel is quite unpleasant, guards line the street to ward of any citizen who may linger or attempt to sit down, and several well appointed buildings have ‘chai’ signs on them and it is unclear whether all or part of them will be eradicated yet. Most of this can be laid at the doorstep of the Rockbund people, the Rockefeller Group folk who have largely balls all this up.

So, fine, vandals at work in Shanghai redeveloping for the elite with little or no appreciation of the past – not really news in Shanghai. But when the vandals lie as well as bulldoze then, well, not much you can do but call them out.

Take the plaque they’ve stuck on the old Rowing Club building. A mediocre restoration of what was the main building down by Suzhou Creek and the Garden Bridge now closed up and guarded by the usual square badges. Here’s the plaque:

‘The Boathouse was dismantled in 1989’ – sadly not true. As reported in Shanghai and on this blog, the bulldozers moved in July 2009 to finally demolish the boathouse – not quite so long ago. This was despite pleas from preservationists and well known architectural academic from Tongji University Ruan Yisan, one of the the city’s foremost experts in historic architecture protection. The contractor, stated at the time to be Shanghai New Huang Pu Real Estate Co Ltd, went in at midnight and did their dirty work hoping darkness would cover their evil deed. See the story as reported back in 2009 here.

So why the lies on the plaque then? Is it possibly that Rockefeller don’t want to be associated with having destroyed what was a supposedly preserved building in an area supposed to be earmarked for preservation just the year before last? Or perhaps nobody told them! Or the political heavies have indeed leaned as they tend to? Either way, now a solid plaque stands on the building telling a lie to every passing tourist.

Who wrote the plaque we do not know – a good guess would be that the author’s name is Winston Smith though!! He was a dab hand at rewriting history.

And here is a picture of the rowing club in all its glory before the vandals at the Shanghai New Huang Pu Real Estate Company and the philistines at the Rockefeller group got their greedy bloody fangs into it.