All things old China - books, anecdotes, stories, podcasts, factoids & ramblings from the author Paul French
Thanks to Tina and Patrick, the loabans of Historic Shanghai, for inviting me to Garden Books on Changle Lu last week to speak on my books and writing about Old China. My Shanghai visit was a bit last minute but Historic Shanghai pulled together a great event at short notice. Thanks to everyone who came out, asked smart questions and brought along books for signing.
Another interesting series of now boarded up streets is around Yunnan Lu South and Ninghai Lu East. These, and adjacent streets that run at the back of the Great World (Da Shijie), are interesting as they were mostly created around 1915 when the old Yanjing Creek and its surrounding slums were finally (after 60 years of complaints!) cleared and covered.
Ninghai Lu west of Xizang Lu was cleared in the early 2000s of shikumen/lilong and a park created running alongside the Gaojia (built earlier with a lot of protest about clearances at the time).
Anyway many will remember that Yunnan Lu and the crossroads with Ninghai Lu was a vibrant all-day/night cluster of Uyghur restaurants and foodstalls until a few years ago. Before WW2 it was recorded as an exciting area where many of the performers and “ladies of the night” who plied their trades at the Great World lived. Now the area’s future is anyone’s guess…..
One thing immediately noticeable on visiting Shanghai is the number of old streets of longtang shikumen that are now emptied of residents and boarded up. And they appear to have been this way for quite some time (indeed some I revisited were already emptied and boarded up a couple of years ago when I last passed through the city).
So what’s going on? Well, views and opinions differ depending on who you talk to. But….(sounding out the heritage crowd)…. most agree on a few things. The traditional process of “redevelopment” (for which read bulldozing the old replacement by hi-rises and office blocks) has changed. The harsh Zero-Covid regime made it somewhat easier to reach relocation/compensation settlements with shikumen\longtang residents – the notion of a bit more room, your own kitchen and perhaps a balcony. Areas were then emptied. They were subsequently boarded up. And so many remain.
The big question of course is what is intended with these areas – eventual demolition or some form of refurbishment. We hope of course for the latter…. but the last 35 years in Shanghai doesn’t offer good odds.
What seems to have happened of course is that as we all know property developers are in a mess across China – either openly bankrupt or stagnant and avoiding declaring their troubles. So these boarding ups may continue and become lingering ghosts of once vibrant old Shanghai communities.
These pictures are the north side Changle Lu between Chengdu Nan Lu and Ruijin No.1 Lu, a once dense and vibrant community where some shikumen date back over 130 years. Now all boarded up….
It was amazing to spend a week in and around Macao’s Casa Garden (Praça de Luís de Camões) for the Macao International Literary Festival….
Originally built in 1770 as Macao’s first villa-style garden residence for the wealthy Portuguese merchant Manuel Pereira.
In the early 19th century, it was leased to the East India Company as their Macau HQ, housing high-ranking directors.
It has hosted figures such as Lord Macartney (Britain’s first envoy to China) and former US President Ulysses S Grant.
Around 1850 George Chinnery painted “A View of Macao Looking Towards the Casa Garden”, taken from a high point above the inner harbour looking towards the Casa Garden. The pitched roof of the Camões Grotto is visible among the trees of the Casa Garden in the middle distance.
More recently Casa Garden housed the Camões Museum before being purchased by the Oriental Foundation in the 1980s.
There is still time to see the exhibition of black and white photos taken by António Duarte Mil-Homens celebrating the work of the late Macanese Modernist architect José Maneiras -“José Maneiras: From Architecture to Urban Management in Macau” – at the Casa Garden until April 5 2026.
Maneiras studied architecture at the University of Porto’s Faculty of Fine Arts, graduating in 1962 and then returning to Macao.
Below just two of Maneiras’s many projects. The Edificio Fung Wong (1966), close by the ruins of St Paul’s on Rua de Sao Paulo and the Residence for the Visually Impaired (1970) in the Areia Preta neighbourhood (Hac Sa Wan).
Sayaka Chatani’s A Nation Within: North Korean Zainichi in Postimperial Japan (Stanford University Press)….
The presence of hundreds of thousands ethnic Koreans in Japan, or “zainichi Koreans,” is one of the visible legacies of Japanese colonialism. A surprising and influential group among zainichi Koreans that persists to this day is Chongryon, the only pro–North Korean diasporic group based in a capitalist society. Chongryon historically represented the central grassroots force seeking to liberate Koreans from Japan’s imperial and neo-imperial influences. At the heart of the Chongryon community stands a political organization equipped with a central bureaucracy in Tokyo, with a headquarters in nearly every prefecture. Often called a de facto embassy of North Korea, the Chongryon organization has, in effect, functioned as a state within another state—operating hundreds of schools, banks, hospitals, business associations, publishing houses, and many other institutions across Japan.
Based on extensive archival research and nearly 250 original interviews collected with co-researcher KumHee Cho, who was raised within the Chongryon community, Sayaka Chatani offers a sweeping social history of this secretive, protective community in xenophobic Japanese society. Weaving together personal accounts and situating them in a multi-layered, transnational political context, the book offers a finely textured, intimate narrative of the community’s tumultuous history and decolonial praxis. Through the stories of Chongryon, this book provides a bottom-up analysis of power politics among zainichi Koreans and reshapes our understanding of Japanese history, Korean history, and the Cold War in Asia.
The Original London Chinatown Revealed- Myths and Realities
Exhibition at St.Anne’s Limehouse, March 20 to July 2026
This exhibition is about the Chinatown that grew up right next to this church, flourished 1900 -1955 and yet almost disappeared from sight in the 1960s. Only a few clues remain…
We explore how Limehouse Chinatown has been represented and misrepresented in newsprint, fiction, film and popular music. And we contrast this with some of the true stories from the real Chinatown – describing family life, social life and commercial life in an urban village, – with the help of witness testimony and the work of ceramicist Charles Ng.
We explain the mystery surrounding Limehouse Chinatown- how did it appear? – how did it disappear? How did it become associated with powerful urban myths?
And finally, we consider the legacy of the small Chinese community who lived so close to this church
(to see more photo albums from Japan and China just put “photo albums” in the search box)
This album, from 1936 contained pictures taken from a tour of SE Asia, Hong Kong, Japan and the South Pacific in 1936 on a Dutch steamer, the SS Grootekerk. I think the album was probably acquired in Singapore, their first stop (or possibly KL or Penang), given the images attached to the cover – one being supposedly humourous. The reverse of the album is a cloth textile covering with floral motifs.
