Ugly Scenes Around Destruction on Thorburn Road

Though little written about – a bit terra incognita for the Puxi hugging Shanghai foreign press corps – Yangpu (formerly Yangtzsepoo) has seen massive destruction in the last couple of years – road widening for EXPO as well as the relentless march of the bulldozer in Shanghai. Many intentional slums have been created across Yangpu in the last few years – roofs destroyed etc – to encourage clearance. Yangpu is architecturally important – a historic working class district that was the ‘Eastern Division’ of the International Settlement.

There is a lot of traditional and, unique to Shanghai, lilong and shikumen housing as well as some western style buildings and, perhaps most importantly, Yangpu is the repository of the majority of the remainder (much has obviously gone already) of Shanghai industrial architecture. While industrial architecture is increasingly valued in other places there is absolutely no value attached to it in Shanghai. Given the low media profile of Yangpu, the relative low incomes of the majority of residents and the low priority (if any) place don working class residential property and industrial architecture by what passes for preservation in Shanghai it has also seemed to me most likely that Yangpu will be completely cleared in a Ground Zero type movement with nothing whatsoever preserved.

Now according to Shanghaiist and Le Monde things have turned unsurprisingly ugly as they often do when people are a little slow to move! The main disputes seem to be around Tongbei Road, formerly Thorburn Road. The street was named after William Thorburn, the original Trustee of the Riding Course in 1854 and from a tea trading family from Leith in Scotland. Thorburn came to Shanghai in 1847, was a prominent member of the Municipal Council and Chairman between 1855 and 1856. Thorburn was a partner in Hargreaves & Co. as well as several other major trading companies including the long established opium dealers Blenkin, Rawson & Co.

I believe the dispute is, as usual, over compensation, or the lack of it to be precise.