Exposed – The Primo Shag Pads of Old Shanghai

Following on from a note yesterday on the interesting little area around Yunnan Road behind the Great World. I’ve posted before on the sort of OKish restoration of the former Great World (Da Shijie) at the junction of Xizang Road and Yanan Road (formerly Boulevard de Montigny and Avenue Edward VII). With the builders moving out one consequence of the redevelopment of the building has been to expose the backs of the properties that front onto Yunnan Road (formerly Rue Palikao), if you see what I mean. Yunnan Road is now a lively and popular food street and forms one of a network of interesting, though slightly bashed about, streets between Xizang Road to the west and Henan Road South (formerly Rue Imperiale) to the east, and sandwiched between Yanan Road (Avenue Edward VII) and Jingling Road (Rue du Consulat) to the north and south respectively.

The Great World in all its glory…now round the back…

These roads were effectively a bit of a rabbit warren. Post-1949 redevelopment has opened them up a bit with some clearances and park creation while the Expressway has rather ended any charm to the north, but Ninghai Road East (Rue Weikwei) running west-east and the north-south cross roads of Yunnan, Guangxi (Rue de Saigon), Yongshou (Rue des Peres) and Zhejiang (Rue Hue) were all a distinct community of the Frenchtown border area between the wars (though this road layout dates back to the 1860s). This community was notorious for its streetwalkers and its lodging houses were their places of work – shag pads basically, as well as the slightly classier tea houses and Yeji houses where Chinese prostitutes charged clients based on time spent in their company. The girls tended to cluster by their province/town of origin.

The working girls, along with the itinerant storytellers, comics, magicians, puppeteers, sword fighters and swallowers, tightrope walkers, animal fights, fortune teller, qigong displays, fire eaters, monkey shows and freak shows, that crowded the area spilling over from the Great World made the whole district somewhat of a carnival every night. Now, given that the Great World was the major draw and that the girls grabbed their clients from the streets around the entertainment centre you have to assume that the lodging houses that backed on to the Great World were both the best situated and the most convenient and would, therefore, have been the primo shag pads for Shanghai’s most serious slappers between 1917 (when the Great World first opened its doors to all and sundry) and the war.

And so now here revealed, those very salubrious and handily located knocking shops…..these being the backs of the properties on the corner of Yunnan and Ninghai directly to the rear of the Great World. If buildings could talk….