Shanghai Heritage Under Threat…The Most Likely Chinese Style Buildings to Go Soon

Katya Knyazeva is one of the smartest and most diligent people around in the Shanghai heritage “movement” (such as it is). She is very good particularly on the old town and its ongoing destruction which, given that that now includes some of the oldest Chinese style structures in Shanghai, is particularly shocking. For years we’ve heard officials blithely disregard the destruction of western style structures as unimportant – “colonial”, “imperialist” and therefore embarrassing for them and so to be swept away, but these arguments were always straw men to cover for their vandalism-for-profit and philistinism. The destruction of ancient Chinese culture in Nantao is obviously harder to explain away and so largely they just let places rot away until they fall down. Here, in Time Out Shanghai, Katya takes a tour round some of the most vulnerable buildings in old town and the long running dispute over the preservation of the Nie’s Garden compound in Yangpu (Yangtszepoo). Fascinating but tragic…