The Shanghai Daily tells me that the old 1932 Rubicon Garden Villa (at 2409 Hungjao Road, now renamed 2310 Hongqiao Road) was, the former home of Sir Victor Sassoon, has been ordered to change a vegetable patch back to a heritage British flower garden. Destroying the garden (which survived warlords, Japanese invaders and red Guards but not a consulting company called Kamel who inhabit the site) were growing vegetables and raising chickens who would want their invetsment advise!) having trashed what was a heritage protected flower garden.

The villa was one of Shanghai’s supposedly protected cultural units since September 1989. This cultural protection included the maples and poplar trees oriignally planted around the property.

Rubicon, by the way, was an amusing name given to a small creek in the area that the paper chase hunters used to jump on horseback and is close by.  Rubicon Road (now Hami Road, as anyone who has had to endure the compulsory Shanghai medical test for foreigners will know well) connected with Hunjao Road as part of the linking system that allowed the spread of the Western External Roads out towards Hungjao (Hongqiao) with its market gardens, farms, golf course, villas and aerodrome.

During WW2 the Japanese Navy took over the building. After Sassoon left Shanghai for good in 1950 a Ningbo tycoon bought the villa. After the revolution in the 1950s the villa was a sanatorium for workers of the Shanghai Textile Industry Bureau, as well as a retreat for the Gang of Four in the Cultural Revolution. I seem to remember visiting it once in the 1990s when it was the offices of BP, but I may be misremembering that – certainly it was a villa out Hungjao way.