The Loss of Shanghai’s Rue du Consulat (Jinling Lu)

If I start to write about the Rue du Consulat in Shanghai’s former French Concession, it’s beautiful colonades, the wonderful shops and apartment buildings, how in Shanghai’s brutal summers that street was a sanctuary of shade and how now that street is being totally destroyed I’ll just cry. So here’s a link to Katya Knyazeva’s history of the street and a few pictures (because we must archive the philistine vandalism and destruction of a city’s heritage too as well as celebrate its past architectural glory) of the street as it comes to its final end….

Dreams of Boulevards des Arcadiens by Katya Knyazeva

And that dream now….(well late March when I was last there)

The shuttered shops of Jinling Lu

The side streets running south down towards Laoximen (also of course being flattened) also boarded up

the corner roads off Jinling Lu now blocked off as whole destruction of the rear of the apartment buildings over the street level shops continues apace

many of the rears of the buildings are already gone leaving only frontages now – the street can never now be restored

and here the total and utter eradication of Shanghai’s built heritage…