AT THE ENTRANCE to Wooden Bridge Street, Mr Liu and his dog make a contrasting couple. One a picture of relaxation, leaning back in his folding wooden chair, a cup of tea at his side, surveying the goings-on of the narrow lane: the other, head craned forward, straining against its leash, hair bristling when anyone comes too close. Mr Liu has the air of someone who is part of the natural order of things. He nods greetings to passers-by, and exchanges cheerful banter with the dawdling cyclists on their way home for dinner. The dog, on the other hand, is obviously a newcomer. ‘Hey old Liu, that your dog?’ shouts a middle-aged man with a laugh and a raised eyebrow as he pedals past.

     A little Japanese car backs around the corner and comes to a halt just in front of Mr Liu’s knee and the dog’s nose, blocking the road. A smartly dressed young woman jumps out clutching a basket of fruit with a ribbon on top. ‘Oh what a cute dog,’ she giggles. ‘It’s one of those, what do you call them, Jie-ke Luo-sai-ers, isn’t it?’ Mr Liu doesn’t seem too bothered whether it’s a Jack Russell or any other kind of dog for that matter. ‘Don’t ask me,’ he says, ‘I only just got it – someone gave it to me.’ At this point the dog snarls a little; the young woman gives a squeal and dashes into the tiny side lane behind Mr Liu’s chair. Her boyfriend walks around from the other side of the car. ‘Is it okay to stop here for a few minutes?’ he asks. ‘If it’s only for a few minutes it’s alright,’ Mr Liu replies, waving his hand conclusively. The source of his authority in the area is not immediately evident, but it probably derives from the fact that he has been sitting here of an evening for half a century or more, looking out from his vantage point in Wooden Bridge Street across the junction to the other side of Fangbang Road – the winding, bustling market street with its half-wooden houses, which has traditionally been the heart of this neighbourhood in Shanghai’s ‘old town’.

 

Office buildings rise above low-rise neighbourhoods in Shanghai’s old city.

 

The only problem is there is no other side of Fangbang Road anymore. The houses opposite the entrance to Wooden Bridge Street are gone, demolished recently and replaced by a head-high concrete wall, and behind it a plot of empty land stretching across to where another wall traces the outline of what was once Green Lotus Street. Posters at regular intervals along the walls advertise the future this demolition is supposed to bring. And that future is a smiling European family lying on a lawn, modern townhouses by a lake, a city scene of cars driving around a huge grass-covered traffic island, and the slogan ‘Harmonious and Beautiful Urban Life’.

     Demolition has come to Shanghai’s old city. Already the gold-topped high-rises of the new urban dream can be seen above the roofs of what is left of Fangbang Road. And although Mr Liu and the old men who shuffle past his chair on their evening strolls look as though they have probably been here forever, and will be for evermore, the bamboo scaffolding covering the front of the houses further along the lane is a sure sign: Wooden Bridge Street is coming down – and Jin Family Lane and West Horse Street too, and the whole labyrinth of lanes that make up this little community. Tiny streets, with houses as close together as in a medieval European town, the eclectic collection of buildings a testament to the determination of the locals of years gone by to squeeze the grandest houses they could into this densely packed area.

     The street names themselves are reminders of earlier times, for this was the original Shanghai, the old walled city, which stood here for hundreds of years before the foreigners arrived, with their ships and their opium, in the 1840s. The circular city wall was knocked down after the Nationalist Revolution in 1911 in an attempt to ‘modernise’ the old town. But while the French Concession and the International Settlement to the north filled up with modern architecture and amenities during the boom years of the 1920s and ’30s, and again as the city began to modernise in the 1990s, the old town seemed remarkably resistant to change. Even at the turn of the twenty-first century, as most of Shanghai rushed to embrace the new, Fangbang Road and the area around it retained the atmosphere of a traditional Chinese market town: children played in the street, monks strolled out from Buddhist temples hidden away in the back alleys; in the daytime the main street filled up with vegetable stalls, chickens ran loose, little plastic tubs containing aquatic life of all kinds cluttered the pavements, the cries of vendors and the hooting of traffic trying to squeeze through the middle of it all added to the hubbub. Visitors from abroad were amazed to find such vivid scenes just a Gucci handbag’s throw from the upmarket stores and lifestyle brands of the Huaihai Road, Shanghai’s most prestigious shopping street. The fact it was still here, we told ourselves, perhaps suggested that the government had recognised the remarkable cultural uniqueness of this area and decided to preserve it. Sometimes I daydreamed that the entire old city, inside the circular road which traced the route of the old city wall, could apply for Unesco world heritage status, so special did it seem.…

 

A row of homes under demolition, a common scene in old neighbourhoods.

I soon came to learn that one of the most important survival skills for living in Shanghai in the new millennium is the ability to cope with sudden and drastic change, in a city where rapid development is an official obsession. Things you assume will be there forever can suddenly disappear, sometimes overnight. It took me a couple of years of living here before I came to accept as normal the idea that you could pass a place regularly, admire the architecture, then one day turn the corner and find that one of your favourite buildings had simply vanished – or worse, was being demolished: demolition in Shanghai can be a painfully physical process – for many of the old neighbourhoods, the executioner is not the anonymous bullet of the wrecking ball, but the more personal attack of men with sledgehammers, labourers hired to smash their way through the old walls and traditional carvings above the doorways – sparing only the window frames, wooden beams, roof tiles and anything else worth money as building materials.

     And given the uniqueness of so much of Shanghai’s old architecture – the old lanes, set back from the main streets, which combined the concept of the Western terrace house with a tiny, shrunken traditional Chinese courtyard set behind high wooden gates topped with decorative carvings, or the neo-classical villas and art deco mansions and apartment blocks of the wealthier neighbourhoods – watching its demise brings with it a sense of bereavement. I still feel a cold, sinking feeling in my stomach when I spy another neighbourhood on the way down, as though I’m watching an old friend dying.

     And the intensity of Shanghai’s short but chequered history – between the 1840s and the 1960s it experienced foreign settlement, Japanese occupation, two revolutions, two civil wars, the mayhem of the Cultural Revolution, as well as sundry uprisings, strikes and protests – means that when these areas vanish, they take with them rich seams of human stories and memory stored up layer upon layer within them. In New York they say that when buildings are demolished the authorities preserve a full photographic and written record of their history. In Shanghai, when a neighbourhood goes, its history seems to go with it. Once I was gazing at a pair of matching 1930s town houses about to come under the wrecker’s hammer, when a fat man in a vest emerged and told me that this was where Soong Ai-ling, sister of Soong Mei-ling and Soong Ching Ling, the wives of Chiang Kai-shek and Sun Yat-sen respectively, spent her last night on the Mainland before fleeing to Taiwan as the communists advanced on the city in 1949. It sounded a little far-fetched – anyway, now there’s no way to check, no longer any room for such myth and legend, since the area has completely vanished. In another old street, not far away, I used to pass one of those old Shanghai coffee shops which, in the austere days of the 1980s, appeared to be one of the few signs that China had ever been connected to the wider world. The owner’s family was said to have suffered acutely in the Cultural Revolution for its links with this sinister foreign infusion, but stayed loyal to the love of coffee and reopened when the reform era began in the 1980s. Last year, the demolition men moved in, and now the shop and the entire block around it have gone forever – though coffee-drinkers can repair to the new Starbucks in the office tower across the road.

     Shanghai’s reconstruction since the early 1990s, which has led to the removal of more than one and a half million people from the old neighbourhoods and the demolition of perhaps half the old buildings in the downtown area, has changed the city; not just quantitatively, but qualitatively too. What were once uniquely ‘local’ neighbourhoods – with all the problems of cramped living and lack of facilities that this implied – can these days be replaced, with startling swiftness, by the trappings of a modern, luxurious lifestyle at once global and characterless. One year, a street can be full of men in vests and old women washing vegetables at outside taps, the next it’s become the foundations of a new corporate tower, with security guards patrolling its perimeters, or, in the few cases where the old buildings have been renovated, is filled with well-heeled foreigners clutching boutique carrier bags, sipping lattes on the terraces of new cafés. It’s a process that leaves the original inhabitants, many of whose families have been here for generations, literally ‘marginalised’ – driven by rising property prices into cheaper accommodation in remote new suburbs.

     Wooden Bridge Street and the old city have inevitably become part of this process. The real estate developers have already built their downtown business districts and upmarket residential areas, the subway network is expanding, land values are soaring, and development, spreading outwards in a ripple effect, has reached the old town. For the inhabitants, it spells the end of a way of life: as in so many of Shanghai’s old neighbourhoods, life here has always been governed by the fact that most people lived in old houses divided up after the Communist Revolution, with one family to a room, or two rooms if they were lucky. In such cramped conditions, it was inevitable the inhabitants would live much of their life sitting outside their doors, shelling shrimp or peeling vegetables, playing mah-jong or chatting. Many had no bathroom, and residents had to use the public toilet down the street. These rough conditions mean that people like Mr Liu often show little sentimentality when they speak about the loss of the old neighbourhoods. But he admits he’s unlikely to see some of his neighbours again – ‘they’ll be scattered to the winds,’ he says. And he’s frustrated that the company in charge of the relocation has not yet come to see him, even now, with the scaffolding already going up in the lane. ‘They haven’t talked to us about where we’ll go, or the compensation we’ll get or anything,’ he grumbles. ‘And even when they do negotiate, they want you to get out of your house before they’ll give you any money – where do they think we’ll go in the meantime?

 

An old neighbourhood, typical of those fast disappearing from Shanghai.

 

For many caught up in Shanghai’s reconstruction, this has been the biggest complaint. They can accept their lives being turned upside down in the hope that a more modern lifestyle will eventually be theirs – it’s the uncertainty, the lack of information, that riles them. In theory, they are supposed to have a choice: cash compensation, or a new apartment out in one of the suburbs springing up from the farmland all around Shanghai. But the relocation companies with which they have to negotiate can be difficult: it is in their interests to negotiate the lowest compensation possible with each individual family, and leave them so little time before the moving deadline that they have to accept what they’re offered. Growing public complaints about the process have forced the government to make it a little more transparent – posters with details of the alternative accommodation on offer are now on public display in some neighbourhoods awaiting demolition, with descriptions of the facilities provided, in an attempt to reassure anxious residents and persuade them to accept these new homes. But Mr Liu has been less lucky – and for many of those about to move there’s the realisation that, with property prices soaring, the best they can hope for is a place far away from their jobs and their children’s schools. The government is putting money into infrastructure in the new zones, and new subway lines are under construction, but the sheer pace of relocations is such that it is hard for the city planners to keep up.

     For some of the locals, wholesale reconstruction of their city is beginning to leave a nagging sense of loss. Like so many people who grew up in the Shanghai of the 1970s, Shu Haolun spent his childhood in one of the teeming residential lanes which, at the time, filled much of the city’s central districts. Built largely in the 1920s or ’30s, when this was the fastest growing city in Asia, these were of a style unique to Shanghai – effectively private residential communities set back from the main streets, accessible by a net­work of narrow internal lanes. By the time Shu Haolun was growing up, the once upmarket homes in Dazhong Li (Great Central Lane), where he lived, were filled with the families of workers.

 

A family plays mah-jong in their home in a traditional neighbourhood.

 

His grandparents, who had moved into a spacious apartment here in 1935, when his grandfather began working in a private bank nearby, now occupied what was once their living room; Haolun, his brother and his parents shared the room next door. But his memories of his childhood are happy ones. ‘There were so many of my friends living in the same lane,’ he says. ‘We spent a lot of time together, running around in the alleyways, in and out of each other’s homes.’ School was on the other side of the lane – if he was late for class his teacher would lean out of the window and shout across to him to hurry up. ‘The hospital where I was born was just nearby, there was a cinema on the corner, shops on the street next door – everything was here.’ There was a shared sense of history too: ‘The big house at the front of the lane belonged to the family who built the whole area in the 1920s,’ he says. ‘The story was that they owned land right in the centre of the city, then earned a lot of money by selling it to a Russian.’

 

     Awaiting demolition: Shanghai’s heritage faces the wrecker’s hammer.

Still, like many in Shanghai, when he got the chance to first move out of the lane, to a local university, and then to study abroad, Haolun didn’t look back. ‘The lane was still there, my grandmother was still there, we came back to see her sometimes, so we didn’t really think about it,’ he says. But by 2002, when he first heard that the neighbourhood was going to be demolished and redeveloped, he was already starting to feel a sense of loss. ‘Suddenly we noticed that these kind of old areas were getting fewer and fewer; I felt I should try to capture something before it was too late.’ Now a filmmaker by training, Haolun took his camera to his grandmother’s home and started filming her daily life – alone at home, welcoming the family on visits, laugh­ing around the mah-jong table with her old neighbours, back in her room methodically counting up her winnings. He interviewed the shopkeeper running the little stall where he used to buy his snacks, and the old man who always sat outside in a deckchair, keeping an eye on everyone’s comings and goings. Haolun went back to his old school, and looked for the house where his first love had lived. He interviewed the manager of the new five-star hotel across the road, who spoke of how fascinated the foreign guests were with the old neighbourhood.

     Haolun called the result Xiangchou, hich roughly translates as ‘nostalgia’, but usually refers to a longing for a far-away homeland. Now his family has gone from the lane – his grandmother died in hospital at the age of ninety-one in 2007, shortly before demolition was due to start (‘She was talking about moving to a new home,’ he says, ‘but we knew she was worried about the future’); this year, the wrecking crews got to work on Dazhong Li. The last time Haolun went back, the house he had lived in was half-destroyed. The loss of these physical surroundings has reinforced his sense – one shared by many of his generation – that the world he grew up in has now gone. ‘At that time, in the 1970s and early ’80s, we really lived a kind of communal life – I guess you could call it a kind of socialism,’ he says with a smile. ‘And there was very little difference in income regardless of what job you did – it felt like there were no obstacles between us, nothing to stop you having contact with all the different kinds of people in the neighbourhood.’

     Shu Haolun now lives in a new residential compound, a collection of tower blocks set around a green space, where neighbours have virtually no contact with each other – ‘There are one or two you nod at in the lift, but I don’t even really know who lives in the next-door apartment.’ He acknowledges that their former way of life left little room for privacy – ‘It was great for kids, but I’m sure our parents weren’t so happy about it’ – but he thinks many in Shanghai are starting to miss something of the old ways: ‘With so many people in such a small space, of course there were sometimes conflicts, but at least we had some emotion, some connection with the people around us.’ Even the central garden now has little appeal: ‘It just feels artificial, not like a real public space – these take years to form, to evolve.’ He recalls, ‘When I was growing up, we always used to play badminton outside in the lane   – even though there were so many people walking past, bikes going by; and there were always kids running around. In our new compound, with all this outdoor space, no one plays badminton. You don’t see many children. It’s just a different feeling.’

 

An old lane in an area scheduled for demolition and redevelopment.

So obsessed has Haolun become with the block of land on which he grew up that he’s still filming, even as the demolition continues, and plans to make another film about the new office and residential compounds that the Hong Kong property developer who bought the land is planning to build here. All that may be left of the old neighbourhood is his old school building, which has been deemed to be of particular architectural merit, though apparently the planners have decided that it’s necessary to move the entire building a few dozen metres from its original site to make more space for the new development. It has reinforced Haolun’s feeling that watching his old home and neighbourhood being destroyed to make way for what the posters on the nearby street call a ‘Mediazone’ is, he says, ‘surreal’.

     A few years back, it did seem that Shanghai, having been through a period of breakneck development in the 1990s, was becoming a little more concerned about preserving at least something of its heritage. The rising value of old buildings on the property market, not least because of interest from foreigners and overseas Chinese investors, may have played a part, but the government has talked more about conservation in recent years. Architecture professors from the city’s universities have been drafted in to delineate a dozen conservation zones and identify streets worthy of ‘historical appearance protection’, though the results can sometimes be curious: several streets of buildings from the 1930s have had their simple modernist façades redecorated with rococo carvings and neo-classical statues, apparently at the inspiration of someone in the local planning department. Still, more old lanes have been listed for preservation, and even some of the city’s vast old industrial zones are now being spared from the wreckers, renovated for use as art centres, offices or designer lofts; even an old slaughterhouse has been converted into a trendy cultural and entertainment space.

     In Shanghai, however, it’s always foolish to assume that things have reached a state of equilibrium. Perhaps the city was just gathering breath, because in the past twelve months it has found a new surge of energy for redevelopment. Not content with the half-dozen new subway lines added over the past few years, another six or so are now under construction. And there’s more. ‘This year we are building five tunnels and one bridge across our rivers, constructing 105 new subway stations and carrying out improvements and road works on 1,400 roads,’ a municipal spokesman told a recent government news conference. ‘We apologise for any disruption.’ The official motivation for all of this is Shanghai’s hosting of World Expo 2010, but it also reflects the growing obsession of the city’s residents with owning their own car. Many old roads are being widened, which means a new wave of demolition. ‘Make the roads flow better to welcome the World Expo – do practical things for the people,’ exhorts the banner in one neighbourhood as its residents clear out their possessions ahead of demolition. Little matter that the area affected includes part of the San Yi Fang, a fine 1920s lane immortalised in fiction as the home of the heroine of The Song of Everlasting Sorrow by Wang Anyi, one of Shanghai’s best known writers. With a dozen new satellite cities being constructed in its suburbs, Shanghai’s current phase of development is on a startling scale. It could perhaps be compared to the outward, and upward, growth of cities like London, New York or Chicago in the 1920s or 1930s – but perhaps it should be compared with the combined growth of all three. It’s brought the return of that strange feeling of disorientation you get when you pass by a familiar area and find that all the landmarks are gone. Driving through one neighbourhood, I experience a sudden sense of panic as I realise I have no idea where I am. I pull myself together: all that has happened, of course, is that the local park – where the monks from the nearby temple used to practise their hoop skills on the basketball court, hanging their ochre robes on the wire fence – has been ripped up and replaced by a high steel hoarding hiding a vast new construction zone.

 

Children play in the rubble of all that remains of an old neighbourhood.

If you wander out to the city’s less central neighbourhoods, or back behind the main streets into the old lanes, you can still find yourself startled by just how much of old Shanghai remains, and by how vast and multi-faceted it must have been – though it’s startling, too, to realise how much of it is un­der demolition. On a Sunday stroll through a neighbourhood of downtown lanes with Peter Hibbard, a British historian who has spent years researching the city’s old architecture, I realised just how much still lay hidden behind the ornate red brick houses on the main thoroughfare which I had visited many times.

     Peter led me into a warren of tiny lanes; eventually we emerged in front of high walls surrounding flourishing gardens. Then he took me through creaking gates into a series of old mansions, barely touched since the 1920s, when they had been built as the homes of wealthy Chinese bankers and ‘compradors’ who acted as intermediaries between the bosses of big foreign companies and their Chinese staff and partners. Inside, along dark hallways, past dust-covered stained glass windows, we came upon rooms with parquet floors, ornate pillars and marble fire places, where the staff of state-run companies and neighbourhood health clinics were busy about their bureaucratic chores. They paid little attention as we peered in – me staring in amazement at these remarkable buildings I had never known existed, just a couple of minutes’ walk from the shiny modernity of Nanjing Road. It was like being transported into a mysterious world, one where, you felt, if you just stretched out your hand you would be able to grasp a handful of the elusive, dark, sombre mood which, these buildings whispered, was the atmosphere of old Shanghai.

     I asked Peter whether these mansions were preserved. ‘I don’t think so,’ he said. On the opposite side of the road, a whole row of houses was in the final stages of demolition. To Shu Haolun, this would have been the entrance to his old neighbourhood of Dazhong Li. Peter preferred to call it Yates Road, which had been on the itinerary of every visitor to Shanghai in the 1930s seeking a tailor or dressmaker. ‘It was known as the land of a thousand nighties,’ he said. To the planners, it was now part of an ‘internationalised district’, the hoardings emblazoned with the words ‘Madison Avenue’ – a sign, no doubt, of just how international were the authorities’ ambitions for the district. ‘I suppose it’s no different from what they were doing here in the 1920s,’ said Peter. ‘Dazhong Li started out as big individual houses with gardens like the ones we’ve just seen, then they knocked them down and replaced them with high-density residential housing and rows of shops along the street here.’ He surveyed the wreckage of the lane, where old stone gate frames lay smashed among the rubble. ‘But there was so much uniqueness in these old neighbourhoods – they were so pleasing to the eye, and all the senses. Now look at this place – it’s like a war zone. It’s been vandalised.’

 

Shanghai rising: skyscrapers soar where old neighbourhoods once stood.

Rising land values, and the continuing interest of property developers, mean more of old Shanghai is likely to meet the fate of Dazhong Li and Yates Road. Given that many of the real estate companies involved in the city’s ‘reconstruction’ are from Hong Kong, it may be reasonable to ask whether Shanghai faces a fate similar to that of the former British colony – the almost total erasure of its past, which was achieved in the space of a few short decades. Perhaps here the municipal planning bureau’s conservation zones will prevent this happening. But when there’s so much money to be made, it’s hard to say.

     As Shanghai’s old areas are demolished, many of the inhabitants discard their old possessions, selling them off to junk shops and antique dealers. In one of the few buildings still standing in Dazhong Li, someone has set up a little stall selling such trinkets, including an old toy train and a framed photograph of former Premier Zhou Enlai greeting Chairman Mao at an airport. On the footpath not far from Mr Liu’s house in Wooden Bridge Street, a huge array of old wardrobes, chairs, and other furniture is spread out under the trees on the street corner; at nightfall the vendors cover them with big tarpaulins to keep off the rain.

     Soon these neighbourhoods will be empty, and many of these old possessions will end up in Dongtai Road, a ramshackle and meandering collection of buildings on the edge of the old city. Its eccentric mixture of fake antiques, obscure artefacts, garrulous vendors and traditional Shanghai architecture makes it one of my favourite places in the city. A rumour that Dongtai Road itself is about to be demolished sends me rushing down here, only to find the usual collection of hawkers, hustlers and antique lovers still hard at work. A venerable old man hails me, in venerable English learned in one of the missionary-run schools of pre-revolutionary times. These days he puts his language skills to use translating for tourists. I ask whether he’s heard that the neighbourhood is to be knocked down. ‘Oh I don’t think so,’ he says. ‘It makes so much money for the government – every month the traders here pay 200,000 yuan in taxes. Two hundred thousand yuan, that’s almost 30,000 US dollars! How could the government afford to let that go?’ I glance up at the gleaming office towers in the near distance, and say I hope he’s right.