The Drifting Derelict

The Chinese Encounter with Opium by K.Flow
This book just makes you want to smoke!

Dongjiadu 董家渡 – the old docks – is arguably the most important historic district in Shanghai. It was the economic center of the city centuries before the Europeans built their treaty port. Located between the old city walls and the Huangpu River, Dongjiadu was a trade terminal for the entire Yangtze delta – and it was the business center of a thriving multi-ethnic commercial capital. Merchants and transport tycoons from Fujian, Guangdong and Zhejiang built up the area and created an intricate network of shipyards, workshops, residences and guildhalls. The fantastic range of architecture, business enterprise and ethnicities had never been seen before; diversity made Shanghai unique among Chinese cities.
Neglect, vandalism and poverty in the twentieth century corroded the neighborhood, but the urban fabric and many historic buildings remained intact. It was in the last decade, that most of street network and heritage architecture has been destroyed. Shanghai’s oldest shikumen blocks at Doushi Jie were replaced by high-rises. Wood-and-brick lane compounds that used to line Caocang Jie, Luxi Jie, Zhuhangmatou Jie are gone. Qing-era courtyards on Qinglongqiao Jie and Laiyimatou Jie have disappeared beneath a parking lot. Republican school buildings that faced the Dongjiadu Church were razed in 2010. Pre-war warehouses and Japanese-built factories that lined Waima Lu and the perpendicular wharf streets are replaced with strip malls. Spectacular ethnic guild halls have been disassembled and rebuilt, or simply torn down.
In the last year, the demolition and eviction process has accelerated. The destruction of authentic neighborhoods is erasing Shanghai’s original character. This loss is especially acute in an area that was so unique and so central.
Living history remains on a few streets in the old docks. Over fifty buildings of documented historical value are still standing. Only one is protected by the government. The following is a list of heritage sites that still could be preserved.

[the list]

From Yuan Mei, Eighteenth Century Poet by Arthur Waley

A few inspiring comics from Policy Conflicts in Post-Mao China.



This reminds me of my grandparents who had to choose from several undesirable assignments after their graduation from Odessa Polytechnic University. (The fact that my grandad had spent three years as a captive in Germany was probably the reason for the poor options.) In the end, they settled for Novosibirsk as 'the lesser evil'.









The big stick. What can you say...

Marine Merchants' Guildhall 商船会馆, built in 1715 in the southern docks 董家渡. Photographed at the turn of the 20th century and in 2011.
[more Marine Merchants' Guildhall 商船会馆 on flickr]


Catalpa Garden 梓园, the estate of painter Wang Yiting 王一亭, built circa 1916. The archival photo of the garden studio is taken during Albert Einstein's visit to Shanghai in November 1922; the modern photo is from 2010. Image above belongs to the Center for Jewish History.
[more Catalpa Garden 梓园 on flickr]



Ever-Spring Hall 世春堂, estate of Pan Yunduan 潘允端, built in 1559, later converted to a catholic church and renamed Jingyitang 敬一堂. The archival photo is undated; the modern view is from 2011. Of the beautiful stained glass panels only one survives in a side room inside of the hall. The building was used as a primary school gym until recently. Today, there's a retired citizens activities center in the adjacent building, and the hall is walled off.
[more Ever-Spring Hall 世春堂 on flickr]



Nine-Rooms House 九间楼, house of catholic luminary and official Xu Guangqi 徐光启 (1562-1633). The building is the northern part of the courtyard where Xu was born; he also lived here (very modestly) between his court assignments. The archival photo from Survey Shanghai 1840-1940 is undated; the modern photo is from 2010.



Ancestral hall 徐氏祠堂 built by the family of Xu Guangqi 徐光启 in 1628. Photographed at the turn of the 20th century and in 2012. The archival photo is from Survey Shanghai 1840-1940.




Main gate of the Temple of Confucius 上海文庙 on Wenmiao Lu 文庙路. The temple was built at this location in 1855 and rebuilt almost entirely in the late 1990's. The archival photo is from Shanghai Library old photo resource, the modern photo is from sh.city8.com.



Dongjiadu Police Station 董家渡警察所, built in 1934. The archival photo is from Shanghai Library old photo resource; the photo below is taken in 2012. The whole neighborhood is undergoing demolition, and the police station happens to be on the condemned block.
[more Dongjiadu 董家渡 on flickr]



Destruction of residential neighborhoods in Shanghai. The archival photo circa 1937 depicts street fighting in Shanghai during the Japanese occupation (USC Digital Library). Photo below is taken in 2011 during the demolition of the neighborhood around Marine Merchants' Guildhall 商船会馆.
[more old docks 董家渡 on flickr]

I'm reading Craig Clunas' Fruitful Sites. The book is enlightening and has changed my preconceptions of Chinese gardens (not like I had many; gardens not being typical for Shanghai etc.). Combined with other Ming history I've been reading, an interesting picture is revealed.

As the Yuan court's grip on the empire was waning, between 1357 and 1369 Suzhou was headquarters of a rebel salt merchant Zhang Shicheng, leader of the Red Turbans and a contestant in the battle for the throne. A different Zhang, Yuanzhang, eventually ousted him out and started the Ming Dynasty. As a penalty, Suzhou "was saddled with a punitively high grain tax from the early Ming period on." [Linda Cooke Johnson, Cities of Jiangnan in Late Imperial China] The tax was ten times higher than elsewhere in the empire, making the income from rice paddies negligible compared with silk production or orchards. Jiangnan was a highly urbanized and industrialized region, and so "members of Jiangnan elite preferred to invest in almost any form of productive capacity rather than the fields producing staple grains." "Land was respectable, but profits on trade, money-lending or commercial production of sugar, fruit or timber were all much higher..."

Since the fifteenth century elite participated in "a little genteel horticulture ... directed towards edible crops, and in cognate activities like wood-gathering and fishing". In the highly fertile Jiangnan, "retired grandee could boast of living comfortably on twenty mu". A garden within the city walls did not give immediate returns, but had huge productive capacity and was a prefect retirement investment.


1. Lotus and mandarin ducks in the pond

Now, the otters.

Gardens were not always built to make money, but everything inside them had economic potential. Elms were quick to grow and offered high returns. Young elm sprouts and pine kernels were edible. Pine resin was used for the making of aromatics, pine ash was used to make ink. Cypress and juniper branches were cut for flower arrangements.

Shallow ponds were perfect for the breeding of fish. Islands in the middle of the ponds encouraged fish to exercise. Lotuses around the edges of the lakes kept away predatory otters. Once in a while the ponds were emptied and the fish easily harvested.


2. Fish

Peaches, plums and crab-apples were edible fruit, naturally. When other relishes were introduced to China (hot peppers and peanuts, for instance), pickled plum was no longer necessary to 'help the rice go down'. It stayed in history as the poetic blossom – to the point of later writers claiming the plum was inedible. "Salted flowering plums became unthinkable on the way to becoming uneatable."


3. Blossoming plum

The peaches of Luxiangyuan [Dew Fragrance Garden in Ming Shanghai] are becoming more and more tangible; I can almost feel their fragrance (and their price).

And lastly,

"...The decay and flourishing of a garden is allied to that of its owner. If the person is remembered, then though the garden decays it will rise again. If the person is not commemorated, then even though the garden flourishes it will eventually decay." [Qian Yong, 19th century]


4. Searching for plums in the snow

[Illustrations from Vernacular Housing Wood Carvings]

From Drawing Boundaries: Architectural Images in Qing China by Anita Chung

From this book.