5 Reasons to Visit the Old City Right Now

This autumn, we’ve seen the atmospheric Old Chinese City disappearing with unprecedented speed. Sure, it’s been slowly vanishing for years, but a recent visit saw one of our favorite sections demolished, and recently living neighborhoods emptied out and boarded up. The recent rapid clip adds an urgency to taking a last look at one of the most special places in Shanghai: Inside the old walled city.

There’s nothing quite like the Old City, the oldest part of Shanghai: it’s a world unto itself, with its gloriously eclectic architecture and stories that go back generations, before the foreigners ever arrived. For now, we can still walk through the streets that remain, in dystopian, empty neighborhoods, where architectural details once obscured by the clutter of living are now revealed, but it won’t last: these streets may not see another Chinese New Year. 

Saturday December 16, 10am Inside the Walled City RMB 200 members, 300 nonmembers Scan the QR below to book or click here.

1/ The Stories, written into these lanes and walls. Above the doorways are carved the tales of generations: wedding blessings, elegantly worded wishes for fortune and happiness, poetic couplets from ancient books. Stories from the classics are carved in exquisite detail in courtyards. Boundary stones are chiseled with the names of illustrious families.

Worn by a century of use, the old city may be shabby today but these markers give us a glimpse of the wealth and prestige of the elite Chinese who once lived here. And there are more layers of history: names and sayings chiseled away, the Red Guards’ attempt to obliterate bourgeois traditions and families. Quotations from the Little Red Book; faded red Cultural Revolution slogans boldly proclaimed over pretty shikumen doors.

2/ The Details: There are delicious details everywhere, beautiful surprises. Stunning tile, its colors fresh and bright, imported from Switzerland, inside a grand western building. Doorways guarded by elephants and  lions, surrounded by auspicious clouds and bats. The city’s oldest gingko, framing an old watchtower. Deep inside a house, the character for prosperity, positioned just so to catch the master’s attention as he heads out.

And as the old city’s fate became known, new details emerged: farewell poetry, chalked on a wall. Vibrantly colored swirls of graffiti, incongruously decorating staid shikumen walls. Climbing plants, creating a lush green arcade across a lane, “because all the neighbors have left, and it feels empty otherwise.”

3/ The People of the Old City, the best storytellers of all. The ones who walk you to the most famous house in the area to tell you of its rich history – and dark past — so you don’t miss the highlights of the place they’ve called home for a lifetime.

Madam Zhang, who makes the best hun dun in Laoximen and is definitely not moving. Madam Ma, who has lived in her shikumen house with exquisite tiles since “the year Chairman Mao and Zhou En-lai died”. The bird man, who sits contentedly in the sunshine, watching his birds :(“they say ‘ni hao’”!). The ancient ladies, gossiping in the sunshine, as they’ve done since they moved here in 1948 as new brides, who insist that they’re much too old to move.

4/ Watching a Neighborhood Morph. Many residents have left, and so the space, subtly but perceptibly, shifts: an empty passageway, no longer choked with belongings, is now a makeshift kitchen where an entrepreneurial chef makes delicate spring roll wrappers. Lanes open up, the entire shape of buildings, once hidden behind shacks, and teetering piles of worldly goods, emerge. Graffiti is creeping in, the shikumen walls have become a giant canvas.

5/ It Will Vanish: And this is the most important of all. One day very soon, it’ll all be gone, and all we’ll have to remember it by is the name of a metro stop. Come and see how much more there is to it.

Scan the QR to book our December 16 walk.

Interested in visiting the Old Chinese City? Check our event schedule here, or  contact us about private tours, here.

Shanghai Old Town, Volumes 1&2 In all things Old City, we owe enormous gratitude to Katya Knyazeva, researcher and writer extraordinaire. Katya is the author of Shanghai Old Town: Topography of a Phantom City Volumes 1&2 – Volume 2, The Walled City, covers Laoximen.