Alexandre Léonard: The Man. The Art Deco. The Mystery.
This Sunday, we'll explore the Art Deco buildings designed by Alexandre Léonard, one of Shanghai's most talented architects, and finish up with a special treat: a visit to the penthouse apartment where he lived--and from which he disappeared, without a trace. Will we solve the mystery of his disappearance? Come along and ...
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Tour Report: Inside Marble Hall, The Kadoorie Mansion
Old Shanghai was a city full of exquisite mansions, yet even so, Elly Kadoorie’s Marble Hall was considered the most beautiful of all. On Saturday, August 5, Historic Shanghai visited this jewel. Here's the story. “It is palatial ….built on a lavish scale, yet not ostentatious.” – North-China Herald, March 22, ...
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Last Call: Keven Café, the French Concession’s Diner
Last call at Keven Café, the western restaurant that became the French Concession’s beloved neighborhood diner. The café, which closes today, sat unassumingly on leafy Hengshan Road for 25 years, a comfortingly enduring presence amidst the meteoric transformations of the last quarter-century. Keven Café, in the ...
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Sweet Old Shanghai: Heritage Bakeries
February is sweet season (you know - sweethearts, sweet delights...) so just in time for Valentine’s Day, we take a look at Shanghai’s surviving heritage bakeries and legacy of Western pastry classics. A selection of Shanghai heritage pastry classics from Kaisiling - Left, clockwise from top: Napoleon, chestnut ...
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Shanghai’s Little White House
They call it the “Little White House,” and it was one of the finest grand mansions of old Shanghai. Still is. Constructed by a company whose buildings would become icons, this gracious belle époque mansion on Fenyang Lu never housed Presidents, but for nearly half a century after it was built, it was the home of men ...
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The ’20s Gala: Farewell, 2020, Hello, 1920s!
It was a 1930s photo of a grand soirée in the ballroom of the Cercle Sportif Français that inspired the “Farewell 2020, Hello, 1920s” Gala. Hu Ping, the founder of the Shanghai Culture Society, showed us the photo, and the rest … is Gala history. Left: The inspiration. Right: The '20s Gala. Same ballroom, same ...
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The Early Shanghai Photographs of Pierre Gendron
Sometime between the 1880s and early 1900s, a Frenchman named Pierre Gendron photographed Shanghai. And miraculously, his glass stereoscopic slides, some of the earliest photographs of Shanghai in existence, have survived. As a banker based in Hué (which was then French Indochina), Pierre traveled throughout the region—to ...
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