Shanghai’s Forgotten Courtyard
You’d think there’d be no more surprises left in Shanghai - surely drones, digital maps, and amateur historians have unearthed them all. But here, just a building’s breadth from busy Wulumuqi Lu, stands a timeless Chinese courtyard house. Imagine away everything around it, and this house could be from a thousand years ...
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Historic Shanghai’s Best Books of 2018
Shanghai’s history could never be painted with a single brush, a single perspective, a single tale. Perhaps that’s true of all cities, but it’s especially so in this cosmopolitan metropolis, where east and west, communism and capitalism, tradition and revolution, coexisted. And to complicate things further, Shanghai’s ...
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A Chinese artist, a cartoon boy, and a former French Concession house
by Maura Elizabeth Cunningham Zhang Leping (1910–1992) was a Chinese cartoonist, most famed for his Sanmao the Orphan comics. In the late 1920s, Zhang moved from his coastal hometown to Shanghai, where he quickly found work as a commercial artist and cartoonist. He debuted the Sanmao the Orphan comics — China’s ...
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Shanghai Shoot ‘Em Society
If you need proof that living in Old Shanghai really was like being in a Bonnie and Clyde movie, consider the story of the Shanghai Shoot ‘Em Society, reported in colorful detail in The China Press newspaper. It was November 24, 1929, just a month after the dramatic stock market crash in the U.S. A group described by the ...
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Remembering Shanghai: A Memoir of Socialites, Scholars and Scoundrels
We've lost one of the last voices of Old Shanghai with the passing of Isabel Sun Chao on March 13 2023, just a day after her 92nd birthday. Luckily for us, Isabel shared her story with us in her memoir, Remembering Shanghai. Spend a little time in Shanghai and it becomes clear that the history of the city can best be ...
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Roar, China! Langston Hughes in Shanghai
February is Black History month, and Shanghai has a fascinating, hidden history of Black American poets, activists, and musicians. Our inaugural Shanghai Black History walk is sold out, but you can sign up for the wait list here. Langston Hughes, the poet laureate of the Harlem Renaissance, spent three months in ...
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Hazelwood: The Taipan’s Retreat
The stately Butterfield & Swire taipan's mansion -- "the only gentleman's house in Shanghai'' -- was designed from afar by an architect who never set foot here. "It is known all over Shanghai as the Palace,'' reported George Warren Swire when he arrived from England in 1934 to inaugurate Hazelwood, the ...
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