Tours & Talks
FEBRUARY 2025
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RECORDINGS: We’ve recorded our most popular talks, for your viewing pleasure! To order, click here.
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FEBRUARY WALKS
Tuesday February 4, 2pm Revolutionaries, Cabarets & Collaborators: Yuyuan Road West (from Zhenning Road to Zhongshan Park) /RMB 200 members, 300 nonmembers
Our exploration of Yuyuan Road continues! This section of Yuyuan Road is a marvellous mix of Old Shanghai: the missionaries’ secret door of hope, housing for Japanese executives; underground revolutionary lairs, a mansion for a mistress and a Victorian Gothic castle for a collaborator; homes of literary figures, a rocket scientist, a notorious cabaret—so many buildings, so many stories!
Yuyuan Road East is covered on February 1.
Saturday February 8, 10am (working day) /DISAPPEARING SHANGHAI: Behind the Bund /RMB 200 members, 300 nonmembers
“Urban renewal” plans were recently announced for the glorious historic neighborhood behind the Bund, and that means only one thing: it’s time to see it before it all becomes gentrified!
Join us for an exploration of the first streets to be laid out in foreign Shanghai, and the stories and secrets revealed in the legacy they left: stately government buildings; sprawling apartment houses; the imposing banks of the old financial district; a magnificent cathedral and lane neighborhoods, and the stories of those who built them, lived in them, and ran them. It’s a wonderful mélange of architecture, as well—Chinese, Gothic, astonishing Art Deco—Old Shanghai landmarks in a forgotten landscape.
Sunday February 9, 2pm /XIANGYANG LU: Moguls, Mansions, Russian Domes & Art Deco /RMB 200 members, 300 nonmembers
There’s nothing quite like exploring the entire length of an historic Shanghai street to see the rich diversity of this city, the stories and layers of a century’s worth of history, and discover the secrets that lie hidden behind familiar sights.
Xiangyang Lu was originally in the former French Concession, bordering Chinese territory. Here, we’ll find traces of the Russian enclave in the onion domes of the Russian Orthodox Mission Church and the even fainter traces of the New Synagogue; see lavish mansions–one owned by a Southeast Asian movie mogul and another by a Jewish tycoon—the story of a tragic poet, classic Shanghai lane neighborhoods, Art Deco apartment houses, dancing in the beautiful park, and more!
Saturday February 15, 4pm /VALENTINE’S WINE WALK: Romance of the Former French Concession /RMB 300 members, 400 nonmembers, includes 2 glasses of bubbly
Celebrate the romance of the old French Concession with the Historic Shanghai Valentine’s wine walk! Sip bubbly, stroll the prettiest part of the former Concession, and travel back in time to hear the stories of the fascinating characters who once lived here: love stories (of course), tales of tycoons and spies, of playboys and dreamers. Our walk will take us along plane-tree lined streets to Art Deco apartments, grand mansions, and charming lanes into the heart and soul of old Shanghai.
Sunday February 16, 2pm /HONGKEW: Shanghai Jewish Ghetto Memories /RMB 250 members, 350 nonmembers, includes entry to the Jewish Refugees Museum
On February 18 1943, a proclamation was issued, establishing a designated area for stateless refugees. It became known as the Shanghai Ghetto, a safe haven for the 20,000 European Jews who had fled Nazi Europe. This city on the other side of the world, a place many had never heard of, was a refuge when all other doors were closing. In this alien city, they had to make a new home and a life in extremely difficult circumstances.
82 years after the proclamation, we’ll visit the Jewish Refugee Museum and the former synagogue to explore the stories of the men and women who lived here, and visit the places where they lived, worked, and played. We’ll also take a look around this historic neighborhood where they lived, which contains what was once Asia’s largest prison, as well as an old Sea Temple.
Sunday February 23, 2pm /SHANGHAI BLACK HISTORY: Poets, Activists, and All that Jazz /RMB 300 members, 400 nonmembers, bus + walking tour, includes private bus
Join us on a Black History month walk that traces the fascinating story of the talented Black artists and activists who peopled 1930s Shanghai. The city was a global hotspot that drew the curious and opportunistic from around the world, and they came for reasons as diverse as the city itself.
In a walk that takes us from Hongkou to the Bund and into the former French Concession, we’ll follow in the footsteps of people like Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes, who came to see fellow writers and intellectuals, and his jazz musician friends from back home. We’ll share stories of those jazz musicians—Buck Clayton, Teddy Weatherford, Earl Whaley, Valaida Snow—who were lighting up Shanghai’s nightclub scene, and not incidentally, escaping America’s race laws.
We’ll see where activist and anticolonialist W.E.B. Dubois lunched with Shanghai’s Chinese newspaper editors, and where singer and actor Paul Robeson’s movie “Emperor Jones” played—Robeson, who had recorded an album of Chinese songs, had an enduring popularity in China. We’ll visit the house where dancer Sylvia Si-Lan Chen, and numerous other artists and activists were hosted to dinner, the home of Madame Sun Yat-sen—Shanghai’s own Soong Ching Ling. Join us, and see Old Shanghai through a completely different lens.
BOOKINGS: Scan the QR code below, or click here.
