Hidden Histories: The Shanghai Shanty

It’s not often that a shanty stops you in your tracks–in a good way!–but this one did. This little house, clinging to a lane wall in the old Chinese city, defies the usual definition of a shanty: that is, a haphazard illegal structure on the edge of a city.

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You enter via an Art Deco gateway in the heart of Shanghai to find a neatly built home, with the second storey perched somewhat precariously atop the first. A boundary stone at the entrance with the name of the original lane owner is still partially visible. Inside the lane, past the shanty, stands a row of stately Shanghai shikumen with lines of poetry inscribed over their lintels. Next door stands a grand mansion that was once owned by a cloth merchant. Of course, the original owners are long gone, and multiple families now live in these grand dwellings, in much humbler circumstances than their predecessor. But however humble, their dwellings are permanent structures, not a shack classified as an illegal structure.

And then there’s the shanty itself. Although it certainly falls into the category of the ‘illegal structures’ (weizhang jianzhu 违章建橥) that dot Shanghai, this one looks like someone took a great deal of care in its construction.  

Jie Li, author of Shanghai Homes, says that shanties are usually built “with wood, brick, or cement, their roofs might consist of tiles, metal plates, or plastic boards—whatever construction material was available.”[1] And, one might add, said construction materials are often used in wild combinations.

But here, everything seems to have been chosen, and constructed, with care. There’s been a great effort to use the same type of wood on each floor. Everything is proportionate, and form follows function. In a city where tangles of wires, bigger than your head, are the standard, the wiring for electricity here is neatly arranged, and even the color of the wires seems like it’s been selected to enhance the visual appeal.

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Since the 1850s Taiping Rebellion brought the first wave of refugees fleeing political upheaval to the safety of the Concession, Shanghai has had shanties. A stream of migrants fleeing the Chinese countryside, seeking a better life in Shanghai, continued to build and populate the city’s shanties through the first half of the 20^th century.[2]

In the immediate post-civil war period of the 1950s, Shanghai’s population grew from 4.2 million in 1950 to 6.8 million in 1960,[3] fueled by the implementation of the first five-year plan that saw a period of economic recovery. New worker housing, like Caoyuan New Village,[4] was constructed for the workers building a new China. Yet the single-family housing and stylish apartment buildings left behind by the capitalists and foreigners, grand and spacious as they were, was still not enough to house all of those living in the shanties.[5]

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So despite a period of negative population growth in the 1960s and 70s–the result of the tightening of the household registration system, coupled with the chaos of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution[6]—shanties continued to be built.

With the political campaigns of the 1960s and 70s came changes in housing; ‘black classes’ often had to share their homes; instead of married children moving out, extended families had to stay together. In Shanghai Homes, Jie Li describes her Aunt Pearl’s shanty, built in 1974, adding, “by the 1990s, an illegal structure on Pingliang Road had been built in almost every front yard and back yard.”[7]

The old shanties that were constructed by refugees of another era, didn’t entirely disappear. In 1987, Ed Gargan of the New York Times visited the “Putuo slums, a raged swath of land on the northwestern edges of the city crowded with ramshackle miniature houses that were thrown up helter-skelter in the 1930’s and 40’s.” His interviewees moved there in the years before 1949, building their shanties themselves.[8]

But even as new housing was being built to relocate the Putuo slum dwellers, migrants continued pouring into the city, migrants without household registration, who were not entitled to Shanghai housing. Our shanty is probably one of these.

Yet to admire this shanty is not to romanticize it. Without having met the residents or been inside, one can say with certainty that it lacks plumbing and adequate heating or air-conditioning, and a kitchen. It’s definitely not up to fire code, and like Aunt Pearl’s, it may flood during thunderstorms. Its Liliputian size—an adult has to bend down to enter the tiny door–makes for cramped living quarters.

In admiring this shanty, we admire its builder, and the hidden histories of the shanties and their dwellers. All too often, our eyes glide over the illegal structures, as we search for the ‘real’ historic buildings. Shanties tell another story in the layered history of Shanghai, a story of the all too often anonymous people who, for a century and a half, have come here with dreams and hopes for themselves and their children, people who do the jobs no one else wants to, the ones who quietly keep the city running.

As the “Illegal Buildings and Illegal Structures” campaign eliminates many of these buildings, this little shanty reminds us that it’s not just an illegal structure, an eyesore in the landscape. It’s someone’s home, perhaps for a lifetime.

Sources

Bergère, Marie-Claire. Shanghai: China’s Gateway to Modernity. Translated by Janet Lloyd. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2009.

Fan Yiying, “Children of the Revolution: The Lives of China’s Model Communists,” Sixth Tone, July 1 2021. https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1007852/children-of-the-revolution-the-lives-of-chinas-model-communists

Henriot, Christian. 2010. “Straddling three eras: Shanghai’s hutments between rejection and remodeling (1926-1965).” Paper presented at Spaces in-between: from non-place to shared space in developmental cities, Goethe-Institute Max Mueller Bhavan, New Delhi, India, 19-23 October 2010.

Li, Jie. Shanghai Homes: Palimpsests of Private Lives. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015.

Shixun, Gui, and Liu Xian. “Urban Migration in Shanghai, 1950-88: Trends and Characteristics.” Population and Development Review 18, no. 3 (1992): 533-48. Accessed August 19, 2021. doi:10.2307/1973657.

Edward Gargan, “Shanghai Journal: Erasing the Slums: The 64-Square-Foot Question,” New York Times, January 5, 1987, Section A, p.4

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[1] Li, Jie. Shanghai Homes: Palimpsests of Private Lives. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015, p.77

[2] Shixun, Gui, and Liu Xian. “Urban Migration in Shanghai, 1950-88: Trends and Characteristics.” Population and Development Review 18, no. 3 (1992): 533-48, p. 534

[3] Shanghai, China Metro Area Population 1950-2021

https://www.macrotrends.net/cities/20656/shanghai/population

[4] Fan Yiying, “Children of the Revolution: The Lives of China’s Model Communists,” Sixth Tone, July 1 2021.

[5] Bergère, Marie-Claire. Shanghai: China’s Gateway to Modernity. Translated by Janet Lloyd. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2009, p. 379

[6] Shixun, p. 535

[7] Li, p. 77

[8] Edward Gargan, “Shanghai Journal: Erasing the Slums: The 64-Square-Foot Question,” New York Times, January 5, 1987, Section A, p.4