Tess Johnston: Shanghai’s Preservation Pioneer
The cult of Old Shanghai is flourishing: WeChat groups, walking tours, Instagram, books; everywhere you turn, someone’s leveraging Shanghai history. It’s a “booming cottage industry,” says historian Jeffrey Wasserstrom. For all this, we owe a great deal to Tess Johnston, Historic Shanghai’s ...
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School Above the Sea: Shanghai Municipal Council Polytechnic Public School
The Shanghai Municipal Council (SMC) Polytechnic, or Gezhi Academy, was founded in 1874, and remarkably, this pioneering institution, with its links to missionaries, reformers, scientists, and revolutionaries, is still going strong. Today, it’s the Shanghai Gezhi High School. In 2005, I was ...
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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. You enter via an Art Deco gateway ...
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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, ...
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The Forgotten Bride in the Shanghai Lane
We found her in a lane called Chusan Liegh (Zhoushan Li 舟山弄), in the old Jewish ghetto. Who was she, this elegant bride wearing heart-shaped earrings and a fairytale wedding gown? Why was she left here? Who would leave a wedding portrait behind? The lane, on Zhoushan Lu in Hongkou, stands ...
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AstraZeneca, Shanghai, and the fall of the Qing Dynasty
by Duncan Hewitt // You may – just possibly – have heard the name AstraZeneca recently…But did you know about its Shanghai connection? One of the pharmaceutical company’s forerunners had a close association with China in the first half of the 20th century, leaving an architectural legacy in ...
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Bookshelf: Rumors from Shanghai with Amy Sommers
In April, the Historic Shanghai Book Club read Rumors from Shanghai, a historical thriller set in 1940s Shanghai, so we sat down with author Amy Sommers to find out more about hidden histories and untold stories, the city as inspiration, surprise discoveries, and more. Get the book: In Shanghai, ...
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