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 ...
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Treaty Port Gulangyu
“For situation and natural attractions, Kulangsu (Gulangyu) is unsurpassed along the coast of China.” -- Philip Wilson Pitcher, 1909 A tiny gem nestled in the embrace of big sister Xiamen ("Amoy" in the local Hokkien dialect) in China’s southern Fujian province, Gulangyu Island's ...
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The Creation of a 1940s Advertisement
By The Little Museum of Foreign Brand Advertising in the R.O.C (MOFBA) // The companies of Old Shanghai left behind their buildings, but what happened to their products? Following Duncan Hewitt’s post on Brunner Mond/ICI, we’re delighted to publish MOFBA's story on the making of a 1940s ad ...
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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 ...
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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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