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 co-founder, who pioneered the study of Old Shanghai and is the expert on the pre-1949 Western presence here. On September 17 2021, Tess turned 90—no better time to celebrate Shanghai’s preservation pioneer!
A native of Charlottesville, Virginia—who, despite living all over the world for half a century, has never lost her charming Southern drawl, in English and Chinese—Tess first arrived in Shanghai in September 1981, with the U.S. Foreign Service.
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