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.

“I had never seen anything like Shanghai [in 1981]. I had never been to a foreign country that looked so utterly and completely Western. It was perfectly preserved, a cross between Warsaw in 1938 and Calcutta, a totally Western city with an Asian population. It was a scruffy showcase of Western architecture, and it was absolutely wonderful.”

But in 1981 Shanghai, the city’s pre-1949 Western architecture was considered little more than an embarrassing reminder of the ‘Century of Shame’, a physical reminder of a hundred years of forced foreign domination. No one wanted to talk about the history of these buildings, owned by imperialists and blacklisted capitalists, let alone research and write about it. She quickly realized that her curiosity about this “Western city improbably perched on the shores of China,” was not going to be easily satisfied, and she was going to have to be the one to do it. “I was in the right place at the right time, so why not?”

Left: Shanghai was ‘perfectly preserved’ when Tess arrived in 1981. Right: Tess sharing her experiences of 1980s Shanghai with a capacity Historic Shanghai audience in 2018.

She got down to the business of getting to know the city, photographing, documenting, and discovering. She unearthed invaluable research aids: a treasure trove of Old Shanghai books and maps in the street markets, and another sort of treasure trove in the people who had grown up in the years before 1949, and who shared the stories of their past lives.

The wheels of change had begun, slowly, and Tess was all too aware that this museum of pre-1949 architecture could not last. There was a book in this once-great city, but superb photographs were essential. It would her take her several more years—with a posting in Paris in between–before she found that photographer, Deke Erh (Erh Dongqiang).

Left: Tess and Deke, exploring the former Continental Bank vault. Right: top, Deke Erh, bottom, Tess and Deke on the rooftop of the Continental Bank.

Deke, who is Shanghainese, had first picked up a camera as a teenager during the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), and travelled the countryside. Saddled with a “bad family background”, he just wanted to get away from Shanghai, where all his associations were negative. When he returned in the 1980s, he looked at the city with new eyes, and saw a wealth of historic architecture. “Nobody was interested back then,” he says, “not even the professors at Tongji University (now noted for its preservationist architectural faculty).”

Tess and Deke’s first book together, A Last Look: Western Architecture in Old Shanghai, published in 1993, was the first to highlight the city’s built heritage, the first visual record of its incredible architecture legacy. The pair would go on to collaborate on 25 books, including a glorious tome on Shanghai Art Deco, 15 volumes on Western architecture and the Western presence in treaty ports throughout China, as well as a series of walking guides through the history of different Shanghai neighborhoods—a priceless contribution to the story of Shanghai.

Tess retired from the Foreign Service in October 1996, but “I could not see myself leaving China, especially with so many books incubating, such a rich field to explore, and most of all, my abiding love for the country and its people,” she says in her memoir, Permanently Temporary. By November of that year she was back as a private citizen and finally able to focus full-time on her grand passion, the architecture and history of Old Shanghai.

In those years, writers, researchers, and the simply Shanghai history-curious always found their way to Tess (if you share her passion for Old Shanghai, she always has time for you), and so did we. In 1998, Patrick and I first met Tess, in her apartment lined with Old Shanghai books, maps, and wonderful Old Shanghai ephemera. We had sought Tess out because we were curious about Shanghai’s old buildings, and we all agreed that maybe there were others like us, who wanted to know more: and thus, Historic Shanghai was born.

(Left): Tess’ last Historic Shanghai walk in April 2016, covering the route she wrote about for the “Final Five” walking guide and (Right): Rubbing the nose of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank lion for luck, an old Shanghai tradition.

Tess remained in Shanghai for the next 20 years, giving lively walking tours, delivering talks (her classic: “A Hundred Years of Shanghai’s Expat History in 50 Minutes”), and never tiring of exploring old buildings and researching and writing books. She and Deke pioneered research into Shanghai Art Deco, culminating in the beautiful, richly illustrated book Shanghai Art Deco. Her last Shanghai walking guide was published in 2016, the year she repatriated: Final Five Shanghai Walks: The Where’s Where of the Who’s Who of Old Shanghai. Since then, she published a memoir about her time in Vietnam, A War Away: An American Woman in Vietnam, 1967-1974 , and edited her dear friend Daisy Kwok’s memoir, Shanghai Daisy.

Until COVID scuttled her travel plans, Tess returned to Shanghai each spring—twice with new books to promote—eager to see her friends, her buildings, and to continue to explore.

In the introduction to A Last Look, Tess and Deke say that their goal is“to preserve these Western monuments for future generations through our photographs, our research, and the collective memories of the buildings’ former architects, builders and tenants. Tess often says that she was grateful that she was here to do just that, arriving “at the right time and in the right place” to document Shanghai as it was.

So are we, Tess, so are we.

Tess and Deke’s books, published by Old China Hand Press, are all out of print, but it’s worth seeking them out from second-hand sources.

Sources

Langfitt, Frank. After Decades, A Shanghai Preservationist Heads Home to America. NPR, April 7 2016

Johnston, Tess. Permanently Temporary: From Berlin to Shanghai in Half a Century. Shanghai, Old China Hand Press, 2010.

More Info:

Inventory of the Tess Johnston Papers. Online Archive of California.