Looking for the Shanghai That's Gone? This Uncle Has Spent 10 Years Recording Its Streets and Alleys | 100 People With Ideas

You're all so fond of the phrase "down to earth." What he does might actually be the earth.

I first heard of Jiang Qinggong on Douban. Posting under the handle "Old Jiang," he and others like "Genovision" and "Xizi" have long paid attention to Shanghai's local culture.

Some people like to stand on Xiafei Road — the street Eileen Chang used to walk, now called Huaihai Road — and imagine the Republican era out of unofficial histories. This group of Shanghai natives reads the culture of their own birthplace at street level. From the shikumen houses still standing today, to the geographic indexes they work out from Republican-era maps, to the ordinary scenes tucked inside the longtang lanes, they collect it and record it, and post it online whenever they get around to it.

Later, Jiang Qinggong helped write a book called 《上海字记》 (Shanghai Type Record). Later still, more than 100 texts connected to the book turned up at the Xuhui District Art Museum in Shanghai, making up a month-long themed exhibition.

Besides that 400-page book, Jiang Qinggong is the lead author of 《上海里弄文化地图：石库门》 (Map of Shanghai Longtang Culture: Shikumen), published in 2012; 《上海郊游》 (Shanghai Excursions), 2007; 《上海潮流店家》 (Shanghai's Trendy Shops), 2005 and reprinted in 2010; and this year's 《上海高度》 (Shanghai Heights). The list of books he has helped plan and design is longer still: photographer Ma Liang's 《上海寓言》 (Shanghai Fables), Lu Yuanmin's 《胶片时代的上海》 (Shanghai in the Film Era), Xu Xixian and Xu Jianrong's 《百变上海》 (Ever-Changing Shanghai), and others.

If the subject is who is recording Shanghai's local culture right now, Jiang Qinggong's name should come up.

1.

In the late 1980s, Jiang Qinggong was a worker at the Shanghai Refractory Materials Factory. Because he could draw, he was moved to the union's propaganda department and put in charge of the culture page of the factory newspaper. In the early 1990s, the old work-unit factories showed the first small signs of restructuring, and — half-joking — he says he simply couldn't stand the factory's clock-in rule and quit outright. Around the same time, reform and opening up changed the rules on imports and exports, and living in Shanghai he suddenly had far more chances to run into "advanced foreign culture." One thing led to another, and his mind started to wander.

"There was no such concept as a graphic designer in China then. People were called art workers, decoration designers, that sort of thing. It was only by reading magazines from Hong Kong and Taiwan that I worked out what it was I did," Jiang Qinggong says. All that new material rubbed off on him, and after leaving the factory he decided to work out of a small home office — what people now call SOHO. At the time, most people had never heard of such a way of living.

In an era when "designer" was not yet a job, Jiang Qinggong — no formal training in drawing or design, but standards he thought were high — registered a personal design studio of his own. Friends recommended him, word spread wider, and he did commercial graphic design for several companies, China Eastern Airlines among them. He rarely had trouble making a living.

"Taking jobs back then did take some thinking, but most of the time you were following what the client wanted. I felt that what you make should start from an idea of your own. That's more interesting, and then the thing you make is really yours," Jiang Qinggong says.

By 2005, the idea of his own that Jiang Qinggong arrived at was a studio called Shanghai Fengjing — Shanghai Scenery — devoted to the city's local culture.

"I looked into just about everything to do with Shanghai's local culture at the time, and found that popular books presenting this kind of material visually were more or less a blank," Jiang Qinggong says. After a good deal of research, he saw an opportunity in the gap.

The other opportunity came out of his own experience. He had trained as a designer, and he thought images carried plenty of information, could say things in a different way, and had no language barrier, which gave them a longer reach — yet almost nobody was using them to spread the culture of a city. "There are quite a few people writing about Shanghai culture, but what everyone makes comes out much the same. If I say it visually, it might come out different," Jiang Qinggong says.

Unsure whether readers would take to the idea, Jiang Qinggong now had to face a problem he had rarely met before: money. In one sense editing books was not far from his old work — still at home, still turning things out on a computer. But the switch cut his income by two-thirds.

He had more or less seen that coming and had prepared himself. "Everything I'm doing now is still inside the plan," Jiang Qinggong says. From the start of the project he set a timetable counted in years.

2.

In 2009, Jiang Qinggong began compiling Shanghai Type Record. Around then he came across a Douban group called Shanghai Typeface, started by Li Zhiqian, another designer researching and promoting typefaces in Shanghai. Their interests were different, though, and after a few exchanges each went back to his own idea.

Five years later the book came out: 400 pages, mostly pictures. It drew on interviews with 12 people who gave oral accounts, among them Jin Yucheng, author of 《繁花》 (Blossoms); it indexed and displayed 400 images; and it traced 100 years of design and lettering with Shanghai as the setting.

Shanghai opened as a treaty port in 1843. The British missionary Walter Henry Medhurst founded the London Missionary Society Press. In 1860, the American Presbyterian Mission Press, run by the American missionary William Gamble, moved from Ningbo to Shanghai. In 1861, the British firm Zilin Yanghang started Shanghai's earliest Chinese-language newspaper, 《上海新报》 (Shanghai News). Traffic between Eastern and Western culture, and the rise of publishing, gave lead-type printing in Shanghai an early start.

After that, Lu Xun, Yu Dafu and other well-known figures founded avant-garde magazines in the city, and the launch of commercial magazines like 《良友》 (The Young Companion) opened Shanghai's cultural boom in the Republican era. After 1949, Shanghai Type Foundry No. 1, Shanghai Type Foundry No. 2, the Shanghai Printing Technology Research Institute and the Beijing Xinhua Type Foundry together formed the most specialized type-design system in the country. All of it is evidence of how closely Shanghai, as a big city, is tied to the history of type design.

Most of the work was reading and walking. Jiang Qinggong admits he spent a long time on historical material; Kongfuzi.com, the secondhand-book site, and the old bookshops around town became the places he went most. He also walked the streets often to look at the typefaces in use today, and treated them as corroborating evidence.

First of all this is a book for designers. In the note he wrote for the publisher, Jiang Qinggong reckoned two-thirds of its readers would come from that group. "But I don't want it read only by designers," he says. He has a less direct hope: that by looking at type as something a culture produces, readers will follow it back to the history of the place that produced it — Shanghai.

What Jiang Qinggong has always cared about is writing on Shanghai's local culture.

In 2013, Tongji University Press published a small color-printed book, 《上海杂货铺》 (Shanghai General Store). Its author, Zhou Qi, is another member of Shanghai Fengjing. That book belongs to a series called City Walks, six titles in all, including 《上海邬达克建筑地图》 (Map of Shanghai's Hudec Buildings), 《上海教堂建筑地图》 (Map of Shanghai's Church Architecture) and Map of Shanghai Longtang Culture: Shikumen. Four of the six are connected to Jiang Qinggong directly or indirectly, and a new volume, 《上海老城厢》 (Shanghai's Old City), due to be finished in 2016, will also be written by him.

Under his plan, the Shanghai city books whose covers he designed will eventually join up into a single panorama of a Shanghai street.

In Map of Shanghai Longtang Culture: Shikumen, written with Xi Wenlei, the two used a 1940s Republican-era map of the city's lanes as an index, then went looking for Shanghai's shikumen and recorded what had become of them. For Shanghai General Store, Jiang Qinggong suggested stringing the whole history of everyday goods together by their prices, to show readers that what the book describes can still be bought.

"All our books are tied to ordinary life, and readers can go and experience it for themselves. That is a completely different thing from me telling you how a Shanghai socialite lived in the 1930s," Jiang Qinggong says.

From the general store to shikumen to Shanghai Type Record, what Jiang Qinggong keeps to is looking at Shanghai from a new angle. That experimental streak has also drawn doubts in mainstream publishing. "Some people ask what's the point of writing about these shabby little things. I tell them the subjects aren't picked at random. Everyday goods, for instance, have a lot to do with where design comes from," he says.

In his own words, the three most important terms for him and the Shanghai Fengjing studio are physical objects, the site itself, and daily life.

The angle of the books is new, but as they circulate, their lack of depth has been raised again and again. Many people have offered suggestions, urging Jiang Qinggong to dig further into cultural history and the history of images. For now he seems unwilling to say much about it.

He is careful here: anything branching out further would take more theoretical training, and that is not what he has set out to do. "The point of these books is to spread the word, to let people know such a thing exists. We put a reading list in the back — if you need it, you can go find those books yourself," Jiang Qinggong says. As he sees it, not misleading people can itself be a decent form of guidance.

"Most of what I've managed to do came from reading," Jiang Qinggong says. "A lot of what young arty types are doing now, I was doing back then. I can make music, I can shoot documentaries, but most of what I know came from reading, so ending up at books feels like the right place to land. And everything else needs a team, while a book can be made by one person." Put that way, choosing books as his medium is both a choice and something close to inevitable.

Plenty of people do write about Shanghai, and Jiang Qinggong is only writing his own way. He doesn't talk much about sentiment; he is simply sincere about it and does the walking himself.

"I hope the form of my books gets one message across: what you look at should be varied, not limited to a few areas. And if you want to build up an understanding of a city, the best thing is to walk more and look more." That is how Jiang Qinggong, a 55-year-old Shanghai native, sums up his view of the city.

Cover image courtesy of Jiang Qinggong