Two Chroniclers on What Became of Two Old Neighborhoods, Before and After Commercial Real Estate | Shanghai's Nanjing West Road as a Specimen ②

“Culture is fundamentally about people. Once the people are gone, there is no value left.”

More than ten years on, Shu Haolun found himself thinking again about the footage he shot in the lanes.

As a boy he lived in Dazhongli, off Nanjing West Road, a neighborhood first built in 1925. It flourished, then declined, and by 2008 it had been demolished down to the ground — all but one old assembly hall, which was “shifted” intact to another site. Those 83 years, Shu says, “run parallel to the whole history of Shanghai's development. They are a microcosm.”

“1925 was exactly when Shanghai's urbanization began, and it was the golden moment. By the 2008 Olympics, Dazhongli was wiped out against that backdrop. It's the whole history, highly concentrated.”

Shu Haolun is a director, best known for a documentary called Nostalgia, shot in Dazhongli before the demolition, which NPR called “a cinematic poem about a vanished Shanghai.” He has made four more films since, among them Struggle (《挣扎》) and Young Blood (《少年血》), but for most people the documentary is where they first heard his name.

Even for a man who spent his entire childhood there, reassembling these small pieces of history from memory keeps getting harder. Dazhongli is now HKRI Taikoo Hui, one of the largest retail complexes in the Nanjing West Road shopping district, and the old comb-shaped grid of lanes — three rows hanging off a single spine — has been wiped clean. The demolition scattered the old neighbors to Shanghai's outer suburbs, or overseas; the residents here were mostly elderly, and in recent years many have died.

The old hall, which once belonged to Minli Middle School and was “shifted” to the south side of the mall, is now an upscale members' club inside the complex called Cha House — named for Cha Chi-ming, founder of HKR International. Shu remembers taking classes there with middle school students from the surrounding lanes, eating in its canteen, doing gymnastics in it, and the creak of the floorboards and desks in the “old building.”

The photographer Wang Gangfeng was commissioned to document the whole move. His pictures, along with the documentary Shu shot on his own, were filed away by the developer as historical material for future promotional use.

What Wang enjoys talking about more, though, are the things he scavenged from the Dazhongli site once it was rubble — wooden cabinets, bamboo baskets, chamber pots — and how the last holdout family was cleared out:

“They brought a fire ladder and ran it straight up to the third floor, carried a woman in her nineties out through the window along with everything in her room, and delivered her to the new apartment she was supposed to have moved into and hadn't. They were afraid something would happen to her at that age, so there was an ambulance waiting downstairs and a notary on hand. The police were vicious the moment they saw me — the message being, ‘You turn up at a time like this and I'll lock you up.’”

Wang also grew up in an old house near Nanjing West Road, and decades in business taught him how to handle people of every stripe: smile when there's trouble, hand over a pack of cigarettes, make the rounds with gifts at every holiday, and when none of that works, stay well away. It is why his independent photography studio, whose clients are mostly foreigners, has survived more than ten years — a few scares, no real damage — inside Zhang Garden, a neighborhood near Nanjing West Road with more than a century behind it.

The entrance to Zhang Garden hides at the end of Taixing Road, the street that cuts Wujiang Road in two, only a few hundred meters from Nanjing West Road itself. If you have never been, it may puzzle you now: a few restaurants have opened on either side of the main gate, but inside it is still a residential compound.

Zhang Garden was once a grand place. Before it became the new-style lilong housing it is today, it held Arcadia Hall, the tallest building in Puxi before the Sassoon House went up on the Bund, and inside it was an entertainment complex that predated the Great World. Shanghai's first electric lights, its first photo studio, its first manned balloon ascent and its first film screening all happened here.

With Dazhongli gone, Zhang Garden is one of the few places near Nanjing West Road where you can still see an intact 1920s Western-style neighborhood. The lavish specification of a few of its houses is almost impossible to find anywhere else. As Wang puts it, “only people with more money than they could spend would design a place like this.”

But having survived from the Republican era to now, it has also become the purest example of the old Shanghai “seventy-two households under one roof”: the freestanding mansion at No. 41, originally built for the family of Mobil's comprador in Shanghai, now holds 46 households. Plenty of older residents would rather not sit cooped up in their cramped rooms, and spend the day at the community service center with its courtyard, or eating lunch in the roomy “Zhang family hall.”

From 2013 the Jing'an district government began treating the place as a potential tourist attraction and commercial project on the edge of the shopping district. The project company is said to have pulled together 6 billion yuan in all, from state capital, private firms and individual investors. But the development plan has never quite settled — it looks hesitant. So far only one old house near the Taixing Road entrance has been converted; it is called Zhang Garden 99, and a few restaurants have opened in it.

Then, just before Lunar New Year 2017, notices went up at every lane entrance in Zhang Garden, fast as a gust of wind: “To advance Phase II, survey teams will shortly visit households to compile reports.” It looked like a real step forward at last. Wang says almost everyone in the neighborhood was “smiling in spite of themselves.” A sanitation worker who holds the right to use his unit did the arithmetic out loud for him: he stood to collect more than 5 million yuan. Wang's own landlord dropped out of contact from late April and stopped asking about the tens of thousands of yuan in annual rent, “as though he were simply waiting for the demolition.”

Most people still living there are impatient for a chance they may not get twice in a lifetime — to be lifted out of poverty overnight. Since 2002 Jing'an district's compensation rate for clearing dilapidated housing has stood above 10,000 yuan per square meter, and property prices in the surrounding blocks have since risen more than tenfold.

It was precisely those compensation costs that tripped up HKR International, which laid out HK$1.306 billion at the end of 2002 hoping to put apartment towers on the Dazhongli site. In 2006 it sold 50% of the project to Swire Properties; the two agreed to make the site a retail complex to be held and run long term, then added an 8-billion-yuan bank loan, and only after that did the demolition move along.

A former employee of the Dazhongli project office, who asked not to be named, says that in the year or two she worked there, “the project hadn't broken ground, so on an ordinary day there was almost nothing to do. But every week we met with the government and the subdistrict office to work through demolition and stability maintenance.”

Shu Haolun thinks Zhang Garden today is still far better off than Dazhongli was. When Zhang Garden went up in the 1920s it already had relatively modern plumbing — bathtubs, flush toilets. Dazhongli never got its turn in the government's neighborhood renovation programs before the bulldozers arrived.

When it was new, Dazhongli housed senior staff from Shanghai's foreign trading houses; the rent was paid in gold bars and the residents came and went by car. Conditions like the ones at the end, though, were acceptable only to the cleaners and odd-job workers who could not afford high rents yet had to stay near the downtown restaurants and offices where they worked.

The rooms these newcomers took were the ones left by the first people to leave Dazhongli. If they did not keep to themselves, they had to learn to get along with the old residents of several decades' standing and with hard-up middle-aged men and women who had already made peace with their lot. And the demolition news, to one degree or another, was working on the moods of those original residents.

Shu's grandmother was in her nineties by then, rooted to the place and thoroughly unwilling to move. She still played a few rounds of mahjong with the neighbors every day and tallied the winnings and losses on sheets torn from an old vertically ruled letter pad. One of her regular partners, Uncle Wei, was past sixty and, at first, unbothered. “I run 10,000 meters a day,” he told the camera. “Other people make 10,000 yuan a month and aren't necessarily as happy as I am.” Before long he was worrying too: the flat the government allotted him was in Taopu Ninth Estate, two subway stops short of outer districts like Nanxiang, and moving there would sever him from “downtown” life for good.

According to the relocation paperwork, Dazhongli's residents were resettled in batches into housing across Jing'an, Baoshan, Jiading, Putuo, Minhang, Pudong and elsewhere. The old residents who signed first got something extra, then turned around and went to work on their neighbors, and the clearance picked up speed.

By the time Shu came back in 2008 to film the tail end of the demolition, less than 20% of Dazhongli was still standing. The site looked “as if it had been bombed.” Only the postman kept coming, wobbling his bicycle through the rubble to deliver letters to the last few households.

“It was a surreal image. My friend Ma Liang was with me and saw it too, and he took it as inspiration — he cast someone as that postman and made a piece out of it.”

By then the office towers going up around Dazhongli had all but enclosed it. What would replace it was anyone's guess. HKR International's line was that it would be one of the five priciest luxury residential districts in Shanghai, a match in price and fittings for the projects around Central Park in New York. The manager of the Four Seasons next door said it would be redone in the style of Xintiandi, since foreign guests love that sort of old scenery most. Then Swire Properties came in, and the story became a top-end mall like the ones they had built in Hong Kong.

None of it interested Shu. He has moved to Xujiahui and works in Baoshan. He rarely goes out to shop, and when he does come back near Dazhongli he would rather sit for a while in the Chabrol Café a friend runs inside Jing'an Villas. Since the joint enforcement sweep of 2013, Chabrol has been one of the few shops in Jing'an Villas still trading normally.

Now that commercial projects have driven so many original residents out, he finds the Nanjing West Road area deserted: no cinema, sports ground, children's bookshop or children's palace of the kind he went to as a boy; no grain shop or wet market where his parents queued; not even the messy vitality of Jing'an Villas a few years ago, when it was full of small shops.

“This is the thing I don't understand about the government and the developers — why they never grasp it. Or they don't want to grasp it, or they pretend to. Look at the life in a shop inside a mall and the life in a place like Jing'an Villas that was never developed as one block: they're not the same. A big reason is that the second kind is spontaneous, and it's tangled up with the neighborhood. A mall doesn't have that, and it can't copy a neighborhood's memory in a hurry, because a neighborhood takes time to form. And the people who experiment inside a neighborhood simply can't carry a mall's rent or the risk of failing. If a shop is guaranteed twenty years without being moved, I'll plan the business around twenty years. If you're going to move me in two, I plan around two — and then no large investment is possible.”

Wang Gangfeng takes the change calmly, even though further development of Zhang Garden is bound to knock down his favorite “backdrop” in Shanghai of the past dozen years.

In 1989 a solo exhibition abroad gave him his way out — out of a dull job as a fitter in a factory, and out of an old house on North Maoming Road shared with a “Ningbo granny” and a “Suzhou grandpa.” He studied commercial photography in Canada and got permanent residency. When he hauled everything he owned, camera gear included, back to China in 14 suitcases some years later, he happened to land on an unmet need among the first foreign executives in the Nanjing West Road district: besides shooting commercials for their companies, could he find somewhere with Shanghai character and take some family portraits?

After trying the Bund, the City God Temple, the Jade Buddha Temple and other sights, what he liked best was still taking foreign clients to Dazhongli and Zhang Garden. They usually met in the lobby of the Four Seasons, which spared them getting lost in the tangle of lanes; clients brought their own clothes, while the props — bicycles, birdcages, bamboo baskets — sat in his studio in Zhang Garden.

Since Dazhongli came down, he can shoot a full professional family set, several dozen frames, entirely in the corners of Zhang Garden he knows, and throw in an easy walking tour of the lanes:

Every lane has its own name, and some of the auspicious phrases over the doorways quote The Analects in ways an ordinary person cannot place. No. 2, Lane 106 belonged to Zhou Qingyun, the largest shareholder in the company that ran the steamer Taiping; after the ship went down in 1949, two or three hundred relatives of the dead besieged the mansion demanding compensation, and Zhou ended up giving away his entire fortune and walking out with nothing. China had a baby boom of its own, and the curtains strung across a single room and the sleeping lofts built above it all date from then. And to look out over the whole of Zhang Garden, skip the main path and the big balcony: the way to do it is up the narrow workers' staircase on the side of No. 41, step by step, to the fourth floor.

You can now find Wang's “wild tour guide” program on the Four Seasons' own website. Packed with historical detail and with argument about the state of Shanghai society, the walk through Zhang Garden takes three hours end to end; what began as free commentary to win clients has turned into a paid service, and a business.

Whether they come for photographs or for the tour, most of these foreign-executive clients arrive on reputation. They have worked in Shanghai for years and know nothing about how local people live. The family lives in an international compound in Jinqiao, Pudong; a car takes him to work; the children attend an international school. Yet on a Zhang Garden tour, if lunchtime happens to come around and Wang can get them a few stir-fried fava beans from somebody's home cooking, they are delighted.

“If you're a cultured, well-educated person arriving somewhere new, of course you want to know how people live. Not how pretty it is — they've all seen the Bund. They want to come here, behind the handsome streets, and see the real thing.”

What galls him is not so much the foreigners peering at the lives of Zhang Garden's residents as though at a peep show. It was the time he brought high school classmates who had once lived nearby on the same tour, told them the same vivid stories, and watched their faces stay blank. “There was no reaction at all. Like looking at a white wall.”

As the general manager of Zhang Garden Group described it to him, the plain, unremarkable houses will be pulled down; the mansions worth keeping will be moved along rails and grouped together, the way the old Minli Middle School hall was. Gonghui Hospital, which locals consider good and cheap and where they queue daily for prescriptions and IV drips, will also go — only the one building inside it designed by the celebrated Hungarian architect László Hudec will remain.

“The one thing they haven't worked out is how many residents to keep, so there are still signs of ordinary life, the way there used to be. Take Xintiandi, which foreigners think is wonderful: imagine putting a real residential block inside it — think how chaotic that would be. And the chaos and the life at Tianzifang come precisely from keeping every original resident. That's the new problem they have to solve,” Wang says.

To sell the project to the young people who move through the Nanjing West Road district and pass Zhang Garden's gate on Wujiang Road, the government and the project company have spent several years on groundwork. Part of that work is folding Zhang Garden's history from every period together, blurring the fact that it is a product of the foreign concessions, from before the liberation of Shanghai.

“Old things become a symbol, a consumer product, waiting to be grafted onto something. The new things were worth nothing in themselves; graft the old onto them and they acquire value. The content inside has been scooped out. Culture is fundamentally about people. Once the people are gone, there is no value left,” Shu says.

Shu Haolun wants to attempt something longer. In the form of a series or a film, he would “take Dazhongli's whole history from 1925 to 2008 as an index, and through it look at how Shanghai developed.” No other place, he says, is as familiar to him, or lets him feel as sharply how a neighborhood is “bound up with the course of an entire country and people.”

Unless otherwise noted, the cover image and the photographs in this article are by Wang Gangfeng