The Death of 34 Movie Theaters, and One Street's Past and Present

They once accounted for half of China's film industry. Today they have lost any reason to exist.

Sichuan North Road runs through Hongkou, on the north bank of Suzhou Creek. What old Shanghainese called "crossing the river to see a picture" happened on this street. In the first half of the 20th century, this road — more than three kilometers long, then known as North Sichuan Road — was lined with 34 venues showing stage plays and films, helping make Hongkou home to half of China's film industry.

The contrast between that past glory and the present is jarring. Today almost every cinema has vanished from this north-south main road, or survives only as a ruin. One is still barely hanging on.

This might look like a story about the general decline of cinemas — many cities carry a similar memory. But on Sichuan North Road, cinemas were not the only thing that declined. The death of one line of business came with the loss of an entire human history: the buildings, the ways of living, the people.

Around 2013, Li Jianhua, retired from a government post, became a contributing writer for a publishing house on the recommendation of people he knew online, and set out to write a biography of each of Shanghai's old cinemas. Unlike the bulk of research, which focuses on films and actors, he wanted to use oral history to tell "the human stories bound up with cinema buildings."

Li quickly found himself facing "a writing task that couldn't be completed." The biggest obstacle was finding the right people to interview. "First-hand material is extremely scarce, and it's hard to find anyone who actually lived through it. I genuinely couldn't put pen to paper," Li told QDaily. When he was lucky, he could use connections to track down some witness in their eighties or nineties. But in Hongkou, the scattering of film people seemed especially severe — he couldn't find a single suitable eyewitness there.

More than a century of history is in danger of breaking off entirely.

Veteran film professional Gu Min has lived on Sichuan North Road for more than 30 years. He remembers clearly that when he was in elementary school, the school gate faced the side entrance of the International Cinema. A little further on was the Victory Cinema; across the street was the "Ramos"; and across from that was the Liberation Theater. "There were too many places to watch movies."

This intersection, which brought together four movie theaters, was known locally as the "Movie Theater Golden Triangle." The "Ramos" that Gu mentioned is, by the official account, China's first commercial cinema. In 1908 the Spaniard Ramos put up a sheet-metal shed here to show films; in 1909 he built a more proper cinema, the Victoria, also on North Sichuan Road.

Differing definitions of "cinema" mean the dispute over which was truly "the first" persists. But there's no doubt that in the early 20th century, the cinema, as a new kind of entertainment venue, began clustering in China for the first time, and one center of that clustering was North Sichuan Road in Hongkou, Shanghai. This origin was no accident: Hongkou's status as a foreign concession let imported forms — architecture, art, and more — take root quickly here, while the large number of Chinese residents, many of them migrants from other provinces, drove multi-tiered consumption and enriched the existing culture.

"Ramos," "Victoria" — these names mark the colonial coloring of the earliest cinemas. Even when Chinese entrepreneurs decided to build a cinema of their own, they still reached for a foreign name, "Odeon," and advertised it as "the most spacious, most magnificent movie palace in the East." As distributors like RKO and MGM set up shop in Shanghai, well-off audiences could watch the latest Hollywood films in lavishly decorated first-run cinemas, opening only about a week behind the United States.

At the same time, a film culture distinct from Hollywood was taking shape. In 1925, several brothers from Ningbo founded the Tianyi Film Company at Hengbang Bridge, midway along North Sichuan Road, making films drawn from folk tales and classical novels. They later moved south to Southeast Asia and then into Hong Kong, eventually going down in the history of Chinese cinema under the name Shaw Brothers. The following year, Wu Liande, a native of Guangdong, launched The Young Companion pictorial here; its first cover star was Hu Die, not yet famous. The magazine later became a major archive of — and in some sense part of — the history of Shanghai film.

Neither "locals" nor "migrants," neither audiences nor film people, simply copied an imported way of life. This may not fit the classic image of Shanghai as a "ten-mile foreign settlement." The cultural studies scholar Leo Ou-fan Lee argues in Shanghai Modern that as the luxurious décor and comfortable seats of the movie palaces drew audiences "into a world unlike anything they had experienced, whether in private or public spaces," going to the movies became a new social ritual. But it's easy to imagine that this luxurious, novel experience belonged only to a minority with money and status, and that this minority clustered along regional lines — so much so that people tend to overlook the other side of "modern Shanghai."

A dramatic contrast: while the Grand Theatre on Nanjing Road West still required anyone other than civil servants to wear a long gown or a Western suit to be admitted, the cinemas on North Sichuan Road — many of them called "picture houses" — presented an entirely different scene. Wang Weiyi, a director who died in 2013, recorded this hybrid, homegrown-and-foreign "social ritual" in his memoir:

"The theater hired two narrators. One spoke the Suzhou dialect, which all Shanghainese could understand. The other spoke Cantonese, because Hongkou was an area where Cantonese people clustered, and the audience was mostly Cantonese. The two narrators sat on specially built high platforms on either side of the screen, and as the plot developed they took turns narrating — just like a storyteller, vivid and full of color, working the audience up into a frenzy. … When the hero and the villain came to blows, the whole house would stamp their feet on the floor in a thundering show of support. When the hero won, the crowd applauded and cheered. When the villain fled, the crowd cursed him out foully, in Suzhou dialect and in Cantonese."

Besides colonizers and ordinary residents, another group was active on Sichuan North Road before the war with Japan: intellectuals. They had their own way of living — reading, translating, and writing books in the morning, swimming and "drinking iced drinks" in the afternoon, then slipping into cinemas and dance halls at night and staying out until midnight. Some left-wing writers had moved into the concession simply to avoid trouble, but as like-minded people and admirers gathered around them, they unexpectedly gave rise to a whole cultural community.

It's a picture that still feels exciting today: people of different nationalities, different classes, different levels of education, living together on one street. Whether they went to the pricey, internationally connected first-run cinemas or the more down-to-earth picture houses, people were all looking for a space that pointed toward "somewhere else" while still being built into daily life. The prosperity of North Sichuan Road grew out of this civic culture, and reproduced it in turn. Even through politically turbulent times, it kept up a continuity that was almost out of step with the era.

On August 13, 1937, artillery fire opened up at Hengbang Bridge on Sichuan North Road. Five years earlier, the Odeon Grand Theatre near the bridge had already been destroyed by Japanese bombing during the January 28 Incident. The Japanese took over several cinemas on North Sichuan Road, renaming some of them with Japanese-style names such as "Ginei-za" and "Shonan Theater," and opened a new picture house, "Towa Hall," dedicated to showing Japanese films and staging Japanese theater.

Japan's invasion is usually seen as the turning point when these cinemas went from thriving to declining. From 1932 until the founding of the People's Republic in 1949, their names, uses, and ownership went through complicated changes that researchers today are still "excavating." But people also witnessed some new things. In 1940 two sensational films, Gone with the Wind and Waterloo Bridge, opened in Shanghai; in the 1940s, Sichuan North Road saw stereoscopic films made with the limited technology of the day; after 1945, Hollywood studios began setting up offices in the Embankment Building near the Sichuan Road bridge. Through the medium of film, people stayed connected to the world.

It's not hard to see why these episodes are no longer the focus of official or grassroots historians. In the film The Wasted Times, Mr. Lu, who is preparing to force a showdown with the Japanese, is warned by Boss Wang: "Don't go to Hongkou." The historical fact behind this fictional scene is that even for a powerful gang, Hongkou had become entirely Japanese territory. And the cinemas under the occupier's rule carried a certain uneasy quality — something like the old line about the "sing-song girls not knowing the pain of a fallen nation."

On the other hand, the war and the economic depression it caused ultimately changed the way people lived. As politics became the dominant theme of life in the occupied areas, film, theater, and music were given a stronger propaganda function, in service of colonial or anti-colonial political aims. Important as these changes were, they belonged to a nationwide context, no longer specific to Shanghai as an "isolated island," a cosmopolitan city of its own.

Shanghai grew less special, and interest in telling stories about the city seemed to fade. This is reflected in academia: most scholarly research concentrates on the period from the late Qing to the Republican era — what the scholar Xu Jilin has called "the first wave" of Shanghai historical studies. The history after that remains an under-studied field.

By the 1950s, Shanghai's "de-specialization" was even clearer. As joint public-private ownership spread, centralized management pushed cultural and entertainment life nationwide toward uniformity. In Li Jianhua's view, Shanghai's cinemas became "utterly without character, with nothing worth telling." The cinemas on Sichuan North Road were still fairly busy, but the films themselves had little to offer — as everywhere else, Landmine Warfare, Tunnel Warfare, and From Victory to Victory played round after round, filling up people's memories of the movies.

After the Cultural Revolution broke out, Shanghai — once proud of its Westernized, modern way of life — became, more dramatically, an engine of far-left ideology. In 1965, the Shanghai-published Liberation Daily ran an article praising the Peking opera The Red Lantern; in 1966, the People's Daily ran two Shanghai workers' commentary on the Peking opera Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy. Afterward, the model operas were made into films and sent into cinemas across the country.

With so little to work with in the films themselves, Li Jianhua shifted his research focus to "people." He hoped to find people who had worked in cinemas spanning the years before and after 1949, but those elderly witnesses were either abroad or had already died, and the few still in China weren't necessarily willing to be interviewed. He calls this "a historical fault line."

But seen from another angle, Sichuan North Road remained special. For the people who lived there, the sheer density of cinemas became an inescapable cultural marker, deeply rooted in their everyday experience. Part of that experience's influence was immediate — it let people meet "Westerners" through documentaries like The Chinese Table Tennis Team Visits the United States and coverage of the Asian Games, and meet "the West" through films imported from Albania, a fellow socialist state. Another part carried through to the second golden age Sichuan North Road enjoyed after China's reform and opening, which shaped, for some people, a romantic image of the cinema as a public institution.

Gu Min, who grew up in the "Golden Triangle," witnessed this shift firsthand. In 1973, the Hongkou District Library partially reopened, and Gu volunteered there twice a week, earning the "privilege" of a library card. After finishing middle school, he missed out on a spot working at the library, and instead followed the usual path for a science-and-engineering student, entering the technical school at Shanghai's No. 5 Steel Mill.

The opportunity came again in 1987. Quyang New Village, the huge residential complex built while Wang Daohan governed Shanghai, got Hongkou's second district-level library. Its director, who had once worked at a cinema, immediately thought of setting up a "Film and Television Documentation Center" to collect manuscripts and papers from film people, scripts from various studios, posters, stills, and video footage. Gu Min, after ten years at the steel mill, passed the interview and took charge of the Documentation Center's work — having grown up next to a cinema, he had finally returned to the world of film, in a different capacity.

Gu wasn't the only one who felt the change. Many residents of Sichuan North Road did too. The most immediate impression was that the street had suddenly become bewilderingly prosperous. Foreign cigarettes, restaurants, individually run shops — consumer goods, forms of ownership, and ways of life that the planned economy had wiped out all came back here. One resident of the "Golden Triangle" said that in the 1980s, before Haining Road was widened, the streets around the Golden Triangle were lined with shops "stacked floor after floor" — "back then, there really was money."

Cinemas grew busy again too. In the 1980s some theaters started running all night, bundling several films into one ticket, and young people would bring snacks and tea mugs to while away the time there — sometimes tickets sold out entirely. According to an article in Xinmin Evening News, when the shows let out, "every last one of them looked half-dead, faces stale as day-old bread, heads lolling, stumbling and staggering, feet unsteady, yawning nonstop as they squeezed out of the cinema. The plots of the four films had turned into a bowl of mixed-grain porridge, all jumbled together."

A number of factors made this a public space that had grown out of, yet was different from, what it had been decades earlier. It was still a place where neighbors and acquaintances ran into each other, and "block-booking a whole cinema" remained a standard form of group activity for nearby schools and work units. Regular moviegoers built personal relationships with ticket-takers, who would let them in for free with an extra seat when a show sold out. Because cinemas were still run by the cultural bureaucracy, they kept ticket prices low under their state-owned status — as low as 0.15 yuan a show — and kept the air conditioning running, which also made them an ideal place for young people to escape the summer heat.

On the other hand, the subject matter of films changed fundamentally. As cultural policy loosened, films were no longer purely tools of political propaganda, and regained, to some degree, the autonomy to set their own agendas and challenge conservative ideas.

In 1988, "Fifth Generation" director Huang Jianxin's film Samsara opened at the Victory Cinema; its exploration of money, the system, and spiritual emptiness still feels ahead of its time today. In 1989, the Victory ran another film adapted from a Wang Shuo novel, Half Flame, Half Brine, for three straight months. The appearance of these sensational films recalled the "Shanghai Modern" era, when Hollywood films shook up the city — art seemed, once again, to be a step ahead of its time.

The Victory's success involved a certain amount of luck. At the time, on Sichuan North Road, this venerable cinema counted only as a "third-run cinema." That meant that when the International Cinema, just across the street, started screening the latest blockbusters, the Victory had to wait a month before it could get the rights to show the same new films. The Victory's countermove was to get creative with what films it could source and how it scheduled them. In March 1989, the China Film Corporation selected the Victory as one of 11 art-house cinemas nationwide, and its identity was set from then on.

In the third year after the Victory became an art-house cinema, Gu Min transferred from the Shanghai Film and Television Documentation Library to become the Victory's business manager — going from "someone who watched movies" to "someone who screened them." That year, the other big event in his life was being allotted a new three-bedroom apartment, letting him move out of the old house his father had rented on Sichuan North Road since 1957, for 9.99 yuan a month. While renovating the new place, Gu designed a listening room and had it specially lined with sound-absorbing wall carpet — he says that, working in cinemas, he had to care about acoustic detail.

As business manager, Gu's job was to select films, schedule screenings, and plan events. His proudest achievement was an exhibition of films adapted from world literary classics, screening titles including Hamlet, Othello, and The Count of Monte Cristo, along with eight lectures by experts including Cao Ying, the Chinese translator of Tolstoy. In an era when "culture fever" hadn't yet faded, even an unpopular 8:30 a.m. slot would, miraculously, sell out, and it drove foot traffic to nearby shops as well.

Another thing Gu did was secure, in 1993, screening slots for the Victory at the first Shanghai International Film Festival. At the time, the International Cinema, close by and ranked among the city's top three by box office, was easily admitted; Gu persuaded Wu Yigong, chairman of the festival's organizing committee, to admit the Victory on the strength of its identity as an art-house cinema, and it ended up screening 19 films competing for the Golden Goblet Award. He still remembers that most of the tickets at the International were bought in bulk by work units, while the Victory's audience mostly showed up on their own initiative. While buying tickets, film fans would gather outside the cinema and form little "forums," arguing over "which film was worth watching," and since they didn't know each other, they'd give each other nicknames and bicker. Gu would sometimes join in and listen — and based on that "feedback," he'd decide which films were worth adding extra screenings for.

In the years the Victory thrived, college students and young culture enthusiasts made up the core of its audience. Since shopping districts like today's Wujiaochang hadn't yet risen, Sichuan North Road was still where students from Fudan, Tongji, the Shanghai International Studies University, and Shanghai University of Finance and Economics went to hang out, and art-house films, always a niche taste, happened to suit these film-savvy students. Gu saw an opportunity in this. In 1992 he planned a Valentine's Day program, screening Love in Berlin (《柏林之恋》) and Roman Holiday, and it did great box office, with the run extended all the way to the end of February. After the Victory had been doing this for two years, the rest of the industry caught on to the value of the date "2/14" and began following the Victory's lead in creating a Valentine's Day box-office season and its holiday effect.

Years later, Gu Min ran into some Shanghai culture reporters. He asked these young people whether they'd ever seen a film at the Victory, and they said yes. They may well have been the last generation to witness the prosperity of the Golden Triangle — in the mid-1990s, cinemas on Sichuan North Road, the Golden Triangle included, fell into an overall slump from which they never recovered.

If the earlier round of decline, in the 1940s and '50s, happened because the loss of "cosmopolitanism" stripped the picture houses of their character, this round of decline was nationwide. As people found new ways of connecting with the world, the special significance of the cinema as a public cultural facility weakened. Videotapes and VCDs bypassed the whole complicated machinery of copyright protection and censorship, dramatically speeding up how fast new foreign films reached people's living rooms, and state-run cinemas quickly lost out to the new media.

The response from the cultural authorities was to let cinemas diversify their business. In fact, as early as 1985, the Hongkou Grand Theatre had already been renamed the "Hongkou Culture and Entertainment Hall" and become one of the first commercial dance halls to open in Shanghai after reform and opening — marking the arrival of a new model. In 1987, Gao Zhanxiang, then executive vice minister of culture, drew on Guangdong's experience to convene a conference on "using culture to subsidize culture, using side businesses to help culture," encouraging cultural institutions to run for-profit ventures to make up for insufficient government funding for cultural affairs and become financially self-sufficient.

This push toward side businesses quickly swept from cultural centers and theater troupes into the cinemas. Many movie theaters opened music bars, bars, and tea houses, and by the mid-1990s video arcades became the fashion.

In hindsight, this response was poison taken to quench thirst. It never brought cinemas' finances to a sustainable level, but it did badly damage the cinema's meaning as a public cultural space. From the semi-colonial era through the second spring of the 1980s, and even during the Cultural Revolution, this cultural meaning had been a core part of people's memory of going to the movies: people went to the cinema both for the ritual of "watching a film together" and to find a world elevated above everyday life. Cinemas remade through diversified business drifted further and further from that tradition.

Unfortunately for the Golden Triangle, and for the cinemas along the whole of Sichuan North Road, the theaters' troubles compounded the troubles of the street itself, and the two quickly spiraled into a vicious cycle. Not only did the business itself become unsustainable — the buildings that housed the cinemas also faced demolition or abandonment, and even became tools for rent-seeking.

In 1995 and 2002, the Hongkou district government launched two rounds of redevelopment along Sichuan North Road, widening Haining Road, tearing down "shantytowns," building large shopping centers, and developing cultural-tourism resources such as Duolun Road, all in pursuit of "consumption upgrading." Things didn't turn out as hoped. The redeveloped Sichuan North Road ended up stranded in the middle — not upscale enough to reach one crowd, not cheap enough to hold the other — unable to compete with established shopping districts like Nanjing Road and Huaihai Road or with emerging ones like Xujiahui and Wujiaochang; and the large-scale relocation that came with the municipal redevelopment drove away the local consumer base.

Old residents moved away one after another, and new customers never arrived on schedule. For the cinemas that had thrived on Sichuan North Road for nearly a century, the countdown had begun.

In 1998, the widening of Haining Road led directly to the demolition of the Hongkou Grand Theatre. On the patch of green space left behind after the widening, the district government erected a stone marker declaring this the site of China's earliest cinema. Every day traffic streams past on this east-west artery, and hardly anyone notices the marker, or the history it can't come close to recording in full.

In the late 1990s, a culture reporter set up the Yong'an Joy Plaza on the site of the Yong'an Cinema. A later investigation found that the new shopping center had in fact been used as a vehicle for siphoning money into private hands; the reporter involved was sentenced to prison, and the Yong'an Cinema was left standing in name only.

In 1997 the Victory fell into the red. In 2001 the Hongkou District Culture Bureau, its sole shareholder, decided to dispose of it. According to Xinwen Evening News, a private company from Jiangxi bought the Victory for 12 million yuan and turned it into "Victory Street," a venue focused on dining and entertainment. Just three years later, the property at No. 408 Zhapu Road, where the Victory once stood, went up for auction again, with the auction house setting a reference price of 35 million yuan.

Today, in Li Jianhua's words, this cylindrical building still sits "like a bunker" at the corner of Zhapu Road and Haining Road, fenced off on all sides. Rusted signs are a reminder of the businesses it recently housed: an internet café on the third floor, an arcade on the fourth, late-night snacks on the second. The words "Victory Entertainment City" are still there, but nothing else suggests any connection to a cinema. Business registry records show that the restaurant and arcade companies once operating at No. 408 Zhapu Road have all had their licenses revoked.

No new tenant has managed — or even tried — to turn its fortunes around.

Nearby residents told QDaily that No. 408 Zhapu Road has sat abandoned for two or three years. There are rumors it will be auctioned off, but no public notice has appeared. A batch of the Victory's former employees went on to work at Hongkou Stadium and Quyang Cinema City, another old state-run cinema in Hongkou district. Mr. Wang, who handles personnel there, said that more than a decade ago several employees did indeed come over from the Victory, but they've all since retired, and he couldn't provide contact information for any of them.

"I've already got my photos. Now it's just a matter of whether they tear it down or keep it," said Li Jianhua. He believes the government now faces a dilemma, with the rise of the idea of a "cultural brand." The logic of "demolish it" seems to be giving way to the idea of "preserve historic buildings." But how to actually make good use of this historical legacy, and bring it back to life, clearly isn't something a policy document alone can solve.

What worries him is whether "keeping it" will actually happen in practice. "Don't fake an antique — tear it down and build a new one in its place. A building — even if you number every single brick and put it back together exactly, it's still a soulless thing. Once the place is gone, the soul is gone with it."

Also left abandoned for a long stretch is the Masses Cinema and Theater. After closing its doors around 2012, it was hung, one after another, with makeshift signs for a "Changshu Rosewood Furniture Exhibition" and a "Guangdong Furniture Clearance Sale" — which, oddly enough, recalls the fact that this was once a place where Cantonese people gathered to watch Cantonese opera. Through the iron fence, you can see a 2018 municipal notice posted on an interior wall, and the words "snack counter" on the door of a small room to the left. The symmetrical first-floor lobby sits steeped in darkness, with no sign of any recent activity. A bronze plaque reading "Outstanding Historic Building" hangs above the entrance, up to the left.

The only survivor, the International Cinema, leased its entire premises in 2008 to the Shanghai Xingmei Cinema Management Co., Ltd. On January 16, 2009, the Xingmei International Cineplex opened, its original two screens expanded to eight, built out in a "fully European style." A press release claimed that this was a "five-star cinema," filling the gap left by the fact that "Hongkou district has never had a modern multiplex." The word "International" in the new cineplex's name had nothing to do with the old cinema, but for some people it was a comfort all the same — after all, something had carried over from the past.

In May this year, after a round of rapid expansion, cinemas in the Xingmei chain around the country began surfacing in scandals over unpaid wages. Not long ago, cleaning staff at the Xingmei International Cineplex blocked moviegoers from entering before a screening, and the cinema ended up calling the police. In late July, the cineplex was advertising August's new releases, but a notice reading "facilities under repair" was posted at the entrance. Walking inside, two passers-by sat in the dim lobby to cool off. A staff member said the cinema was only closed for two or three days. Asked how business was these days, the reply was: "It's alright, I guess."

"He actually said 'alright'!" The two passers-by burst out laughing. The staff member laughed too, then sighed.

Cover image: Cai Yineng Graphics: Zheng Shuya