Last month I reviewed
Shanghai Homes: Palimpsests of Private Life by
Jie Li (Columbia, 2015) for the
LSE Review of Books. It’s an excellent book and
reading it elucidated and informed much of what I recall from many hours spent
wandering through Shanghai’s
shikumen lanes.
It’ll be ten years ago this September that I first visited China. On my first
visits to Beijing and Shanghai I became fascinated by the
hutong and
shikumen of
each city respectively. Although distinctly dishevelled, dilapidated and run
down to look at from the outside they seemed to have a distinctly homely air
that hummed with the close-knit feeling of a genuine community.
The
石库门 shikumen alleyways in Shanghai were we originally constructed by foreign
owned factories to house their workers in the area of the city which was then known
as the ‘International Settlement’ during the semi-colonial period of the city’s
administration, from the mid-19
th century up to the end of the Second
World War and the subsequent Communist revolution. Beijing’s
hutong in contrast have a much older
heritage, dating back to the Mongol Yuan era in the late-13
th century.
The name,
胡同 hutong, derives from the
Mongolian term
(khôtagh) for a 'water well', suggesting a communal focal point for a set of
family dwellings.
I made several trips to Beijing and
Shanghai between 2005 and 2010 working on several exhibitions in each city. A
colleague and close friend of mine on our first few trips in 2005-2006 found a
mutual affinity for wandering these old towns for hours on end whenever we
could get a chance, either day or night.
As we walked around these old areas we
were struck by how often we were met with smiling faces. At first we’d both
been rather timid, venturing into what felt like very intimate and enclosed
spaces. The labyrinthine little alleyways were intriguing and unfathomable –
entering one you never really knew if it would lead you through into another
lane or if you’d end up inside someone’s house. Then turning a corner you might
just as easily be met by the unexpected, I remember my surprise at rounding one
corner to find an old Mosque (
Xiaotaoyuan Mosque) suddenly looming up at the end of the lane.
In other areas you’d stumble on a
kerbside market, selling vegetables and cuts of meat, bustling with life.
Motorbikes laden with clinking gas canisters trying to weave their way through
the crowd. A game of mah jong being
played at a table outdoors with a shrill horde of cheering onlookers,
suggesting that the stakes of that particular game were riding high. People all
around were out strolling, or sitting smoking, chatting. Proud grandparents showing off new
born infants. Kids sprinting home from running errands to nearby food shops. Lines
of laundry hung up high overhead, amidst skeins of telegraph wires, bridging
the narrow alleyways. Songbirds occasionally singing out from elegant bamboo
cages hanging in the shade of the upturned eaves. A bucket being filled from a spluttering
faucet in an outdoor communal sink. A sudden waft of unsavoury air when passing
the open doorway of a public lavatory. Bicycle repair shops busy with activity on
the street corners. Open fronted shops with steaming pots boiling away on smoky
stoves, selling dumplings and all sorts of snacks. There was always something
to see.
In writing the review of Jie Li’s
wonderful book I went back to my old notebooks and photos, digging out the
sparse diary entries I’d jotted down whilst on these first few trips to China,
and looking through the photos and short films I’d made whilst wandering these
back lanes.
I remember a comment my friend made about how sad it was in some
ways that this way of life was swiftly being swept away in the building boom
which is the “New China” – but then again, these places have long been
overcrowded and less than ideal. Things need to change perhaps, but, as Li’s
book suggests, in losing the bad aspects often it's hard to hold onto and so transfer
the good aspects, such as that close knit community feeling, into the new
faceless anonymity of the high-rise blocks which are increasingly becoming the
norm not just for China, but for so many cities in other parts of Asia too.
What follows are my first
impressions of Shanghai, contrasting how I saw Shanghai with my experience of Beijing. I’ve since
been back to each city on a number of different occasions in all seasons, often
staying for long periods at a time, in which I got to know each city much
better; but it’s always interesting to record your first impressions so that
you can look back on them later and see how they compare with what you know and
feel now:
SHANGHAI. MARCH 20, 2006.
After two weeks in Beijing just two nights
in Shanghai is a complete contrast. Beijing, although massive beyond compare,
is quieter and a lot more placid. Shanghai on the other hand is truly alive!
Beijing is permeated with the military, the police, bureaucracy and regulation.
Shanghai seems more open, more vibrant, and far more diverse. Wealth and
poverty here stretch each end of the set of scales. Massive brand new skyscrapers
have been built cheek-by-jowl to old shikumen lanes (Shanghai’s
equivalent of Beijing’s hutongs)
still packed with life, living, thriving, squalid but respectable and neat.
Many of the old buildings in these shikumen
lanes are marked with their numbers for demolition – but unlike the hutongs I saw in Beijing they still seem to
function without care. The empty hutongs
of Beijing which I saw were forlorn places, bereft of people and life [because
many were in the process of being torn down in preparations ahead of the 2008
Beijing Olympic Games]. Here too there is
all the Technicolor neon brilliance of somewhere like Tokyo, but also maimed
beggars, many limbless and horrifically disfigured, missing eyes and wizened,
weathered old faces. These
are the two sides of China which I suppose I should have expected.
Shanghai is perhaps the westerner’s most
expected reality of Asia. Beijing is a grey utopia, popped out of the same
mould as GDR-era East Berlin, and the Soviet Eastern Block. Beijingers seem
laid back and accepting. Shanghai people either seem completely curious or
utterly disinterested. Walking back to the hotel tonight we passed a spot where
couples were dancing happily together in the street to music from a loud
speaker. Unlike Beijing I don’t think I’ve seen a single military uniform here
in Shanghai yet. I now have an altered impression of China as a country of
contrasts. Shanghai is perhaps the ultimate city of total transition.
Further Reading:
Read
my review of ‘Shanghai Homes: Palimpsests of Private Life’ by Jie Li (Columbia,
2015) on the LSE Review of Books website
Three Short Films I made in Shanghai in March 2006:
All photos were taken by me in Beijing and Shanghai, 2005-2007
