Jinling Road Area Renovations

As we approach the EXPO in Shanghai it seems every building at the moment is getting a lick of paint. In general pretty poor quality paint I notice – it’s a city-wide equivalent of the team that is supposed to get ahead of the Queen wherever she visits repainting the toilets just in case she needs a pee while visiting some local community centre.

However, whether EXPO related or not some buildings are getting tarted up that needed it. And not just the landmark building where restoration is inevitably followed by the opening of horrendously gauche and overpriced restaurants featuring “famous” French chefs I have, of course, never heard of. Around my office we’ve seen a lot of destruction – every year another block of old housing has gone to be replaced by either a) an ugly and jerry built high rise or b) a park where you can’t venture onto the grass without some fascist with a whistle going nuts.

Still, some is being restored and seems to be being restored quite well. It’s the blocks of traditional lilong housing that are between Jingling Lu (formerly Rue du Consulat and the Avenue Foch East Section) and Ninghai Road (formerly Rue Wagner). The streets being restored include mostly the narrow but interesting Shengze Lu (formerly Rue du Moulin), Yunnan Lu (sorry don’t know what this was called before – any suggestions most welcome?), Yongshou Lu (formerly Rue des Péres) and Shandong Nan Lu (formerly Rue Mathieu).

Yunnan Lu is now a gentrified food street (with the cities best and cheapest Xinjiang places) and doing well. The rest are being tarted up quite nicely at the moment – I’ll go back and photograph them again when the scaffolding comes down. Interestingly these small narrow streets have quite a good history – according to Christian Henriot and Noel Castelino’s Prostitution and Sexuality in Shanghai: A Social History, 1849-1949 (Cambridge University Press, 2001), just after the First World War these streets housed numerous prostitutes who worked out of numerous small hotels in the area catching the overspill of clients from the nearby and notorious Great World amusement centre (itself undergoing a restoration at the moment). It became a much nicer area to live in after 1918 once the Yangjingbang Creek was covered up and made into Avenue Edward VII and the border between French Town and the International Settlement (now Yanan Lu and the expressway).

Working girls seem conspicuously absent these days and I’m sure that none of the old ladies I’ve talked too while wandering around on my lunch hour go back quite that far. They seem happy and say the restoration is long overdue and that they’ve been told they will not be moved out once the work is done and dumped in some horrible suburb miles from their day-long majhong games. Let’s hope so.