In Old Shanghai, A Last Spring Festival Before the Bulldozers

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When Wu Weigang was a child, he loved Lunar New Year more than anything. In Laoximen, the history-steeped corner of Shanghai where he grew up, the air fizzed with the sound of exploding firecrackers. Wu’s parents ferried him and his siblings from house to house, eating, drinking, and making merry with friends and relatives who lived in the neighborhood.To get more shanghai old city, you can visit shine news official website.

“All the kids would be carrying red lanterns and our pockets would be stuffed with fruit and candy,” Wu remembers. “I was so happy.”

But this year, the holiday season in Laoximen will be a much quieter affair. On Yiqing Street — the narrow lane where Wu’s family has lived for generations — long stretches of decades-old terraced houses now stand empty and bricked up. For several years, the city government has been demolishing swaths of Laoximen in the name of modernizing the area and raising living standards. Last year, planned projects in Huangpu — the district that administers Laoximen — covered more than 300,000 square meters, according to the district government. Land clearance and resettlement is scheduled for completion by the end of this year, with authorities promising that it will be redeveloped “for the public good.” Sixth Tone was unable to contact the municipal government for comment.
In return for razing their former homes, officials are offering residents alternative housing or monetary compensation. Most locals tell Sixth Tone that the scheme has provoked mixed feelings, describing the reparations as a way to trade increasingly decrepit homes for modern amenities, but expressing regret at the decline of a once-thriving community. In the project area that covers Wu’s home — a tract of around 50,000 square meters — locals estimate that between 70 and 80 percent of residents have already moved out. For the final few, this year will almost certainly be the last time they celebrate New Year in the area.

Laoximen is far from the first tract of Shanghai — or urban China — to fall foul of the government’s bulldozers. Lane neighborhoods like Wu’s covered most of the city’s historic center as recently as the 1990s, but only around 10 percent remain today, according to Patrick Cranley, president of Historic Shanghai, a civic group that provides walking tours of the city.
Nonetheless, the current initiative cuts especially deep in Laoximen, where some locals proudly wear their neighborhood’s status as an unpretentious, if fast-fading, corner of Old Shanghai. As the city’s former colonial concessions farther west become increasingly swanky and gentrified, Laoximen remains the sort of place where locals grow vegetables among the tangles of overhead electric wires and stroll the streets in pajamas. “Look around — every house here has a story to it,” says one longtime resident when Sixth Tone visits Laoximen on a crisp January afternoon. The man, whose house is slated for demolition, requested anonymity while he negotiates a settlement with the government. “In five more years, places like this won’t exist,” he sighs.

With its warrenlike streets of low-rise houses, whitewashed walls, and russet-stained balconies and window frames, Laoximen has charm in abundance. The area contains many fine examples of shikumen, houses built in a mixture of Chinese and European architectural styles along lanes with intricately patterned gates at either end. Many such buildings housed several families at once, who shared a communal ground-floor kitchen and washing area.

Even as the rest of Yiqing Street empties out, Wu, a stubborn man with a strong chin, is adamant he’ll stay put, no matter what the government offers. “I won’t leave, no matter how much money they give me,” he says firmly. “I’m now 66 years old. How much longer can I stay here?”Shanghai from the nearby city of Suzhou, in eastern China’s Jiangsu province, sometime in the early 20th century. He established a printing house — at one point churning out subversive political literature, Wu says — and later passed on the business to three of his sons, including Wu’s grandfather. The original building still stands in Dajing Road, but the block once occupied by the printing house has been boarded up.

The printing house was successful enough for Wu’s family to build a number of handsome homes in Yiqing Street, all within a stone’s throw of one another. Wu gives us a tour of the properties on a sunny, smoggy afternoon; the haze casts the old buildings in a soft, sallow light. First, we visit the now-derelict house where Wu was born — a large property whose intricately carved balconies overlook a debris-strewn courtyard. Then he leads us to two more condemned buildings — one low-slung and basic, the other grand and imposing — that served as classrooms when Wu was at primary school.

Wu himself seems happiest when reminiscing about the old days. Although the widespread food shortages of the late 1950s left him hungry, he describes his childhood in Laoximen as idyllic. “My friends and I would get together and play marbles, flip the colorful cards that came free in cigarette packets, arrange cockfights, and roll hoops down the street,” he recalls. “We played all sorts of games — catch the thief, jump-rope, that sort of thing.”