In the next installment of our contributor series, Sam, a Shanghai-based editor and loyal Vanity Fare reader, braves the watch sellers and flying timber to give us a glimpse inside his adopted city.
Huaihai Road runs east to west across downtown Shanghai, cutting the former French Concession area of the city neatly in two. It is the commercial heart of Shanghai, and has the hustle and bustle to prove it. The street emits a kind of constant, giant whir: the hum of modernity, you might say, or the annoying buzz of a mosquito, depending on your general outlook on life.
Advice for the intrepid traveler: Go to the corner of Huaihai Road and Shaanxi Road, one of the busiest intersections in Shanghai. Find your way to the left of Starbucks, across the street from McDonald’s. Avoid the hoards of watch-sellers. Duck under the overhanging port-cochère of a street-front hotel. Wind through some parked cars and half-closed gates. You are now in Huaihai Village, a lilong built in 1924.
Lilong neighborhoods are one of the aspects that make Shanghai unique. The name combines li, which has the two meanings of “inside” and “neighborhood,” and long, which roughly translates to “alleyway” or “lane.” It is, like many Chinese words, starkly literal: Lilongs can best be described as neighborhoods of alleyways nestled inside city blocks. They are the result of a clever combination of the Chinese courtyard style and English terrace housing, resulting in compact and comfortable dwellings. The neighborhoods usually have very few entrances, and once inside can resemble vast, ordered labyrinths of long alleyways.
The Huaihai Village lilong has three gates: on Huaihai Road, Nanchang Road, and Maoming Road. The lanes are made up of rows of doorways, and the neighborhood has its own kindergarten, library, children’s playground, and bank. Like many lilongs, it forms a tightly knit community. Going inside is like entering another world: it is very quiet, the hum of Huaihai Road utterly erased.
Huaihai Village is a “new-style” lilong, which means that when it was built it featured modern conveniences such as sewers, running water, electricity, and gas, and was intended for the city’s wealthier foreign population. Most lilongs were not so luxurious. The lilong development boom started in the second half of the nineteenth century, when an influx of Chinese entered the city, seeking refuge from the various wars of the time. The lilongs were thus originally intended for Chinese, though such large projects required capital that only foreign companies could provide; luckily for the city, many foreign companies had just made their fortunes from opium trading. Later on foreigners lived in the neighborhoods; nowadays, residents are once again almost all Chinese, as most lilongs have not been restored and foreigners are wealthy enough to avoid them (we like to stand outside and look, but not venture inside). Ask almost any Chinese living in a run-down lilong, and he or she will say an apartment in a high-rise building, with central heating, reliable water, and new furnishings, is vastly preferable.
Like every Chinese urban area, Shanghai is suffering from copious amounts of construction, and flying timbers and falling bricks are just two dangers an innocent pedestrian can expect to encounter while strolling along its streets. Not so in lilongs lucky enough to be graced with a preservation permit from the government; their sanctity and peace are preserved. Many, however, have not been so fortunate. Amid the bombed-out rubble of construction sites often sit a few, lonely shikumen, one of the most recognizable architectural traits of older lilongs.
“Shikumen” roughly translates to “stone doorway,” and they are exactly that: a sort of large frame made of stone that surrounds a doorway, usually with some sort of design. One such area that I saw recently was beside the old Jewish ghetto, where the Japanese stuck the city’s Jewish population during the Second World War. Perhaps those years were on my mind, for it closely resembled old photos of Berlin or London in 1945; the area was completely destroyed. Only a few small structures were standing, as well as its old lilong wall, which still surrounded the large area. As I stood on the sidewalk admiring the destruction through a doorway in the wall, a lady with grocery bags walked briskly by me, through the doorway, and down a small path lined with bricks and plaster. The area still had people living in it, though not for much longer; they were the final remnants of the lilong’s lengthy and no doubt eventful history.
My own apartment is in a kind of modern incarnation of the lilong, though now they are called yuans, or “gardens.” It sits beside several tall high-rise apartment buildings. The yuan is accessible by four entryways, two of which are closed after 10:30 PM. Outside the window, Shanghai life goes by: handymen, knife-sharpeners, popcorn-poppers, and other sorts of peddlers come to do business, and each day elderly residents play mahjong, often in their pajamas. People burn piles of clothes of the dead, and young brides and grooms arrive home amidst fireworks and cameras.
Today is a nice day and the mahjong players are in their customary spot beneath my bedroom window. Outside the window on the opposite side of my apartment I can see high-rise buildings stretching up to the sky, gazing down on the city from their great heights; down below, a woman holding a baby chats with an elderly woman sitting in a chair on the street, and two old men play Chinese chess on an upturned crate beside them.
-Sam, Vanity Fare contributor
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