The French Concession

An itinerant barber in a Shikumen

We proceeded in a cool fog to the French Concession, upscale and jarringly chic where it occupies the old renovated Shikumen, a form of 19th c. brick architecture. Shikumen had been built by the wealthy Chinese fleeing political turmoil in the 20's and 30's, in the shelter of the French concession. They claimed their Chinese creds by housing starving poets in their garrets. They also brought the street scene into their courtyards - shoe menders (in fact, a woman had just attached herself to Jacques' foot even as he walked, trying to polish his shoes for 10 yuan) and junk dealers, barbers and tailors. The deep dark polished wood in high ceilinged white interiors, entered through exquisitely finished Ming-style reception rooms, is elegant in a spare fashion.

The Shikumen of Xintiandi have become a small trendy mall of upscale restaurants comprising two alleyway blocks. Recently the dilapidated alleyways had housed about 2,800 families and more than 8,000 people. The Shikumen Museum proclaims: "To salvage the city's remaining heritage houses from bulldozers, the developers (from Hong Kong) took painstaking effort to retain the original looks, a fusion of the old and new. Xintiandi is a placer older people find nostalgic, young people find trendy, foreigners find cultural and Chinese people find foreign. It is a place where everybody finds something of his/her own."

First Communist Congress - heavily renovated
courtesy WikiCommons

Another Shikumen housed the first meeting of the Community Party at a shiny wooden dining room table. Eerie wax figures depict a young wholesome Mao, attended by his inner circle and two members of the International Comintern. The home of Sun Yat Sen repeats the same themes of oppressive unfair treaties with the West, the brutal oppression by the Japanese (in a newsreel, kneeling bound Chinese are being shot; in another, myriad hanged bodies sag in nooses). The museum recalls Sun Yat Sen's austere personal life (he budgeted 2 yuan--today, 20 cents--a day for the family food budget) and his continuing presence even after he'd been pushed out of power. Stalin odered the Comintern to stay in touch with him.

Art and poetry café

Much of the French Concession has the crumbling charm of a defunct French outpost in Indochine or Afrique, housing edgy cafe's with art and poetry, or thrift shops - like Brooklyn. Penetrating the facades are alleyways, called lilongs, some of which have been deemed "Model Quarters" by the government. We entered a lilong and found the same structure as our tenement, with the same colored chalk drawings of beautiful Shanghai and glass covered message boards. An old lady in a wheelchair, browned and furrowed, latched her eyes onto mine and smiled.

Don't honk your horn!

Our own Soviet-apt-lilong is a village where everyone speaks and congregates. This morning the basketball court was taken by young people shooting (since 7am on a Saturday). One of them watched Jacques do chinups and yelled "You're still young!"