Good reading on art, customs, architecture
Minhang District, which has been a wonder of economic development, is equally interested in promoting its cultural credentials.
The district government has commissioned a series of 25 books spanning folk art, traditional customs and architecture of the area.
“When speaking of Minhang, many are under the impression that the district is bereft of culture,” said Wu Yulin, who is overseeing the book project. “They think of this as a place of new money, where people are rich but have no cultural roots.”
When the Minhang district was created through the merger with Shanghai County in 1992, economic development was the top priority. But with the economy firmly established and thriving, the book project aims to highlight other aspects of life and environment in the district. The project is funded by the Minhang Political Consultative Conference and the Committee of Cultural and Historical Data.
“I feel the need to help promote the culture of Minhang so that people can appreciate its true beauty,” Wu said. “We know many interesting events took place in here, but no one recorded them and they are lost over time.”
Wu started out as a journalist and later opened a printing company that brought him huge profit. However, his love for literature never faded. Seven years ago, he sold the printing company and founded Bright Mirror Culture Media.
“Money is just numbers, but books will last.”
Five books have been published so far. Among them, Wu compiled “Three Thousand Worlds at the Fingertips,” “The Singing of the Crane and Rivers of Zhuanqiao” and “Local Dialect.”
The book series is titled “Discovering the Beauty of Minhang.” Each book cover bears an inscription of the series title from famous calligrapher Wu Yiren, a Minhang resident.
“Shortly after I became a member of Minhang Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference last year, I received this task,” Wu said. “To be honest there was a lot of pressure and we only had six months before publishing.”
He said it’s unusual for the government to entrust a third party, like his company, to write and publish historical accounts.
“In that respect, Minhang is ahead of other districts,” he said.
Thankfully, Wu’s five-year experience of being the chief editor of magazine “City Season” helped a lot. He soon reached out to scholars like Chen Gongyi and Chu Bannong.
Chen is a retired Chinese teacher and the development consultant of Pujiang Town. Chu is a linguist and a scholar on houses, a special kind of houses frequently seen in the southern region of the Yangtze River Delta.
Chu started to record this style of architecture in 1983, when he joined the team to write in the Shanghai County annals. The work contained a 400-character paragraph on houses. ‘Urbanization caused the houses to be razed around 1980, and before long, almost all of them were gone,” Chu said. “I was really sad because part of me was gone, too.
“This is probably the first and the only book on the old houses ever published in Shanghai, even in China,” said Chu. “I have been trying to raise awareness of this architectural heritage for some time and protect any of its remains.”
During the process of writing, Chu once embarked on an investigation with Feng Guoyin, a retired professor from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, to search for any remaining houses that might still exist in Minhang. In Pujiang, they found vestiges of structures that lay in ruins.
“We still don’t know how many old
houses may still exist in the Shanghai area,” he said. “I wish I had realized earlier how fast the old houses were disappearing. I wish I had spoken out sooner. But I have been doing what I can to make up for lost time, and I hope more people will join this cause.”