Old town sketches capture a way of life fast disappearing
Tõnis Kimmel, an Estonian architect who has been working in Shanghai since 2010, has spent eight years sketching the city’s old town with his Drawing Shanghai group members.
“One night around 2015 or 2016, I was on my way home on foot from Pudong to Puxi (Shanghai is divided into Pudong and Puxi areas by the Huangpu River). Then I passed a kind of urban village and felt an immediate attachment to it. The windows of the houses were set low, so I had a chance to peek through them into the interior life of the dwellers.
“”Back in Estonia, people always drew their curtains at night. I visited the place later frequently because it was so fun,” said Kimmel.
The architect invited a group of friends to sketch scenes. Later it dawned on him that the “village” was part of Shanghai’s old town. Many Shanghainese used to live there.
People in the “village” were also more willing to start a conversation with him.
“There was an estate called Shuyinlou (Җ䳀ᾬ), or the Hermit’s Library, around Xiaonanmen (ሿই䰘) in Huangpu District. We found the place on an online digital map among geographical names such as the Bund and the People’s Square,” said Kimmel.
Then a member of Drawing Shanghai made a phone call asking for entry. A granny surnamed Guo allowed the group in.
“The lane which connected the estate was so narrow. As we walked in, then all of a sudden we were in a garden and saw those Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) and Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) houses with sculptures and wooden carvings,” said Kimmel.
The granny still lived in the estate during the group’s visit. She was the last generation of a former wealthy family.
“And there was a man who lived in a four-story house in West Tangjia Lane. On the ground floor he offered shampooing service for pet dogs and put up his bathing hut. On the second and third floors he was probably living, and on the roof he raised pigeons,” said Kimmel.
Back in the 1950s and 1960s when entertainment facilities such as shopping malls or cinemas did not exist or were rare, men of the old town in Shanghai would raise pigeons in a rooftop cage for fun. Then they competed. They would take their pigeons to a faraway place, such as Hefei in Anhui Province or Datong in Shanxi Province, then set them free. Whose pigeons returned to their homes in the old town in Shanghai the quickest would be the winner.
The tradition has been preserved till now and in some households in the old town in Shanghai, we may still have opportunities to see pigeons cooing, fluttering their wings or bursting their way suddenly into the sky.
“In the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, the old town dwellers started to mend their houses. They built an additional kitchen here or a storage room there. They planted climbing sponge gourds and raised cocks and hens.
“As an architect, I am thrilled by the way how ordinary people in China made their houses when they had a freedom to do this, and especially when their budgets were limited,” said Kimmel.
The owners of homes in Shanghai’s old town often used poetry to decorate their entrances, so that a walk in the old town would easily become a Chinese poetry trip, Kimmel said.
Elegant houses
Members of the Drawing Shanghai group once visited 96 Daochuan Lane ق( ᐍᔴ96ਧ) where two elderly people inhabited one of those elegant houses.
There was a grandpa who always welcomed the group. He told them that the archaic typeface used to write the three characters above his back portal was tricky and the rightmost character was not ཀྵ (jia meaning “in-between” in Chinese), although it looked like it.
A Tongji University professor, the grandpa recalled, had once told him what it actually meant, but his memory was playing hide and seek with him.
The group later found out that the line might come from the tail of the poem “Late Spring (᳞᱕ ” by Song Dynasty poet Lu You (1125-1209) that roughly translates as “several straw-thatched huts also serve as my home(Ӗ੮ᓀ).”
When Drawing Shanghai visited Daochuan Lane around June, 2021, eight families that used to live there had been relocated. By early December last year, the lane was demolished for an urban renewal and relocation project.
Historically, the lane was another river reclamation road. And its name Daochuan ق( ᐍ , part of a Chinese phrase ق ᐍ⁚ഋ (make a quarter turn of ᐍ and maintain ഋ in its current shape), is said to derive hieroglyphically from merchants’ secret bargain of the number й ॱഋ, or 34, in the past.
Shuyinlou, or the Hermit’s Library, which had weathered 258 years of vicissitudes, became state-owned in 2020 and went through rescue maintenance by November 2021.
The mansion, first constructed in the Ming Dynasty, was set back from the narrow Tiandeng Lane (ཙ⚟ᔴ and hidden behind a wall 10 meters high. It had over 40 rooms and three interior courtyards. Being one of the oldest residences in Shanghai, its last inhabitant was a woman named Guo Yuwen.
Shanghai rose from a county town in 1291 in the Yuan Dynasty to the most populous county in all of China by the end of the 15th century, according to Katya Knyazeva, a Russian scholar on the old town.
By the 16th century, periodic bans on marine trade imposed by the Ming Dynasty court hindered Shanghai’s port business and gave rise to a rogue economy of coastal plundering. Shanghai too suffered from repeat pirate raids. The assault, however, mobilized landowners to raise funds to build a defensive w against invaders. An earthen ramp about 4 kilometers in circumferen was erected in just three months, s rounded by a wide moat.
That formed Shanghai’s old to which is circled half by the Renmin R (Ӫ≁䐟 and half by the Zhonghua R (ѝॾ䐟 now, according to Knyaze book “Shanghai Old Town: The Wa City,” which had inspired Kimmel’s l adventures in the first place.
The citywide urban renewal proj which had also put the old town in demolition plan, is drawing to an now. The last section of the old to which a visitor still has a chance to ness, is around Mianjin Lane (䶒ㅻᔴ Huangpu District.
In February last year, Kimmel a his Drawing Shanghai members h an exhibition at Urbancross Gallery downtown Xuhui District display their portrayals of the old town t had ventured into.
“Each time I sent out an advertisem calling on people to join the sketch event, I was afraid that few people mi care and were willing to come. But e time the event proved to be quite popu and bustling with drawing membe said Kimmel.
“Shanghai’s old town lies under shadow of tall buildings and is spli highways, but its street life reflects environment that is centuries old. network of lanes formed slowly, cha cally, following the contours of gar estates and creeks, and many neighb hoods here still express the free-spiri entrepreneurial and resilient chara of the old port,” wrote Knyazeva.
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