Sadly, Shanghai’s oldest and most venerable neighborhoods are falling to the bulldozers and wrecking crews like the ancient forests of the Pacific Northwest or the rain forests of Brazil and Borneo. This is not news of course. Everyone who follows the destruction of Shanghai’s built heritage knows that the “Old West Gate” Lao Xi Men 老西门 area has been forcibly vacated and closed down. Now the area east of the City God Temple 城隍庙 and around Fangbang Road 方浜路is boarded up and awaiting its fate. 

I’m not a very systematic documentarian of the city’s built heritage around this area of town. The best documentation project, at least by a non-Chinese, has been Katya Kneyazeva’s two-volume series on the Old Town. Nobody I know knows this area and its history better than Katya. Nobody has spent more time in its alleyways, homes, and temples, talking to folks and getting to know its rich legacy which stretches all the way back to the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644). Alas, Katya isn’t here in Shanghai these days to roam these neighborhoods one last time before they fade into oblivion.

Today I took a stroll through the City God Temple area of the Old Walled City, which was once the beating heart of Shanghai and remained so from the Ming through the late Qing period. Eventually this part of the city was eclipsed by the two foreign settlements, and by 1912 the old Ming walls were knocked down. And yet the neighborhoods within those walls remained largely intact until the 1990s. Since then, the various neighborhoods in and around the Old Walled City have been slowly but surely targeted for destruction and redevelopment, given the high cost of the land near the Bund and the Huangpu River. 

There are those who decry any sort of destruction of the city’s built heritage. Then there are those who claim that this is an inevitable and irresistible part of a city’s growth and development. I suppose I stand on a middle ground. I can see how old derelict low-rise buildings, shoddily built to begin with and not fitted with modern amenities, stand in the way of the “progress” of the metropolis. As do the residents who have lived there, unfortunately, often for generations. On the other hand, I also recognize how deep a part of the living history of the city these neighborhoods are, and how destroying them and dispersing their residents is cutting and tearing into the social and cultural fabric and long-lived traditions of the city. Modernity is a ruthless and pitiless god.

After walking down Fangbang Zhong Lu 方浜中路 to where it ends at Renmin Lu 人民路 (the road that runs around the area in a circle, making the outline of the original city walls), I ambled into an adjacent alley called Kang Jia Nong 康家弄 – “Kang Family Alley”. This neighborhood was also slated for destruction, with eviction notices on the doors, and red government propaganda slogans and boarded up windows lining the alleyway. I stopped briefly to talk to a man who had lived there with his family for all his life. He told me his 100-year-old mother still lives there. Now they are moving out, but many residents cannot afford the to buy into the newer housing that has systematically replaced these old neighborhoods all over the city. 

It is sad to see how the city is losing its identity and its culture through such rampant destruction of its oldest neighborhoods. Hopefully some will be preserved, and perhaps even some buildings in these neighborhoods will be left standing as memorial of earlier times. He pointed out one building that he claimed was built by Japanese, probably in the 1930s, and told me that it might be renovated and saved. But the rest of the neighborhood is definitely targeted for imminent destruction. “Look here,” he pointed at some wooden pillars lining a wall lining the alleyway. “The shoddy materials they used for these buildings. Foreigners don’t build this way, do they?”