Shanghai wreckers shift 'old China hand' Johnston
Shanghai wreckers shift 'old China hand' Johnston
By Andrew Browne [10pt ML]
SHANGHAI (Reuter): The Shanghai wreckers have finally caught up with Tess Johnston.
No sooner did her book on Shanghai's vanishing Western architecture reach the shops than this colorful American "old China hand" was given final notice to quit her own home in a swanky art deco block.
Like many of Shanghai's architectural gems, the Gascogne apartments are to be gutted and renovated. Now, Johnston is packing to leave her cozy, antique-filled penthouse and move into a modern high-rise she gloomily calls a "concrete silo".
"It breaks my heart," sighs Johnston, whose book, A Last Look: Western Architecture In Old Shanghai, was published this year in collaboration with the talented Chinese travel photographer Deke Erh.
Shanghai was in its heyday between the two world wars when the likes of Sir Victor Sassoon, the Ezra, Kadoorie and Hardoon families -- Sephardic Jews of fabulous wealth -- built some of the most sumptuous palaces east of Suez.
Tenements were crammed with Jews fleeing Nazi Germany and White Russians on the run from Bolshevism.
There were cathedrals and synagogues, social clubs, academies, theaters, dance halls, hospitals and fire stations -- all built in the city's extraterritorial foreign concessions that existed for a century as Western imperial outposts.
Along the waterfront Bund, the dome of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank loomed over Asia's financial center.
Going era
Now, the city once dubbed "The Paris of the East" is being remodeled as a glitzy version of Hong Kong and many of its old buildings are being torn down to make way for ring roads, commercial centers and office blocks.
"It's an era that's going," says Johnston. "And we're just whistling in the dark, those of us trying to revive it."
Johnston has applied her energy to the task of researching old Shanghai, working in her spare time from the cluttered apartment where she lives alone with her beloved dachshund dog called Lamb Chop.
This U.S. foreign service veteran and her photographer friend -- "a little old American lady and a young Chinese man", as Johnston puts it -- have produced a lavishly-illustrated tribute to Shanghai's glory days.
"We just kept one step ahead of the wrecker's ball," she explains.
The Chinese Communists drew the curtain on the most cosmopolitan -- some said the most wicked -- city on earth with their 1949 revolution that kicked out the last of the Westerners but left the real estate more or less intact.
The Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank is now the Communist Party headquarters; the Ezra mansion houses the People's Armed Police; the race track clubhouse is the municipal library.
A jazz band -- somewhat geriatric now -- still belts out dixieland tunes in the bar of the Cathay Hotel, now renamed the Peace Hotel.
Johnston and Erh had to fast-talk their way past the watchmen of some of these crumbling buildings before the developers moved in.
As Johnston points out: "The people who had the money and taste are not the ones doing the renovating."
The Gascogne, at least, is not being ripped down but nobody can be sure what the developers will do.
The Russian Orthodox Mission Church was lately "restored" by the Religious Affairs Bureau, which leased the ground floor to a brokerage house and the space under the cupolaed roofs to a karaoke bar called the St Peter's Club.
Longest bar
Some time ago the Long Bar at the old Shanghai Club on the Bund -- reputedly the longest bar in the world -- was sliced up to make room for a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant.
The Bund is being strictly protected as the city's main tourist draw, and foreign banks are being lured back as a symbol of Shanghai's financial reemergence.
But the conservation lobby is fighting an uphill battle to save other landmarks.
"It's money money money, make it go go go. It's just like it was in the 30s," says Johnston.
Johnston takes all this destruction personally.
She not only knows the architectural history of most buildings, but through her old street directories -- trophies of more than a decade nosing around flea markets -- can tell you the names of the families that occupied them. She even knows the names of their employers and their children's schoolteachers.
After publishing their first book through the Old China Hand Press, Johnston and Erh are turning to other projects.
Already in the works is a guide to the architecture of China's former Treaty Ports -- cities seized by Western powers in the last century.
Next will come volumes on hill station retreats and seaside resorts, a look at the churches of China, a separate tome on Shanghai's old banks and clubs, and another on Jews in China.
That should help fill Johnston's time before retirement three years from now, when she plans to move home to Charlottesville, Virginia.
"I'm not one of those people who comes to China and never goes home," she explains. Besides, she says, with rents rising as they are "there won't be a place in Shanghai for little old ladies writing books."