The Way Shanghai Used to Live...

Click to see how they lived here in the 20's... Shanghai_Shikumen

While we recovered from our exposure to the Communist Party museum :), we checked out what a home was like for residents of Shanghai back in the early 1900s. The Shikumen lanes were considered among the younger generation as the ultimate examples of dilapidated, crowded and wretched urban living. Fortunately, a few literary masterpieces were written by writers who loved the lane's architecture and showed people the beauty of Shikumen.

According to the museum, over 70% of Shanghai residents were born and raised in Shikumen houses. Today there are almost gone but they have rebuilt a house from the 20s. It is constructed in the architectural style of the 1920s and is modeled on one household, which was part of a unit in an alley. There are seven exhibition rooms and it shows how the typical family lived back in the 1920s.

Tingzijian Literature

Tingzijian is the name of a small room located at the turn of the staircase in a building. It usually faces the north, so the small room would be cold in winter and hot in summer. House owners used to rent them out for extra income. During the 1920s and 1930s, intellectuals and artists came to Shanghai to escape pressures in other parts of the country. Mostly single, Tingzijian was cheap and in these rooms they were prodigious. Many famous writers such as Lu Xun, Cai Yuanpei, Guo Moluo, Mao Dun, Ba Jing, Ding Ling and Feng Zikai had lived in Tingzijian. Many of their works reflected life in Tingzijian and Shikumen, and were hence dubbed Tingzijian Literature.

At their peak, the Shikumen-style neighborhoods numbered more than 9000 in Shanghai and took up 60 per cent of the total housing space of the city. The Shikumen style, which has survived for more than a century, isn't in vogue today but people are realizing these monuments to Shanghai's past should be preserved.

Take a look through this old style of living here in Shanghai here...