Ruihua Lane (瑞华坊) is one of the many old alleys in Shanghai’s Luwan District (卢湾区), but it’s distinguished by its wonderful display of visual public service announcements made up entirely of large mosaic tiles.
Though slightly fading, the posters, in good Party-like slogan fashion, reminded the lane’s former residents of behaviors that went along with a civilized society: protecting the environment (绿化美化，保护环境), maintaining neighborly and familial harmony (邻里团结，家庭和睦) (with the classic two grandparents-two parents-one child family structure), keeping law and order (遵纪守法，遵纪秩序), helping others (in the footsteps of the exemplary revolutionary hero Lei Feng, 学习雷锋，助人为乐) and promoting the belief in science to combat superstitions (普及科学破除迷). The cartoons were simply drawn, in a style made to resemble that of a young child, but effective.
When asked, an older resident walking his dog said the mosaics were put up sometime in early 2000s. But why here on Ruihua Lane, and not anywhere else?
Thirty years ago, Shenzhen was a collection of farming towns and fishing villages home to not much more than 300,000 people. It is now a sprawling metropolis of several million, with around 3.5 million in the city centre and another five or six million in the suburbs and industrial towns that stretch for miles beyond.
The story of Shenzhen’s growth has been told many times, in many places, but it is still hard to understand exactly how quickly the city has grown until you see it from above. 1,200 feet above ground, in the observation deck of Shun Hing Square, the city’s tallest building, the ad hoc nature of Shenzhen’s development becomes obvious.
It might only be thirty years old, but Shenzhen has been built and rebuilt so many times, it has the urban layers of a city four times its age. Country fields developed into worker-unit housing blocks in the 1980s were redeveloped into low-rise private housing in the 1990s and then into high-rises in the 2000s. None of these generations fully subsume the other — there are always traces left of the past — and the city is littered with discarded planning initiatives, like attempts to build tree-line boulevards that were abandoned after just a few blocks.
“China to create largest mega city in the world with 42 million people,” announced a breathless headline in Sunday’s Telegraph, detailing plans to combine the cities of Guangdong province’s Pearl River Delta (PRD) into a massive urban conurbation. “Over the next six years, around 150 major infrastructure projects will mesh the transport, energy, water and telecommunications networks of the nine cities together, at a cost of some 2 trillion yuan,” the British newspaper reported, noting that the new megalopolis would be “26 times larger geographically than Greater London, or twice the size of Wales.”
The news generated quite a bit of chatter as it circled around the Internet, much of it predicated on the mistaken assumption that China would be building an entirely new city of 42 million. “What about all the cities already constructed but still empty?” wrote one commenter on CNNGo in reference to the master-planned, never-lived-in city of Ordos, in Inner Mongolia. “Time to beef up security on the Hong Kong border,” tweeted a former Hong Kong resident.
The reality is less exciting. The PRD is already home to more than 42 million people and it already functions as a megalopolis with an economy worth a little under US$300 billion (about the same as the metropolitan areas of Shanghai, Boston, San Francisco and Milan). The billions of dollars in new infrastructure will complement an already well-developed network of highways, railways and waterways. In fact, the concept of a huge megalopolis tied together by roads and rail is nothing new: the Taiheyo Belt in Japan is an interconnected urban area of 80 million people linked by shikumen trains running every few minutes. Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington form a mostly interconnected urban region of more than 50 million people.
Mountains of Chinese cabbage — 396 million pounds by the reckoning of the Beijing authorities — began advancing on the capital this month, as one of old Beijing’s agricultural rhythms persists against the onslaught of modern supermarkets and glitzy shopping centers that have sprouted here.
Rough-hewn peasants who have been sleeping with their crops for weeks in a 100-mile arc of farmland outside Beijing have converged for the annual ritual of selling what was once a survival crop for many Chinese.
They come in trucks, horse-drawn carts and pedal-powered three-wheelers, all straining under billowing loads of cabbage that within the space of a week fill acres of sidewalks and alleyway space.”
While their boats were moored along the Huangpu River, southwest of the Bund, Shanghai’s Shangchuan Huiguan (商船会馆), or Merchant Shipping Hall, accommodated traders both wheeling and dealing and seeking to rest for the night.
While the Hall itself is authorized for preservation, all the surrounding living quarters have fallen to the wrecking ball. A family from Anhui currently lives on the site, responsible for organizing the razing. On my last trip, I noticed many plots of vegetables surrounding the Hall, on what had been rubble only months ago. Any leftover vegetables were laid out to dry in various parts of the house.
Melbourne’s Chinatown as shot with a camera made from a duck
Earlier this week, I paid a visit to Martin Cheung‘s studio in the Cattle Depot Artists’ Village in To Kwa Wan. I was there to speak to him about his work with pinhole photography, a medium that uses crude, handmade cameras to record images that often look as rough as the devices that made them.
We spoke for awhile about Cheung’s fascination with pinhole photography. It’s meditative and not as aggressive as conventional photography, he told me, and it forces you to consider the process of taking a photo rather than the result. He showed me how to make a simple pinhole camera with paper and tape. Then the conversation turned to ducks.
Cheung studied art in Melbourne, where he also worked in a Chinese restaurant as a waiter and kitchenhand. Nine years ago, in his final year of study, Cheung had a thought: “Roast duck is such a symbol of Chinese cooking, so I wanted to see how the duck saw Chinatown.” So he bought a roast duck and turned it into a pinhole camera.
Beijing is not a good walking city. Its roads are too wide, its blocks too long — this is a city meant to be experienced on wheels, whether those of a bicycle or (increasingly) a compact sedan.
But as Christopher Szabla reminded us earlier this year, “Beijing is at least two cities”: the city beyond the Second Ring Road, with its new office blocks and apartment complexes, and the older city within it, made up of hutong alleyways and old, low-rise courtyard houses.
The first time I visited Beijing, almost two years ago, I had no idea about the existence of Sichahai, the three interconnected lakes just northwest of the city’s imperial heart. Built more than 800 years ago during the Jin Dynasty, the lakes later became the northern end of the Grand Canal, a 1,700-kilometre waterway that was for centuries the backbone of China’s economy. Today, they are one of the most beautiful spots in Beijing, ringed by willow trees and ancient buildings.
As lovely as they are, though, what makes them so memorable is not the scenery so much as the way they remain the setting for ordinary Beijing life. Walk north along the banks of Houhai, the largest of the three lakes, and you’ll pass by cycling hutong dwellers, people practising tai chi and playing traditional instruments. What stood out to me the first time I visited were the swimmers. It was early March and there was still ice on the lakes, so I was astonished to see a group of men emerge from the frigid water in tiny bathing suits, their skin as red as cooked lobsters.
The contrast on both sides of the street is only as jarring as you make it out to be, if you notice it at all.
You can see it while standing in the middle of Sinan Lu (思南路), facing Fuxing West Lu (复兴西路) in Shanghai’s French Concession. A noted commercial development of ostentatious luxury sits face to face with the ghosts of past riches. Both Shanghai past and Shanghai present are embodied in the traditional, old, European-style villas. But those on one side of the street have had their layouts redesigned, their foundations tilted sideways, their innards replaced with modern amenities (lifts!), and their courtyards beautified with plenty of commercial landscaping. On the other side of the street stand facsimiles of the original, unmodified versions of these structures: tired, broken down and devoid of occupants.
The 18 steps (十八梯) in Chongqing form a wonderfully atmospheric alleyway. It’s one of many older streets sunk down amongst the thrusting skyscrapers of this rapidly growing city which feel saturated with history, in contrast to the modern development all around.
Clambering up the steps, I feel like I’ve found the traditional China I’ve been searching for. Old grey bricked buildings dating back to the Ming dynasty tumble crookedly down the hill on each side, their open doorways offering glimpses of interiors cluttered with objects worthy of a museum. A few trees spread out branches into the streets, their roots crawling around the brick walls of these buildings.
I pass an old man sitting on a shady step with a cup of tea by his side and a newspaper spread out. Further on, a lady squats in that typical Chinese way and hacks with a cleaver at dark red meat laid on a board on the steps. Climbing higher, there’s a small massage place that has men sat outside with their bare torsos covered in wooden cups.
Beijing is at least two cities. There’s the Beijing of the hutongs, a largely low-slung, grayscaled cityscape lying along the occasionally meandering little streets one can find within the old city walls, a one to two kilometer radius of Tiananmen Square. Then there’s the rest of Beijing, a march of high and midrise office and apartment buildings that have both infiltrated the city of the hutongs and supplanted much of remains of Mao’s capital: the cheaply built factories and shambolic workers’ dormitories built beyond the old city.
There are pockets of modern construction all over Beijing’s historical core, but the incursion of the new Beijing into the old is only really consistent along the ten lane-wide route of Chang’an Avenue, the city’s ceremonial main east-west axis, which slices in half the heart of the city with flanks of flashy new banks and government office buildings. The rest of new Beijing lies out beyond the old city and its present outer limit: the Second Ring Road, Beijing’s innermost orbital expressway, which replaced hutong Beijing’s medieval defenses with a different sort of wall — one formed by bumper-to-bumper traffic.
It didn’t always seem as if this division would persist. Only a few years ago, the Beijing of the hutongs began disappearing at an alarming rate. The outcry among preservationists, though, was loud enough to slow large-scale demolition, and changes to the historic city have proceeded somewhat less rashly since; some hutongs that were spared the wrecking ball have even undergone gentrification. There are exceptions, of course. Limited demolitions still occur — to install new subway stations, for example. But large-scale redevelopment projects, like this year’s plans to wipe out the classic hutong neighborhood around the historic Gulou, or Drum Tower, have gone nowhere fast; after unusually intense local and global media scrutiny, the Gulou project was shelved indefinitely.
The slowdown of Beijing’s “modernization” has brought with it a stalemate between high-rise and hutong. It’s particularly evident in Xicheng, in the western part of the old city, where the shimmering but somewhat stumpy towers of Beijing Financial Street, intended to form the new commercial heart of China, rise awkwardly against a backdrop of some of the city’s dustiest laneways. And not far away, across the Second Ring Road, the chaotic streetlife of the hutongs has even found a foothold even amid the seemingly hostile, modern streets and plazas of the new city.
Just a brisk walk from the Ox Warehouse is another one of Macau’s contemporary art spaces: the Lun Hing Knitting Factory. When I arrived, a group of old people sat in the lobby playing mahjong as the security guard watched idly. There’s little to indicate the presence of artists, when I took the lift up to the third floor, I found the spacious new home of AFA Macau, an arts organization set up by six artists to host exhibitions, give artists space to work and promote Macau artists abroad.
Photographer James Chu Cheok-son and sculptor Wong Ka Long are two of AFA’s founding artists. “The art market in Macau is not well-developed — there are virtually no galleries,” said Chu as we sat at a table near the back of the gallery. AFA was established in 2007 when it opened artists’ studios and a gallery in partnership with a bar and restaurant next to the ruins of St. Paul’s. Last year, though, the financial crisis and decline in tourism took a toll on the restaurant’s business and AFA was forced to leave. It opened in the Knitting Factory late last year; they share the space with Macau Creative, a design group that often incorporates the work of Macau artists into its work.
On a balmy spring day in Shanghai, I ducked in a narrow corridor to get away from the frantic market activity along the stretch of Anguo Lu (安国路), where the street market bustled with clucking chickens, flopping fish and a rainbow of vegetables and fruits.
I found myself in a compound with squat two-storey apartments. It was a mix of communal housing from the 60s and modest shikumen from the early 30s – nondescript concrete intermingled with old wood.
What struck me most was how neat and orderly everything was. Burgeoning blooms rested in small garden patches that lined a courtyard devoid of clutter and decorated with warm, red windows. What the space lacked in interesting architecture, it made up with a quiet and homey space that was bathed in sunlight.
I struck up conversation with two older men which naturally attracted more people. House-proud, the first gent said he had lived here his whole life, “giving” his apartment to the government after 1949, and reclaiming it in the 1980s.
When I complimented the state of their residence, they beamed. The second gent pointed out, “We make it a point to be civilized (文明) and clean up after ourselves.” Furrowing his brow, he lowered his voice, “Not like the waidiren (外地人, out of state residents) who now dominate the houses across the street. The houses are old and have grown messy and dirty and they don’t take care of it.”
worst anti-bike lane arguments ever: pretending cyclists don't pay taxes, cost of "wide stripes of paint", rain erosion http://t.co/i723dTGKabout 6 hours agofrom web
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