The Street That Became a Gulf

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.”

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Cité Bourgogne

I wasn’t entirely sure where I was. I had just left the rambling lanes of the Taikang Road arts district and was wandering aimlessly through the streets of Shanghai’s former French Concession, each one buzzing with scooters, each lined by perfectly gnarled plane trees and odd, eclectic buildings. The blocks were long but broken by lanes, most of them crowded with hanging laundry, parked bicycles and potted plants. Security guards marked the entrance to each lane, but they seemed nonetheless open to the public, and passersby ambled past me and into the lanes without so much as a glance from the guard.

That’s when I came across a lane marked by an arch with a surprising inscription: “Cité Bourgogne, 1930.” (It really shouldn’t have surprised me, given the colonial history of the surrounding area, but it did.) Two young women stood at the entrance, chatting amiably. I decided that this Burgundian enclave was worth exploring, so I passed through the arch and down a narrow alley. I found myself in a compound of sorts, a small grid of laneways lined by tidy brick rowhouses. At the centre of it was a small square, ringed by houses filled with laundry lines, mostly empty except for a few wet shirts and a worn-looking Winnie the Pooh. Two middle-aged men sat at a table near the edge of the square, eyeing me with benign curiosity.

The Cité Bourgogne, it turns out, is an example of a distinctly Shanghainese form of housing, the shikumen, which takes its name (“stone gate”) from the archways that mark the entrance to each house and laneway. (Shikumen are also known as lilong, which literally means “laneway neighbourhood.”) Shikumen first arose in the nineteenth century when, fleeing the poverty and instability wrought by the Taiping Rebellion, thousands of country-dwellers flooded colonial Shanghai. Property developers scrambled to provide them with housing, and what was built resembled a cross between the traditional Chinese courtyard house and European rowhouses or mews houses.

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