Shangweiguan Nanxiang Xiaolong

It's been a long while since I've posted an update about xiaolongbao, but please believe it's not from a lack of eating them. I've actually gone a little wild about them, more than I should be considering that the “soup” of xiaolongbao is largely coagulated fat, heated up in a steamer until it melts. I've been frequenting Delongguan the most, and perhaps that's become my favorite xiaolongbao. But I still go to and enjoy all of the xiaolongbao places I've mentioned so far, except for Din Tai Fung which isn't really all that.

Shanghweiguan Nanxiang Xiaolong is currently the top rated (by taste) Xiaolongbao on Chinese food website dianping.com. While these rankings change from time to time, as more and more reviewers pitch in, it appears that Shangweiguan Nanxiang Xiaolong is stuck permanently in the #1 position. It scores a 27 out of 30 on taste, there's no grade inflation on Dianping and that's about as high as ratings get. The #2 xiaolongbao, Jia Jia Tang Bao, currently scores a 25 out of 30.

The branch mentioned here is located in a neighborhood area, rather than a shopping district. There's mostly large apartment buildings nearby, with a small strip of low-key restaurants at Xingshan Lu. It's pretty obvious which is the xiaolongbao restaurant, from all the workers inside making xiaolongbao, there's also steaming pots out front.



Nanxiang Xiaolong's Chinese menu is pretty minimal: the standard pork xiaolongbao, shrimp xiaolongbao, and won tons. As always, for non-Chinese speakers just saying “xiaolongbao” and giving an appropriate amount of money should do the trick. Drinks are next door at the convenience store. This is 3.5 kuai's worth of xiaolongbao:



It doesn't look too promising, to be honest. But it's easy to tell why these are the top rated xiaolongbao in town. Xiaolongbao is supposed to be delicate, and these are as delicate as I imagine possible- they seem to dissolve in the mouth. That's true of the dough in particular, but even the meat is obviously very well ground, and unlike the vast majority of meatballs can be described as “light” and “silky.” The taste of the soup and meat is also very nice. Personally I wouldn't claim these are the best xiaolongbao in Shanghai, just because the competition is so strong. However they are still excellent, have a unique vibe to them, and I definitely recommend anyone in Shanghai to try them.

The restaurant is located on 598 Xingshan Lu. The big problem with the place is, it's not very convenient to get to. Personally I walk from Jinshajiang elevated subway station, it takes about fifteen minutes. There’s a whole lot of lefts and rights involved, so I don't imagine there's an entirely convenient bus – of course a taxi, or a motorcycle taxi, is also a possibility. Here's a map, in Chinese, of the local area – the “A” in the upper left corner is the location, and I don't think it's as confusing as it may look.

Child Swapping

Going to People's Square on the weekends is a daunting prospect. There, they run “English Corners,” which seeks to match up Chinese people who would like to learn English but don't want to pay, to foreigners who would like to teach some English but don't want to be payed. Since there are a great many more people in the first category than the second, these corners will start aggressively chatting up foreigners walking past.

I don't go to People's Square on the weekends all that often, even if this area is nearish to the excellent restaurants on Huanghe Lu, Lao Kele and Jia Jia Tang Bao. Last time I did, I was surprised at how greatly the English corner had expanded. There were hundreds or perhaps even thousands of people in their older middle age, hanging around and talking. I noticed a number of them were holding up signs. I had a closer look:



They actually aren't part of the English corner. The area has been overrun by parents who converge on the weekends to match-make for their children, it has the feel of a salesman convention. There's signs everywhere, often listing a short resume including their name, phone number, sometimes their pictures, their age, their height, their interests, and their schooling. There's no standard form, so different parents put up whatever would make the kids look attractive. I don't think I should put the information up on the web, so I erased some of the information in Photoshop, and then blurred it all, and I'll only include a couple of pictures with this update. Still, people looking for a Chinese boyfriend or girlfriend should definitely send their mother over!

Hongkou Street Fair

Hongkou Stadium is in Northern Shanghai, it's the place to catch soccer games and perhaps the occasional Jay Chou concert. Despite having a few foreign-language schools in the area, it's not the normal place for foreigners to be, although with the new subway line #8, it's only a 4 station commute to the centrally-located People's Square. I think the area has a lot of life, and a fun example is the street fairs located in the stadium's surroundings.

The time of these street fairs is irregular: they happen on a lot of summer weekends (and I have to admit that's when these photographs were taken), but they also happen on holidays, or occasionally for no apparent reason. While there's probably some schedule somewhere, I've asked a couple locals and they have no idea, so it seems o be a very mysterious process. Anyway, despite the lack of advance notice, these fairs can get busy with people. One of the attractions is makeshift alleyways of tents, each offering various street foods – in the foreground here is Japanese takoyaki:



And unlike with most street food in Shanghai, there's tables set up, for people to eat at:



Here's another picture of the foods. I don't want to give the impression the stalls are all Japanese style, but here it's a mish-mash of mochi-based sweets:



There's also a lot of clothes being sold, it's always low-end, everyday sort of clothes, and they never have anything nearly my size – I recently saw 6'0" listed at XXL! So I don't have exciting pictures of that. Here's a picture of some of the knick-knacks being sold. They often have an ethnic focus to their products, which I guess goes along with being operated by the ethnicity in question – I believe this would be Yi, or Dai?



And more rarely, there's things like massages, hair stylists, and product demonstrations, often operating with headset-type mics hooked up to amplifiers, and generally being annoying.

Yuxin Sichuan Restaurant

Sichuanese food is well-regarded throughout China, and that includes in Shanghai, where people's tendency is towards bland-ish foods, with the strongest flavors coming from the sugar. Consequently, I think a lot of the Sichuanese Restaurants here get overly localized, and a number of friends from Sichuan or neighboring Chongqing confirm this – Hunanese Restaurants are a better bet, for those looking for a fix of spicy food.

Yuxin Sichuanese was introduced to me as the most authentic Sichuanese Restaurant in Shanghai. While I've never been to Sichuan and can't go into any detailed comparison, it definitely gets spicier than Shanghai's other Sichuanese restaurants, and some dishes have a pronounced ma flavor – it's a peppercorn with a numbing effect on the mouth. Here's one of the spicy dishes, covered in peppers:



It's rabbit, and it's quite good, although it's swimming in oil – which is perfectly authentic Sichuanese. However, I wonder how much the menu has been adjusted to suit local tastes. Really, only a substantial minority of the menu is marked as being spicy, and these sweet fried eels, while excellent, definitely strike me as belonging to Shanghai's cuisine, rather than anything out of Chengdu:



This is an easy restaurant to recommend. Two locations are downtown – one on 333 Chengdu Lu & Weihai Lu, plus a more convenient location on 399 Jiujiang Lu, directly south of the East Nanjing Lu Subway Station. There's also a Pudong Location, on the third floor of a mall on 796 Dongfang Lu. A meal comes to about 100 kuai per person. It's a good idea to make reservations on weekends or Holidays - 6361-1777 is the Jiujiang Lu restaurant's. There's English menus with lots of pictures, and it's a nice if crowded environment, with tables divided off from each other, a professional waiting staff, and tablecloths that start out sparkling white. I wish I had a better picture to demonstrate:

Shanghai in the Movies: Shanghai Baby!

I could never blame somebody for not liking Wei Hui's Chinese novel “Shanghai Baby,” and similarly I hope no one holds it against me that I enjoyed the novel quite a bit. It was fun in a campy sense, in the way a really bad movie can be, where there's a mean-spirited sense of fun of laughing at a work of art that fails on so many levels. Books don't usually have that sort of appeal, but “Shanghai Baby” played like a Hollywood movie, with a fast pace, shallow ambitions, and a general appeal to crasser instincts. While the characters and plot got boring and weren't quite enough to make it a camp classic, I'd still recommend it.

So it's a disappointment that the German movie version of “Shanghai Baby” fails to deliver on a work with so much potential for camp. I don't think that's the fault of the location scout for this movie. The movie is really poorly shot and gives one the tritest possible views of Shanghai. The movie starts with a framing device in Germany. Here's the first shot shown of Shanghai, at 4:50 in:



This clichéd view of the office buildings of Shanghai is shown over and over, dozens of times throughout the movie, including three more times in the following minute. Shanghai Baby lives within sight of these offices, and goes to clubs within these offices. These offices are invariably seen in the back window whenever she rides a taxi, and the offices are frequently used as an establishing shot, when the movie's actions have moved from distant locales back to Shanghai, or sometimes just to establish the transition from day to night.

Ever the dedicated blogger, I re-watched the movie in fast forward, to determine the longest period of time between shots of the Pudong office towers. I clocked it in at nine minutes twenty three seconds, starting after the Shanghai Baby anachronistically takes a ferry to cross the Huangpu River away from the office towers:



From there, she takes a quick break to Hainan, in Southern China. When she gets back, the movie establishes this with a look at the office towers:



While a non-resident may think of these office towers (and upper-end apartments) to be the Wall Street or Le Défense of Shanghai, or perhaps as being really centrally located to Shanghai's downtown and looming over the city, in reality the area is off to the side of Shanghai, and nobody goes there unless they work there, and the large majority of office space in Shanghai is located elsewhere. It would be as ridiculous as showing Alcatraz in every single shot of a movie set in San Francisco.

It must also be said that I could make a similar exercise out of the number of times Shanghai Baby's breasts appear onscreen – the movie verges on being soft porn. However, Slums of Shaolin is for the children, so I won't show screen captures.

The area around the Suzhou River (in particular the old post office) is shown a dozen or so times, actually it's a favorite area of my to wander:



And really there's not much more to the movie's Shanghai than that. A few other postcard views do make a one-off appearance, though, here's Jing'an Si:



The movie played a few festivals and is now going straight to DVD in several countries. Its problem was that it lost the novel's sense of wannabe bohemianism and self-congratulation, made the storyline more cliché, and made the characters even more flat. To its advantage, the Chinese people living in China speaking with other Chinese people spoke in English, and it seemed that they had learned how to pronounce the words by rote, or at least that they weren't fluent enough to put inflection into what they were saying. I thought that was pretty funny. Additionally, Shanghai Baby has cool hair.

Xiao Bai Hua

Xiao Bai Hua is a Shanghainese restaurant near Xujiahui, a big shopping mall of a district. It's become one of my stand-by places when I go out for a fun meal with friends, because it's good food, not terribly expensive (even by Chinese standards), at a cool location, and has a fun, casual atmosphere. The insides are clean, brightly lit, and whimsically decorated, and it feels something like dining in a home:



I first heard about the restaurant off the yelp-like dianping.com, where I looked up, uhh, fish-head soup. That brings up images of a soup-pot full of fish heads, but here it's just a slightly creamy, well-flavored soup with an entire fish inside of it. The fish gets cleaned of the offal, but the head is left on – diners can just choose not to eat that part. The soup is excellent, and I get it almost every time I go to the restaurant. It's 88 kuai (about twelve dollars) for a bowl, but there's enough soup that two or three people could make their entire dinner out of it.



There's a very extensive menu full of Shanghai specialties, with an emphasis on seafoods. The menu is fully translated into English, and it's all very good, although I don’t quite think it rises up to the level of the soup, or of Chun, for that matter. The prices are decent, generally 20-40 kuai for a dish, and I usually end up spending about fifty kuai per person when I go. Here’s another picture of their food, again with the soup:



The restaurant is a little tricky to find the first time. I take the subway to Xujiahui, and then the #12 exit, across the street from Best Buy. It's a five or ten minute walk down Zhaojiabang Lu, past the park, to Wanping Lu, where I cross the street and take a left. Half a block down, on the right, is an alleyway, the address is 299 Wanping Lu, and the building is #3. There's a pink sign.



It's hard to pass by at night, because it's lit up like a Christmas tree!



It's a good idea to make a reservation if going at peak times, sometimes there'll be a short wait. The phone number is 21-6472-1867.

Songjiang Mosque

Shanghai has a visible Muslim population, with Chinese Hui Muslims all about town (often seeming to run Pulled-Noodle Stands), and the generally-Muslim Eastern Turks visible as well (often seeming to sell barbequed meats or raisins). However outside of the food services, there doesn't seem to be much of a Muslim presence – for instance, businesses that aim themselves at a Muslim clientele. The only mosque I've seen in Shanghai has been the underwhelming Peach Garden Mosque, near the Old City of Shanghai.

I'm curious about the Islamic religion, so I've wanted to go to the mosque in the suburb of Songjiang for a long time now. The mosque was originally built in 1391, I had read it's one of the oldest mosques in China. However Songjiang is quite a ways out of town, so I never made it out, until I heard that Shanghai's new line #9 went out to Songjiang, and I decided to give it a try – the line also goes to Qibao Old Street.

The subway ride and transfer there is so annoying, worlds beyond the terrible People's Square Station. There are two stations, both named Yishan Lu – the line #3 version is the proper one to transfer from. From there, the two lines don't actually connect, and there's a long line for a free bus to the line #9 station, and then after the short bus ride, it's about an hour long subway ride to Songjiang terminal station, and a further ten minute taxi ride.

To my untrained eyes, the mosque didn't look all that different from a Chinese temple:



The largest difference being that there were gardens on site:



And also a small graveyard:



As well as the occasional Arabic sign or calligraphy:



There weren't any people worshipping when I went to the Mosque, although I went on a Saturday rather than a Friday. However, I understand it's still an active mosque, here's a snapshot of the Prayer Hall:



So honestly I found the mosque a little disappointing. However, it's worth a gander for those who are already in Songjiang, for whatever obscure reason.

Chun - A Shanghainese Restaurant

This will be the first post in a series about favorite Shanghai-style restaurants. That's in addition to my series about the best places to get xiaolongbao, a local-style snack.

Shanghai's cuisine is not my favorite. I prefer the stronger flavors of South East Asian cuisine, or maybe the hot, oily Sichuan and Hunan styles of Chinese food. Shanghai style food relies on subtle flavors, where quality comes from the fresh ingredients. There's less oil than other Chinese cuisines, with foods often being steamed, rather than fried in a wok. Local seafood is prevalent, as is local produce – farms still line the outskirts of Shanghai. Sauces are mild, often depending on interplay of light soy sauce and sugar – really a lot of Shanghai's food is mildly sweet, and that's probably the biggest hurdle for someone new to the cuisine.

That being said, probably my favorite place in Shanghai for local-style cuisine is Chun, on 124 Jinxian Lu, right next to the Lomography store and nearish to the Shaanxi Nan Lu Subway Station. The restaurant has only four tables, between that and a NY Times write up it all sounded very mysterious. But really the insides are nothing special – it looks like a normal hole in the wall, only maybe just a little fancier and a little smaller. Also, with such a small restaurant, it's a good idea either show up really early, or better yet to book a table, the number is 21-6256-0301.



There's no menu. Instead, the chef prepares what's fresh that day – customers tell the waiter how many dishes they want. Of course there's some leeway to order favorite dishes, or to request certain foods not be served. The waiter only speaks Chinese, but the restaurant is well-known enough with foreigners that I'm sure it's possible to order without the local lingo.

All the pictures above have been taken at the restaurant, and they were all incredibly delicious, to the point that it was hard to choose a favorite or least favorite dish. If there are any caveats to be made, it's that the food is served local style, and personally I'm so lazy at eating, I hate spitting out bones, or digging the meat out of shrimps.



What was shown? The pictures were taken at a meal for two, where we got a cold braised pork, a plate of seasoned shrimp, a steamed whitefish with a hong shao sauce, and pork soup with bamboo shoots and those crazy tofu sheets that are tied into knots. A lot of food, although I should have added a vegetable. It came in to slightly under 200 kuai, or about $14 per person. About double the price from some of my other favorite Shanghai-style restaurants, but you pay the big bucks to get the best!

More Old Chinese Movies

I've posted before about old movies of Shanghai, it's become something of a hobby and I'm contemplating rolling out a separate blog about the subject. A couple months ago, I posted a list of thirteen pre-Communist Shanghai movies that were freely available, with the promise of more. Never one to disappoint...

Silent movies, with original English and Chinese intertitles:
Poor Daddy - 儿子英雄 (1929)
An Orphan - 雪中孤雏 (1929)

Silent movies, with only Chinese intertitles:
Daybreak - 天明 (1933)
Greedy Neighbours - 恶邻 (1933)
Cosmetics of Market - 脂粉市场 (1933)
National Customs - 国风 (1935)

Movies with Mandarin Chinese audio, but no English subtitles:
Plunder of Peach and Plum - 桃李劫 (1934)
Twin Sisters - 再生花 (1934)
Bible for Girls - 女儿经 (1934)
Children of Troubled Times - 风云儿女 (1935)
The Boatman's Daughter - 船家女 (1935)
Song at Midnight - 夜半歌声 (1937)
Youth on the March - 青年進行曲 (1937)
Dream of the Red Mansions - 红楼梦 (1944)
Diary of the Homecoming - 还乡日记 (1947)

I'll still post more movies, but I think I've already uploaded many of the best, so I don't expect to be updating frequently. However, all these movies are posted to the excellent archive.org, so if you're hungry for more, try browsing their archives. Also, a number of these movies are available off Amazon.com, yesasia.com, or rented from netflix.com - the ones from Netflix and Amazon will have subtitles.

Wuyuan and Surroundings

Feeling adventurous after a small trip to Fujian Province, I decided to take the bus back, rather than a plane. That allowed me a chance to look over the countryside, and to make a small detour to Jiangxi Province, on the way back to Shanghai.

Don't do this.

Here's the bus I took, it was a bunch of lay-down cots rather than seats. The cots were a foot and a half shorter than me, meaning I had to sort of fold myself into the cot. Everybody around me was chain smoking. To top it off, it was an 18 hour bus ride. And, the driver dropped me off by the side of the dark highway at 2:30 in the morning, and told me (and a fellow traveler) that it was about a mile to Jingdezhen, a medium-sized no-horse town a few hours away from from my final destination of Wuyuan.



But that's an overly long introduction to Wuyuan. Basically, Wuyuan is an ugly city that acts as a transportation hub to the beautiful villages nearby. So the first order of business is getting out of Dodge and making it to somewhere else. With me, I went to Small Likeng:



As a small village, it made for an interesting contrast with the Hakka villages I had been to several days before. It felt more typically Chinese, not being a Hakka area and all. The countryside, with plenty of rivers and streams, was beautiful, if not quite up to the standards of Yongding. And the buildings were beautiful, well-preserved, and built right against the water. I did have a complaint about all the tourists:



It's not an elitist "I'm too cool to be in a touristed spot" attitude, although of course I do have that attitude. It's more that, Small Likeng is a small village with small sidewalks. With the large tour groups and busy crowds going by, I found myself waiting in line just to walk down the street!

But I don't want to exaggerate; even in Small Likeng, it was easy to get away from the crowds. Here's a couple quick pictures:







There were a number of other villages that weren't quite as impressive, but weren't as busy. They didn't all feel cut from the same mold, though, there were marked contrasts between them. It doesn't photograph well, but Sixi Yancun had a labyrinthine feeling of large featureless buildings, connected by thin irregular pathways:



Whereas Qinghua had a more country feel to it. Here's looking under Rainbow Bridge:



And nearby to central Qinghua City was a beautiful valley filled with older homes:



Similiarly to Yongding, there was an odd relation to the locals, and it felt like their normal lives had turned into a tourist attraction. I was also on the receiving end of this, as random morons would go up to me and yell "Hello!" constantly. Anyway, whether it's cultural imperialism or not, I thought it was interesting to see the villagers doing their thing, here's a few quick pictures:









From Wuyuan, it was a seven hour bus ride back to Shanghai - the proper kind of bus, with seats and rules against smoking.