Ruan Lingyu's Home

Ruan Lingyu was a silent-movie star from Shanghai's 1930 cinema - she's the most well-known actress from the era. She injected drama into roles that were honestly usually very silly and slight, and she stood up to the task when she starred in "The Goddess," generally recognized as one of the best films of early Chinese cinema. She's also well known for her sad life, which led to her eventual suicide at the age of 24 - really a lot of actresses from the era ended up as tragic figures.

I've brought up "The Goddess" before - it can be watched freely off the Internet, I think it's worth a look. Still, while I think she was a good actress and I enjoy watching older Shanghai movies, I never considered myself an obsessive fan. At the least, I'd never considered making a pilgramage to sights associated with Ruan Lingyu. Still, that's exactly what I did recently, and I'll post a few pictures.

The site was her old house at #9 Xinzha Lu, it's inside the Qinyuan Village apartments. Ruan Lingyu lived there from early on in her stardom, until her eventual suicide. The apartment is nothing spectacular now, certainly it doesn't look like the residence of a film star, or of the many other prominent artists who lives there. However, it must have been more impressive back in the day - for one, the apartment has since been sub-divided into multiple living spaces, like a lot of older Shanghai residences.



It's still an interesting, if unspectacular, place to look around, with a few architectual flourishes.



Getting there isn't too difficult: It's a five or ten minute walk north from the Plaza 66 mall, on the north side of Xinzha Lu, between Changhua Lu and Jiangning Lu. Despite being very central towards downtown development, there's a number of other older-style buildings in the area:

Pictures of Fudan University

Fudan University, in the north of Shanghai, is one of China's top universities. I haven’t attended the university, so I’m not about to provide some full-scale expose. But I did wander the grounds with a former student, and I thought it was interesting, so I’ll attach a few pictures in this update.

The University is effectively split into two different halves, on opposite sides of a major street. Right at the entrance to one side is a large statue of Mao Zedong:




There’s also a skyscraper/classroom building, the Guanghua Towers. It’s a new building which houses mostly science and engineering classrooms, from what I’ve been told. I can’t imagine how crowded the elevators must be, right when everyone gets out of class all at once:



And another skyscraper building is to the rear of this picture, on the opposite side of the campus. It's not quite as large, it hosts liberal arts classrooms.



The university has been around for slightly more than a century, though, and a number of older buildings are still in use. These buildings are much smaller and seem pretty pleasant. They also have large fields around them, and wide roads that cars can drive on, and really much of the university seems very much in the American university model:



And there’s also small parks and gardens scattered about:



I didn’t see much of student life, because I visited during the summer on a weekend. However I did see that the school had organized a school dance from 3-7pm, very quaint. On the Liberal Arts side of the university, there were streets directly off-campus full of bookstores and restaurants and so forth, it seemed like it would be a lot of fun. Also, the main pathway was lined with street-side dealers selling snack foods, or clothes, or even kites:

Taikang Lu - stuffwhitepeoplelike

I've become a big fan of the website Stuff White People Like. It catalogs the interests and concerns of the Caucasian hipster set, and I like to think that it "keeps me real," as it were, after living years in Shanghai. For better or for worse, a lot of people in Shanghai just don't share the hipster aesthetic.

Taikang Lu is the best place to immerse myself in a hipster setting. A semi-converted shikumen full of cafes and boutique stores, I think it's the stuffwhitepeoplelike center to Shanghai. You could look over the updated list from their website, compare it to what's available on Taikang Lu, and probably check off 90% of it. You couldn't do much better even in the US, unless you were in the Mission District, Brooklyn, or downtown Portland.

Taikang Lu is not particularly convenient to get to. It's south of the uncool foreigner hub Xintiandi, which is itself South of the Huangpi Nan Lu Station. The walk from the station is about twenty or twenty five minutes. It's a short street, and really what people care about when they say "Taikang Lu" is the shikumen and buildings starting around Alley #210. However, the street has an interesting mix of down-market restaurants, up-market bars, and a local-style vegetable market:



These shikumen are a really interesting setting. I've talked about them before. It's a brick building structure, with shops on the outside street, and on the inside a series of narrow alleys, common courtrooms, and small apartments. It's really quite beautiful, and these shikumen are well preserved:



However what was formerly people's apartments has often been converted into trendy shops, such as this store selling ethnic chotchkies, scarves, and handbags:



Or a very, very large number of cafes, of all kinds: small little nooks, to larger chains - Maui Coffee has a couple branches:



And similarly, there's a large number of art galleries of all different sizes, here's a small one:



I don't want to continue along these lines too long. What else is there? A large amount of foreign restaurants (including a burrito stall, but it's not good), a number of boutique fashion joints, a Tibetan jewelry stall where the jewelry was owned by famous Tibetan lamas and now goes for thousands of dollars, and small cocktail bars. There's English speakers and English menus to everything, and most places have outside seating.

A couple favorites includes an eclectic Chinese antique store, which has things like 60s sewing machines, and Projection 216, a fashion design studio that cheaply shows art movies on their projection TV, during the weekend, in a very small room. Unfortunately, they're taking a break for the summer.

Anyway, the area is also interesting because it's only been half-converted into a retail space. It's still very much in use as a residential space, especially towards the back, and it's a fun way to check out what a real shikumen looks like, while being ignored by the residents. They're going about their lives oblivious to the tourists wandering around, and often snapping pictures of everything in site:



And there's the ubiquitous laundry, getting hanged up on a sunny day:



So I hope I give a good impression of the area. Taikang Lu's shikumen is definitely one of the best places for a foreigner to go in Shanghai. And don't get me wrong, I recommend my Chinese friends to go, and they enjoy it too.

Shanghai Concert Hall

The Shanghai Concert Hall is located in a park between People's Square and the shopping street of Huaihai Lu - when I first came to Shanghai, I lived just around the corner. It's in the center of town, and is lit up to match. Most notably, there's a large television jumbotron on a nearby building. It plays commercials, and there's speakers lying about to play the commercial's sound at night. Kind of annoying, really.

The concert hall looks the part of a concert hall - a big stately building with arches and pseudo-Grecian pillars scattered about.



But it started out in the 30s as a movie hall. It was the setting of a big scene from the old pre-war movie "Scenes of City Life," which by the way I've subtitled - I'm getting the subtitles looked over and working on a good method of hosting the movie, and then I'll put it on the web. Here's a look at the same spot, but from the movie. This shot is from a different angle, but I wasn't about to go climbing any trees:



The more detail-oriented of my gentle readers that the old picture has cars right in front of the theater, as opposed to being in a park - the road (Yan'an Lu) was turned into a highway, and there's also a subway nearby. To lessen the noise, the hall was moved half a block, even though it was more expensive than making a new building. The surroundings park is mostly empty, despite the location - at night there's a bunch of couples making out on benches, and occasional homeless people wandering around.



I went a few days ago, the Chinesey prog-rock band Cold Fairyland was playing - a little surprising, as it's the only time I've ever heard of the concert hall holding rock concerts. I think the band has a cool sound, but their actual music isn't interesting - I was mostly there to check out the insides of the theater. Unfortunately, the show took place in a smallish basement theater, not the main hall. It was a good match, though, the acoustics were really great and let the band's sound come out well.

Yuyuan Lu Fashion Plaza

Beijing Lu is a large-ish street immediate to my apartment. I've heard it called the Northern Barrier of Shanghai - although really it's about in the middle of the city, a cool foreigner has no use to ever go north of it. I'd love to be so cool, but being cool would just be too much of an imposition on me. All the better restaurants near my place are on the North side, I'd probably end up eating McDonald's everyday. Near Jing'an, one block south is Yuyuan Lu. It's a bit of a foreigner-centric area, at least during the day: there's also a Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf, a Burger King, and Malone's, a popular foreigner pub that my friend insists I only call "The Vietnam Veteran Bar."

On the same street, somewhere past the Burger King but before the Vietnam Veteran Bar, lies the Yuyan Lu Fashion Plaza. There's always a few food stalls in front of the plaza, offering a bunch of cheap snacks. In the last few months it's become more crowded, I theorize with vendors who used to sell their food on Wujiang Lu. There was also a pretty decent Xinjiang-style noodle shack that closed around the same time they all moved in.

The actual plaza is a series of small booths, with a high tin roof that half-protects the structure from rain. I imagine if the roof was more solid, it'd be harder to brace from the wind. This is one of about five rows of shops. There's a food counter to the immediate left - it sells spicy soup.



Half the business of Shanghai boils down to hair. Not far from this plaza, it's normal for young girls on the street to be harassed by trainee hairstylists aggressively pushing cut-rate haircuts. For that matter, there's also a nearby "hairstylist" joint with red lights and girls in not so much clothing. Anyway this picture shows a bunch of extensions, and I really wish I knew a girl cool enough to pull off aqua blue hair extensions. There's a small beauty shop nearby.

But of course the main attraction is the clothes. The clothes here are nothing fancy, they're often laid out one after the other. In fact the whole plaza feels something like a huge bargain bin. The prices reflect it: the prices on these shirts are marked 29 kuai, which is something like $3.75, and I have to believe the price can be bargained down quite a bit.

But that's pure conjuncture on my part, as none of these clothes would fit a tall person like me, and I don't even try. Even worse is the shoes: when I tell people my shoe size, they'll initially think I'm making an absurd joke. The largest shoe size that can normally be found is maybe a size 9.

I don't have to say that cheap clothes plus China equates to a bootleg item or two: a lot of the clothes have the brand names on them - I believe those are fake Converse above, and certainly Disney didn't approve these shirts.



Of course Chinese English on clothing is vaguely amusing:



I could go on and on with racks of clothing, but that gets old pretty quick! There's also a few interesting stores selling things unrelated to clothes, like toystores, or froo-froo house decorations.



Out front are a few old ladies with sewing machines, who make on-the-spot alterations to the clothing, pretty cool! This sewing machine looks like it belongs in some kind of museum, I believe it's a foot-crank model. Some of the other sewers use electronic machines though.



And for all the workers, there's a few boilers that dispense hot water, mostly it's for making instant noodles, or for tea - the leaves stay in the jar, and the water gets added a number of times. And people drink hot water plain in Shanghai - it's such a basic thing but the concept never even occurred to me before I arrived in China.



Update 11/4/2008 - This place has been knocked down, it's currently a pile of rubble but a 5-star hotel is sure to come up soon.

Cloud 9 Ghost Mall

Shanghai is in a construction bubble, fueled by anticipation of a continued meteoric growth in city population and wealth. The flip side to the incredible amount of construction going on is a very high vacancy rate, particularly with upper-end apartments and shopping malls.

This update will look at Zhongshan Park's Cloud 9 mall, although there's plenty of other examples. It's actually got a much better location than many of the other ghost malls, being located in what's a fairly crowded, fairly recent district of large apartment buildings. It's built directly over a busy subway station, and actually the basement level is fairly crowded. There's clothes stalls, an unpopular electronics chain, a popular Pizza Hut, and in the far corner is a Japanese-esque noodle chain that is so terrible and overpriced, I don't know how it has chains all over the city.



The basement level also has a Carrefour. It's a French megastore, something like Target or Wal-Mart, and is always spectacularly crowded.



The mall is only about a year old, and the insides are clean and brightly lit. It's full of shops, mostly clothing brands. Maybe this picture gives the idea: most of the brands in the mall are international, well-known, solid brands, although perhaps not the most elite or upscale.



It's a hard thing to show, but each floor is very large. They're not entirely centered around the big escalators, there's also long hallways that go off in two directions, with shops lining each hallway:



I hope the angled photograph gives the unsettling "28 Days Later" feeling - looking at the above two pictures there's not a person in sight, well aside from a cleaning lady. There's a definite eeriness to being in a well-lit mall with shops on all sides and not having a single non-salesperson around - particularly when it takes place in a city of twenty million people. No trick photography was involved, I didn't sneak in right before closing, etc. It really always looks like this!



There's a little more activity to be seen. On the top two floors are some restaurants, many of them serving Korean or Japanese food. A few of them do get very crowded.



The sad part of the story is, Shanghai has ghost-mall after ghost-mall, and more continue to be built. If they were off in places I don't care about, I suppose that wouldn't mean much to me, but recently Wujiang Lu Food Street was shuttered, to make room for the development of a new ghost mall. I guess it's meant to match the ghost mall across the street, or perhaps the ghost malls a mile down the road!