Historic Shanghai OCTOBER EVENTS

Last Kings of Shanghai:

The Sassoons & Kadoories

Saturday October 17, 1pm

RMB 250 members, 350 nonmembers

includes a private visit to former Kadoorie family home

Inspired by Jonathan Kaufman’s book, The Last Kings of Shanghai, we’ll trace the epic story of the Sassoons and the Kadoories, two Jewish dynasties whose wealth and influence shaped Shanghai for more than a century.

Once treasurers to the Ottomans, the Sassoons were known as the Rothschilds of Asia; Elly Kadoorie apprenticed with the Sassoons, but then struck out on his own, and with his sons, built an empire to rival theirs.

Their stories remain in their buildings--tales of innovation, generosity, turmoil, tragedy, faith, and family—and we’ll see many of the buildings they raised, including the sumptuous Kadoorie family home, Marble Hall.

Avenue Haig East:

Taipans, Celebrities, and Pioneers on the Edge of the Badlands

Sunday October 18, 10am

RMB 200 members, 300 nonmembers

Perched on the edge of Shanghai’s notorious Badlands, Avenue Haig—today’s Huashan Road--was was one of the last areas in the Concession to be developed, at a time when there was a lot of money sloshing around.

The characters who built up this area left in their wake colonnaded mansions and Mediterranean style compounds, Art Deco apartments and modernist houses, and in the bricks and mortar they left the stories of Shanghai: tales of taipans and warlords, of discarded wives and ambitious mistresses, of big businesses and vanished dreams.

Avenue Haig is so long, and so chock-full of goodies, that this walk is divided into two parts: on the first part, we’ll see a notorious, luxurious American gangster-run casino, right opposite a very proper girls’ school; Art Deco delights, a concubine’s hideaway; a stylish apartment building that became the home of the stars, a pioneering medical facility, the home and grounds of the Swire taipan, and much more.

DEEP DIVE:

Route Boissezon (Fuxing Xi Lu)

Saturday October 24, 2pm

RMB 200 members, 300 nonmembers

In our Deep Dive series, we pick a street or two and go deep, because that’s where all the treasures lie. Route Boissezon (Fuxing Xi Lu) is one of those streets everyone thinks they know, but its warren of lanes turns up delicious new discoveries at every turn.

This four-block stretch still has a few country manors from the days when this was still the countryside, and host of apartments and villas by a who’s who of the city’s finest architects: a Mediterranean villa for playwright; a Spanish style apartment house for a socialite; a clever concubine’s Art Deco lane; a Bauhaus villa; gorgeous Art Deco apartment buildings, and, of course, the lanes, the secret twists and turns behind the famous street. So much history, so many stories, in just one Shanghai street.

Shanghai History Series:

Postwar, Civil War (1945-1949)

Sunday October 25, 2pm

RMB 200 members, 300 nonmembers

This month, our Shanghai History series explores the postwar city. Shanghai residents were finally free from internment camps and Japanese occupation, the Concessions had ended in 1943, and the U.S. military was managing the transition.

Postwar Shanghai was eager to return to a life of normalcy. But economic instability, massive inflation, and civil war intervened, once again creating chaos that would be ultimately resolved in May of 1949 when the People’s Liberation Army marched down the Bund.

Saturday October 31, 10am

Gangsters in Paradise

Saturday October 31, 10am

RMB 200 members, 300 nonmembers

There’s no other way to say it: Old Shanghai was run by gangsters. The Chicago of Asia. Their names and their deeds are still legend in a city of legends. Big Eared Du, Pock Marked Huang, the Smiling Tiger. The Three Big Shots, the Green Gang, the Big Eight Mob.

They’re gone, gone with the world they created, but the buildings and spaces that tell their stories remain. On this walk, we’ll explore the complicated, fascinating story of Shanghai’s notorious 1930s underworld, its larger-than-life characters, its surprising, intimate association with every aspect of the city, and the built legacies to that vanished world that remain.

OCTOBER BOOK CLUB:

Five Star Billionaire by Tash Aw (2013)

Date, time TBC

RMB 100 members, 200 nonmembers

Tash Aw turns the classic immigrant narrative on its head in Five Star Billionaire: instead of East-West migration, he looks at intra-Asian migration, with Malaysian characters chasing their dreams in the region’s city of hope, Shanghai. Aw wrote much of the novel at a 2010 Shanghai writers residency based in Shanghai’s Embankment Building, and this is the locus of much of the action.

Phoebe is a factory girl who has come to Shanghai with the promise of a job—but when she arrives she discovers that the job doesn’t exist. Gary is a country boy turned pop star who is spinning out of control. Justin is in Shanghai to expand his family’s real estate empire, only to find that he might not be up to the task. He has long harbored a crush on Yinghui, a poetry-loving, left-wing activist who has reinvented herself as a successful Shanghai businesswoman. Yinghui is about to make a deal with the shadowy Walter Chao, the five star billionaire of the novel, who with his secrets and his schemes has a hand in the lives of each of the characters. All bring their dreams and hopes to Shanghai, the shining symbol of the New China, which, like the novel’s characters, is constantly in flux and which plays its own fateful role in the lives of its inhabitants.

Five Star Billionaire captures the Shanghai of the go-go Expo years, things that change and the things that don’t: the city of elusive identities and ever-changing skylines, of grand ambitions and outsize dreams.

Available on Kindle.

Hard copies are not available in Shanghai.