An Army of Old Chinese Women

I was on the subway the Thursday afternoon, on my way to work at the magazine. I was in a rush, but I was on time. I had just expended energy by aiding in Chinese to English translations, negotiating a new cell phone purchase for my girlfriend, exhausting stuff. The nice thing, one of the only nice things, about living so far up in the northern Yangpu district is that I nearly always get a seat on the subway. As I inch closer and closer to the city, the cars fill up fast, these people have to stand. I was seated, hunched in the corner by the door, glazing at the empty seat across from me. Enter: an army of old Chinese women, filling in the remaining seats in the car. They all seemed to know each other. Two women, sitting across from me, busied themselves by pouring over a recent purchase, a dark green knit sweater. They flipped it over, fingering the fabric in their hands, flipping it over and over, analyzing every detail as if they were former seamstresses and were critiquing its quality. The patterns, the stitching. Over and over. Another army of old women burst through the doors at the next station (was it old women shopping discount day?). They filed in and squeezed every ounce of remaining seats left, forcing spots meant more for one, to two. All apart from one found a seat. She darted around like a pinball, head down, looking for a space where none was available. She gave up, all her friends had seats. She laughed, smiled, reserved towards her misfortune, and then looked at me, making eye contact. Sheepishly, I got up, said, “请做, 做吧,” Qingzuo, zuoba. Please, have a seat, and she rushed to take my place. All the old women looked at me, smiled, and said, “谢谢!” Xiexie! Thank you, then instantly dismissed me as any group of old women would, returning to their gossip. I wandered over to the corner of the car.

In other news, I took my first excursion out of Shanghai’s city limits to the small Venetian-esque water village of Zhujiajiao (朱家角), about an hour’s bus ride to the city’s west. The village is one of several out in that area, villages that are all built around a system of intertwining canals and whose dense network of residential and commercial alleyways were built directly along the water’s edge, much like Venice. But this town was nothing like Venice of course, it was inherently Chinese. In fact, it is so Chinese that in filming the Hollywood blockbuster, Mission Impossible 3, they decided to put an entire Shanghai scene here, the scene where Tom Cruise is running along one of the canals, awkwardly shouting, “Xiaoxin! Xiaoxin!” (小心! 小心! Careful! Careful!) to the villagers around him, dodging people left and right, trying to get to a small Chinese house where the villain was holding his wife hostage. The scene looks great because of its location, way more Chinese looking than the internationally recognizable downtown centers of Shanghai.

It was a great day trip. I went with three German girls, my girlfriend, her friend from home and a new German friend from Fudan. On an absolutely beautiful springtime Saturday afternoon, we hopped a local bus from a small station outside the People’s Square in the city center, and about an hour later, driving down China’s famous G-50 highway, called the Yan’an elevated highway in the city (famous because so many China writers before me have traveled down this highway, starting in Shanghai at the Bund, going straight west across the entire country), we arrived in the sparsely populated township of Qingpu, where a brief walk through the town led us to the water village. We dutifully bought our touristy entrance tickets, affording us the chance to pop into the village’s more touristic spots, and set about finding a place to eat (it had been a late night the evening before and a sleepy wake up the morning of, we were starved). We found a great little restaurant on the second floor of one of the buildings along the main canal. It had an open terrace with tables under the gloriously warm sun, and tables along a wandering hallway up against large windows. We found a table towards the end of this hallway. The table was designed in a traditionally Chinese style, perfectly square, with a smaller square of marble inlaid to the table’s center, and molded into a dark wooden outer-rim, delicately carved in oriental patterns. Each side of the table had a long, thin, wooden bench. We were right up against the open bay window where we could peer directly down into the canal, watching men in sampan hats slowly sway back and forth, manually propelling and steering their gondola style boats to and from different pick up points along the village. We ordered yuxiang qiezi (鱼香茄子, fish-flavored eggplant), gongbao jiding (宫保鸡丁, diced chicken and peanuts) and qingcai (青菜, fresh vegetable dish of green onions and lettuce) with a large bowl of baifan (白饭, white rice). It was tasty.

The main canal running through Zhujiajiao

Old lanterns within a temple entrance hall

German girls, my girlfriend and her friend from home

One of many pork meat stalls

Resident old woman, with her photo in the shop's corner

Temple where I was introduced to Buddhist fortune telling

Old women army, praying towards the burning papers

Lunch

This reads, "Park car eat food"

Giant cat eats baby!

Shot of a local gondola driver from above on our restaurant terrace

More gondolas

We picked up, bellies satisfied, and toured the village. One of the highlights, one of the free highlights, is the village’s dense market streets, where pedestrians and market frequenters plunge into the dark alleyways to buy traditional Chinese goods, non-traditional cheap crap, and some really amazing stall foods. Some of the best stall foods I found sold Chinese sweets like caramelized peanut squares and chewy green-tea buns filled with Chinese red-bean paste (my favorite). Other stalls had various pork meats, different cuts of meat, I guess, from the pig. Pig feet and snouts, caramelized in a sweet glaze, and other meat products prepared in a similar way. I think this village was sort of well known for these types of shops. Some stalls had pictures of reporters interviewing the shop owners or had framed pictures of magazine articles written about them. Many had awkward pictures of an old woman, each shop’s resident old woman, presumably the shops’ head chefs, super-imposed over a strange digital display of flowers or something else unappealing, smiling sort of, holding a pan or spatula or something. It was weird. But their shops nonetheless were undeniably impressive.

The village was full of these alley ways. But every now and again, set in a bit deeper from the pedestrian romping market paths were some hidden temples and gardens. We walked into one. The entrance was shrouded in smoke bellowing from the temple within, smelling of incense, and we could hear some faint chanting. We pushed through to the source and as the smoke was clearing we could make out a courtyard full of yes, old Chinese women. Hundreds, standing, then kneeling, then patting their heads and hands on the floor, then rising and repeating, all the while chanting in unison, all aimed at a large bronze pot of burning paper. We stood there watching, mesmerized. Ten minutes passed and it was over. The women got up, looked around, and smiled, exiting en masse through the entrance we had just entered. We explored the aftermath.

Another temple, this time a monastery training school, had much smaller activities occurring but the grounds were active nonetheless. Several Buddhist temples sprawled along the central courtyard. In one, monks in robes were repeating some mantra, over and over, repeating after their master as he hit a low-bass drum. Further in, some bamboo passageways led to further temples. I broke off a bit, on my own, to take some photos in the seclusion of a cluster of smaller temples when a monk popped out from a bush and handed me an incense stick. Without words he pointed to a small golden box within which was a small flame. I lit the stick and watched it slowly burn along the edges, turning the black of the stick to an ashy white, releasing visible fumes into the air. Another monk, watching me from above on the top of some steps urged me inside and beckoned me to the foot of a large, elaborate, Buddha shrine. He had me kneel and put up my hands in prayer with the incense stick in between. He looked at me, clapped his hands and bowed a few times, reciting some singsongy prayer. Then he smiled wide, put his hands into fists raising them in the air a bit, and said, “Ah, good luck!” seeming pleased with himself. I put 5 kuai in the money box, as is tradition, I think, and he got excited and handed me a small red envelope. He took out the piece of paper inside and read aloud the three traditional Chinese characters inscribed: 禄 lu, a traditional word for money, 夀, shou, long life, and 福, fu, good fortune. He pointed to them and read them to me one by one, urging me to repeat them after him. Then he showed me to a man in the corner, another monk in robes, sitting at a writing desk. He had small circular spectacles on his face and looked up at me. I gave him my piece of paper and he said, “A-Haaa!” then said some things in Chinese that I couldn’t follow, then wrote some things on a piece of paper. The first line he described to me, in English, as, “Goooood family!” The second line, “Haaaappy endingggg! (his words, not mine)” The last line was, “Goooood luck! A-Haaaaa!” I said, “Xiexie,” and signed a registry. The registry had foreigners’ names, their countries, then how much they donated for this fortune reading. Each had a number like 150 or 200 kuai. Awkwardly, I reached into my pocket and pulled out 5 kuai, offering it to the monk. He said, “Ooooh,” rounding out his mouth like a fish, pointing to the numbers from other foreigners. I then reached for some coins, beckoning the 5.30 kuai towards him and then he smiled, taking my money, throwing it into a box. I left.

When all was said and done we had a great time in this village. We walked around for the majority of the day, then hopped an early evening bus back to the city. Finding where to catch the bus was a bit of a challenge and only snuck onto the bus right before it left. Lacking available seats, the four of us squeezed into the step leading down to the back entrance and watched the countryside whirl by from the bottom of the near street level window.

Last thing. I shaved my beard today. It was a nice beard. But my goal was to shave it when the weather got warmer. If for whatever reason my posts start to get less and less interesting, I blame the lack of beard. Just a head’s up.

In Pictures

In what I hope will become the first of many installations, this week’s post aims to better capture the essence of space through photographs, enhancing the portrayal of Shanghai for readers through images (in case I wasn’t sufficiently doing that through previous posts, better safe than sorry). I’ve begun with this first set of photos by capturing a few local spots, in and around the Fudan campus, my dormitory, and the adjoining streets. And I threw on a few parting shots of the city skyline to ground this post in the city at large.

It was a beautiful day today. Spring is nearly here. I’ve written this short intro from a rigid chair out on my balcony. It’s too high up to hear the hum drum of street-level noises, conversations, bicycle bells, and the like, but two things pierce through that clutter and echo up clearly to me on the 20th floor: car horns and birds. As you may have heard, car horn blasting is ritual, done regardless of necessity, but done so frequently that I sort of tune it out. The birds’ singing however is relatively new, presumably coinciding with the arrival of warmer air. And it’s a welcome sign, reminding me that I was in fact pooped on by a bird last week (and not something else, as I sort of feared), and that they seem relatively undeterred by the smog, which I’ll say it again, isn’t so bad here.

The following are mostly pictures of today’s wanderings. Enjoy!

Bicycles outside the entrance of the foreign student's dormitory, my building

Chinese pudgster with his Popsicle overlooking the coy pond by the student canteen

Fudan's sidewalks are strewn with propaganda style banners, but not always from propaganda style purposes

Chinese mailbox, trashcan, and phone booth, a functional street corner

Side entrance to the student canteen on campus, late night hours posted above the entryway

Inside this dilapidated complex is an excellent Japanese sake bar

Hippie bus, Seoul to Shanghai, now housing a Korean barbeque dining area

Local shops within the campus

My favorite convenience store, good for cheap coffee (believe it or not) and baozi, breakfast dumplings

Side entrance to an administrative building on campus

The oldest building on campus, built in 1927

Student cyclists

Mao, welcoming visitors by Fudan's main gate

Students enjoying the Sunday sunshine in front of the Guanghua building on campus

Kids behind the campus guards

An apartment block above a supermarket outside the campus gates

Good for sandwiches and pizza, caters to the foreign student crowd

Korean BBQ joint on University Ave

Local fruit market outside campus

Typical shops on a side street by the campus

Not an attractive photo, the magnetic tracks used to shoot the Maglev train to and from Pudong Int. Airport

A banquet style dinner, with friends at a Henan restaurant for a friend's birthday

An interesting duo within the mall by my workplace

A clear shot of the Pudong skyline at dusk

The same shot, panorama style

Pokee-barber and the End of a Curly Era

Reverting back to the chronicling of my goings on mode. I was pooped on by a bird today. Is that supposed to be lucky or unlucky? I can’t remember. What I do know is that birds are few and far between in the cities of smog-choked China. 怎么办? Zenme ban? What to make of that…

I also hit full-time-graduate-student-with-a-part-time-internship in full swing this week. Manageable so far but I foresee stressful times ahead on weeks I’ll have assignments due. The good news is it seems like I’m going to get a lot of writing in with the magazine. Lots of stuff I can publish, I think. In fact, in support of City Weekend’s Home & Office quarterly magazine supplement, I was able to write some blurbs in text boxes. You know, those shaded areas that distract you from the way better writing within the bulk of more important articles. In other words, something I wrote will be printed into a magazine. Making progress!

But I’ve also been sort of commissioned for a far more interesting project that should afford me a lot more leeway in the creative writing process. And the chance to write some full length articles. I’m working on a neighborhood spotlight, another magazine supplement, but a one time shot, a sit-on-the-shelf-for-a-while type project, about Shanghai’s Gubei and Hongqiao districts in the west of the city, also known as Koreatown and Little Japan. In support of this, I decided to make myself the self proclaimed expert on all things that this up and coming neighborhood has to offer. I made my way down from the isolation of Shanghai’s northern Yangpu district, where I live and where Fudan is located, down line 10, and one hour of staring at the Chinese commuters sitting across the train from me later, popped out to Yilin Road, way in the west and got to do some serious exploring. The neighborhood is an old one and now being revamped to accommodate an increasingly interested expatriate crowd. East Asian expats, Japanese, Korean, Taiwanese, etc. have been settling in this pleasant residential area for over 100 years and Western expats are taking notice. The area is very green, relatively quiet, and lots of small points of interest worth taking notice. So it should be fun to do some exploring of my own and write about my findings. I’ll try and save a lot of this experience for my the magazine (I’ll share later, I promise).

Nanjing East Road, Shanghai's old pedestrian shopping street, my office is located in a building behind those shown here to the right

An interesting find, black beer from Xinjiang Province, bought in a small international goods shop in the French Concession

iPhone's auto-adjusting shutter exposure setting didn't do me any favors on this one

This will be difficult to read. A safety notice in the elevator in my apartment building. I especially like point 7

In other news, I got my first haircut in the combined total of 1.5 years of being in China today. I should also mention that I hate getting haircuts. Just generally. In all the times I’ve walked into a barber shop and told and then re-emphasized what I wanted done to my head, words that I believe were clear and explicit always seem to fall on deaf ears. Barbers don’t listen to what you say and the times that they ask you what you want, which is not every time, is seemingly a simple formality. And because they usually don’t listen to exactly what I say, I usually hate my haircut. I get a bit sad and mopey for a day or two, and then sit patiently as my hair grows back. That’s just the way it is.

In the past, in China, rather than bothering to get my haircut at all, I would just let it grow. It gets wild and curly and ridiculous. Moppish, I believe is an accurate term. I kind of like it when it does that. But it’s not super professional especially now when I’m a mature graduate student and also have a job and I’m getting older and all that. Fair enough. Time to man up and get a haircut.

I have a Mandarin phrasebook that I got when I was a student in Beijing years ago. It’s useful for finding the more colloquial ways of saying things. Of saying things that make more sense to the average “street” person, as I’ll call them. Textbooks often fill your head with obnoxiously formal grammar patterns and not so useful ways of saying things. Things that when said to a native speaker, says, ah okay, you’re studying Chinese. And when said to a non-native speaker, says, ah okay, you’ve studied the same book as me. My phrasebook has a chapter on health and beauty and a specific section on getting haircuts. Key words: 剪发, jianfa, haircut, 短一点, duan yidian, a little shorter, 上面你不用剪, shangmian ni buyong jian, you don’t need to cut the top, 我喜欢这个头发很长, wo xihuan zhege toufa hen chang, I like this part long, 后面, houmian, the back, 侧面, cemain, the sides. I practiced. A lot.

There’s a barber shop, well okay, beauty salon, across the road from the gate in my corner of the university’s campus. I heard the haircuts here were 20 kuai, about 3 dollars, pretty good deal. I popped in through the door, met the male receptionist who said to me, 要剪发吗? Yao jianfa ma? Here for a haircut? Okay, good sign, I recognized the exchange. I nodded curtly and he looked around to the many male hairdressers lazing about the waiting chairs, legs crossed, staring into their smart phones. He pointed to the one that looked like a Pokemon character, long spiked hair, streaks of red, buzzed on the sides, tight black leather jacket and pants, who looked up from his phone and led me to a vacant chair. I sat down, staring at myself in the mirror in front of me, composing myself. I initiated the dialogue. Things were going well. I told him I wanted to tidy up the sides a bit and that he needn’t cut the top, I’m letting that grow. He understood, we were on the same page. But he looked at me for a moment in the mirror, pausing a bit, and then this is what I heard: “Chinese, chinese, chinese, here…I think, chinese, chinese, chinese, a bit better… Hao bu hao?” Reluctantly, I said, hao. Then he started pointing at the various prices on the board on the wall. Lots of Chinese here. The subtle differences of which were lost to me. I told him I wanted the cheapest option. Lots more Chinese followed. I said, hao. We had apparently settled on 58 kuai, about 10 dollars. Fine, I thought, let’s just get on with it. What I apparently agreed to was to let him take in the sides, yes, but to also thin out the mop-top and to do a bit of trimming there. Barbers don’t listen.

We chatted while he cut away. After the familiar exchange of what kind of foreigner I am, how long I’ve been studying Chinese, how long I plan to stay in China, I learned that he was from Jiangsu Province, could speak 四川话, Sichuan hua, Sichuan-ese, the incomprehensible western dialect I had become accustomed to in Chengdu, moved to Shanghai to study, but never went to class and could therefore not speak any English, then quit and became a barber, he said laughing. I laughed along with him, he’s cutting my hair.

When all was said and done he had given me a decent haircut. Not what I wanted but not a bad cut either, basically taking two weeks worth of hair growth off my head. It could have been much worse. I’m not moping around for what it’s worth. I went to pay my 58 kuai and the receptionist started to shove a VIP card in my hand, 200 kuai including today’s haircut. I’d get a free haircut next time and lots of perks, like shampooing and special style cuts and blah, blah, blah. I said no, I want to pay 58 kuai, please. Disappointed, he took my money. Pokee-barber went back to his chair.

I think it’s worth mentioning a quick bit about the perception of barber shops in China. And I want to re-iterate that my haircut experience was totally normal and everything that took place was expected. But at the same time it is no secret that many Chinese barber shops are fronts for brothels, or at least they were in 2007. Back rooms with creepy curtained doors double as storage space and other stuff. I’m not sure what the connection is and why barber shops do that. I decided when I was in Beijing that all Chinese barbers were suspect and everyone told me so. This place by Fudan though seems like a legitimate business full of bored college dropouts. But I’m here to educate and expose truths, so there you go.

Some old posts of mine on getting-haircuts-in-foreign-countries fun:

http://stephenadutton.blogspot.com/2013/03/monroe-in-moscow.html

http://stephenadutton.blogspot.com/2013/05/blustery-barcelona.html

Don’t forget, I welcome feedback. Feel free to reach out.

See you next week.

The Astor House

In Feb. 2007, I took a trip to Shanghai with some of my classmates from my undergraduate, study exchange program in Beijing. It was our first time to China and we had been in Beijing about a month. We finished a four-week, intensive language program and were breaking for the Chinese new year festival before starting our full time spring semester back in Beijing. We had a week and decided to go somewhere.

I remember hopping the train, a slow, overnight train. 2007 was a consequence free China for young foreign students. We were free from the constraints of rules and laws and formalities as we were back in the US. It was a semester without phones, without internet, where foreigners didn’t apply to the social regulations of normal Chinese people. We existed in this strange world in between the law because policemen, security guards, train employees, most people didn’t have a grasp of the English language and had little contact with foreigners and assumed that there was no way to effectively communicate with us. So instead, they ignored us. China was therefore boundless, ours to explore.

We bought a couple crates of beers, Tsing Tao beers, the big bottles, 17 cents a pop, stashed our stuff on our hard sleeper beds and retreated to the space in between cars to drink and smoke cigars and joke the night away. 很自由. Hen ziyou. In our minds, absolute freedom. And freedom in a not so free place.

This awareness of freedom begged us to travel and this was our first chance. We pulled into the station in Shanghai the following morning. As students, upon arrival to Beijing, we were each given a gift of a large Lonely Planet guidebook for China. I still use mine. It’s torn and warped from spills and rain exposure, full of train tickets used as place holders. With it, we planned our trip to Shanghai. The cheapest place we could find closest to downtown was listed in our guidebook as the Pujiang Hotel, known more famously in English as the Astor House where a spot in the dorm rooms was 55 kuai per night (I’m looking at the guidebook now for verification). At the time, with that exchange rate, the room cost us each about seven dollars per night. A pretty good deal. And we had a large group so we were all put in the same dorm room, occupying it ourselves. The room was actually a large stateroom, dark wooden panelling, grand windows looking out to the river, but badly in need of attention and in severe disrepair. They had removed all the original furniture and put in awkward rows of cheap bunk beds to accommodate the unique angles and architecture of the room. We of course didn’t care, we were looking for a cheap, central place to sleep. I remember the majestic lobby and its dusty chandeliers and faded murals on the walls. There were some beautiful, wide staircases to the second floor where the rooms began. You could still get a private room there but this place had clearly reverted to shambles and catered now to budget travelers. We had no idea of the place’s history or significance, simply that it was a place we could afford.

We slowly learned throughout our stay however that this wasn’t just an old building. This place had some history. We heard things like Albert Einstein had stayed there during his visit to Shanghai, that the first light bulb in the city was lit in this hotel. We learned that the hotel had been at one time one of the most famous and grandest when Shanghai had opened its ports to foreign traders. It had, at the time, a mix of Western and Chinese employees. And it was still a popular place for film sets. The day we left, the lobby had been closed to film a scene for a British film, The Children of Huangshi. As we were exiting, the lobby entranceway was packed full of 20th century Chinese refugees, dirty, wearing tattered clothing, and some fancy Englishmen and women in Victorian attire. We talked to them a bit in between shoots. The film was apparently a historical adaptation of the Japanese occupation and the throngs of displaced Chinese and the chaos of living in the city as a foreign businessman during the Japanese invasion, amidst a China in revolution.

A few years ago a friend of mine was going to Shanghai for a visit and asked me for some recommendations. I told her she had to stay at the Astor House because it was such a cool building, so central, and so cheap. She later told me that was no longer an option. It’s not a hostel. It’s again a pricey hotel. Puzzled, I wanted to go back.

“你好。你会说英语吗？” Ni hao. Ni hui shuo yingyu ma? Hello. Do you speak English?
“一点点” Yi diandian. Just a little.
“Is it okay for me to take a look around? Maybe to book in the future for a friend? 可不可以看一下你的酒店？我有朋友来上海，要来这儿” Ke bu keyi kan yixia nide bingguan. Wo you pengyou lai shanghai, yao lai zher.
“好. 好. Okay,” Hao. Hao. Okay. No problem.

I found the hotel pretty easily, finding the neighborhood along the creek familiar, and the hotel facade unmistakable. I went on Friday. The smog was so thick that it was difficult to make out some of the largest buildings in the world just on the other side of the river. Walking along the creek towards the hotel, towards the river, I could feel the smog on my skin within the bone chilling moisture that clung to the air, as if walking through a screen of condensation. Unlike the colder air in Boston, where the winter air is so cold and crisp it burns exposed skin, this air has a more subtle effect, mild to the skin but the chill sort of gets inside you, very uncomfortable.

Where the creek meets the river is where I found the hotel, just in the same way as when I stayed at the hotel years ago. Still wedged between the more luxurious Broadway Mansions and Russian consulate. The same steel suspension bridge I crossed over the creek to get to the Bund was there, built in 1907, I learned today. And flowers hung from the eaves of the third balcony windows.

The Astor House

The Russian consulate, to the left is the Astor House and just behind, the Pudong cityscape lost in smog

The entrance to the hotel

The lobby, a bit shinier than I remember it

The cafe adjacent to the front the desk

Walking through the lobby doors is indeed like stepping back a bit in history. The lobby was clearly recently restored. What I remembered as a dimly lit, dirty entrance way was now polished and shiny. A doorman opened the large doors for me. One of the doors had a sign that read in English, “Proper Attire Only”. The lobby was bustling with activity. The large doors straight ahead that led into the famous Peacock Ballroom were open wide where Chinese workers were setting up tables and flower arrangements and signs, preparing for the evening’s activities. To the right, further in the lobby was the main desk where several professional looking Chinese hosts were checking in some French patrons. Adjacent the front deck was an old fashioned and very classy cafe. Upholstered seats and delicate place settings on small coffee tables adorned the floors. An English menu boasted all sorts of coffees and teas. The large lobby was made to appear much smaller, as the weight of the building seemed to squeeze in on the space from above. The lobby was riddled with old wooden pillars from which elegantly framed pictures of the hotel from the 20th century were hung. One photo was of Albert Einstein, probably the same photo I saw in 2007. Further in from the lobby was the entrance to the rest of the building, through some small steps leading up and into the maze of the interior. I was struck immediately by the change in feel of this place. Clearly no longer a place for backpackers and budget travelers. It was apparent some effort was made in the hotel’s revival.

I walked up those steps, into the heart of the first floor of the hotel. Within the narrow space of the purposely darkened corridor, straight ahead lay some marble steps, wrapping around to higher floors. To the left was a longer hallway full of shops and amenities, a bar, lounge, barber shop, jade store. Along these dark wooden walls were hung more photos of the hotel, more plaques with historical information, and some showcases of artifacts. I wandered further down this hall, around a a few corners, following the photographs. I was reading a framed menu from the 1910s when from nowhere I heard, “This hotel has a very long history, you know,” in a very mysterious, wispy voice. Slightly startled, I turned and looked down and saw a young, short Chinese man looking up at the picture from behind me. I started to engage.

“Yes, I’ve heard.”
“This is one of the original menus from the hotel’s past. Are you staying at the hotel?”
“No. Just wandering around, reading about the history.”
“This hotel is very old. Originally called Richard’s Hotel.”
“Do you work here?”
“I’m a waiter. I have to work tonight. And I’m a student but I’m very poor. This job doesn’t pay well.”
“Oh, I’m sorry.”
“If you like I can show you around the hotel.”
“Yes, I would like that very much.”
“Follow me.”

His name was Fang Hong. He was a 22 year old Chinese student, studying part time in the city, working part time on the wait staff. He was relatively plain looking, pretty short, and a bit chubby. He wore a loose over shirt, reminiscent of a waiter’s uniform, that hung over his baggy jeans and he was wearing flip flops, “我随便穿的” Wo suibian chuan de. Sorry, just wearing whatever for now… He had a pack of cheap cigarettes stuffed in his front pocket. Hong is from a city called Hefei in Anhui Province, just west of Shanghai, and is trying to make some money in the city. His English was decent but it was clearly challenging for him to speak, to force out the words. He told me he got little chance to practice but did sometimes with the foreign guests. We proceeded to chat in both English and Chinese. I asked him what the ratio was these days for guests at the hotel, between foreigners and Chinese. He said about half were foreigners. He also told me that the they were dressing up the Peacock room for a wedding party they were hosting that night and that he could take me into the hall and then up into the second floor balcony. I said yeah, let’s do it.

Fang Hong, a member of the wait staff from the rafters of the Peacock Room

Testing the lights for a wedding ceremony being held later that evening

He led me back into the main lobby and towards the entrance of the famous Peacock ballroom. We hopped over a few boards and bags of tools, dodging around employees and into the large space. Dinner tables were scattered around the floor, made up for a formal evening. A banner hung above a makeshift terrace that read, “Happy Wedding Day” and flowers were being prepared and spread around everywhere. The ballroom was grand, indeed, but small. The ceiling extended up through the second floor and a walking balcony wrapped around the upper edges. He took me up into the rafters to get a bird’s eye view. We continued to chat and walked around the first floor a bit. He waved and greeted to the other staff members as we walked. We entered another smaller ballroom, the Richards Room, where maids were sleeping at vacant tables. This room wouldn’t be occupied until the evening, apparently. We made our way back towards the hall where I first met him, when he suddenly said, “I will use the restroom now. Bye bye.” And as quickly and mysteriously as we met, so too was he gone.

But I kept wandering. The long halls were dark and resembled the interior of an old fashioned smoke room. The wooden sides were old, clearly and the floor creaked underfoot. It felt old, musty, and stale. But at the same time meticulously scrubbed and dusted, as I kept dodging maids. Some of the corridors also smelled strongly of incense. From time to time I would pass a door with a plaque that read the name of some famous guest that had stayed there. Zhou Enlai, US President Ulysses S. Grant, Albert Einstein (of course) and Charlie Chaplin. I wandered up floors and into hidden passageways, a floor plan would have made little sense here. I walked past the door to the room I stayed in when it was a hostel. It was closed but I imagine it’s far nicer now and with far fewer beds.

It was easy for me to walk around, picturing how it was back when it was something. Back when foreign dignitaries had to stay here because it was the place to be. The hallways felt old, as if it was a hundred years ago. I later did some research.

An old ad

Back when hotels had dining saloons

If only Shanghai still looked like this, a shot of Nanjing East Road, early 20th century

An illustration of the first time electricity was connected in the city, in front of the Astor House

The Astor House, in its current location where the Suzhou creek meets the Huangpu River on the northern end of the Bund, opened its doors for the first time in 1858, having relocated from its former location as Richard’s Hotel and Restaurant (est. 1846) nearby. In the mid-19th century, after the Treaty of Nanjing admitted Chinese defeat to the British during the Opium Wars, several coastal cities had been forced open for private trade enterprise and Shanghai was one of these ports. As concessions were created (the French concession still remains one of the premier neighborhoods in the city) and foreigner presence increased, the need for foreign amenities and accommodations became a business in its own right. Peter Felix Richards, a Scotsman, opened the hotel, catering to foreigners and dignitaries. After relocating to the Bund, the hotel became a central location for elegant, Western culture, and a hub for both Western and Chinese socialites. It became a symbol for the exposure of Western culture. The first electricity in China was lit in in the Astor House (more significant, I suppose, than simply the first light bulb in the city, as I had heard), the first telephones in Shanghai were installed and used, and pipes for the first running water tap were installed here. The first film in Shanghai was shown in the main hall and China’s first prom, a banquet to celebrate the 60th birthday of Cixi, the Empress dowager, was hosted in the Peacock Room.

The hotel had been managed since inception at the hands of foreign entrepreneurs. In the early 20th century, the hotel had become famous, like the Raffles Hotel of Singapore or the Peninsula of Hong Kong, and was described as the Waldorf Astoria of the Orient. An ad for the hotel listed the Astor House as the “Largest, Best and Most Modern Hotel in the Far East. Main Dining Room Seats 500 Guests, and is Electrically Cooled. Two hundred Bedrooms with Hot and Cold Baths Attached to Each Room. Cuisine Unexcelled; Service and Attention Perfect; Lounge, Smoking and Reading Rooms; Barber and Photographer on the Premises. Rates from $6; Special Monthly Terms.” Strangely, a room in the 1920s cost nearly the same price that I paid in 2007. The wait staff at the time were local Chinese and could be seen in long uniform gowns in the “Oriental” style with traditional braided hair in pony tails draped down the center of their backs.

But the hotel was a battleground as well as a site for foreign attraction. In 1932, the Japanese fought to take control of the city. The streets around the hotel were grounds for the new, Western, Japanese machine guns and later, the site where thousands of homeless Chinese refugees camped out on top of their belongings. The Japanese later seized the hotel from its foreign owners in the Battle of Shanghai in 1937, and they had used the hotel to house Chinese political prisoners, traitors of imperial Japan. The Japanese maintained control of the hotel until their surrender in 1945, but the hotel had been the site of other historic meetings. Russian Imperial White Army Troops, scattered from the Russian revolution, met at the Astor House to convince the West to help them fight against the Soviets. And apparently, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek had his last meal in mainland China at the Astor House before fleeing to Taiwan after his KMT forces were kicked out by Mao’s communists.

By this point however, with the Japanese occupation and its events afterward, the hotel fell into severe disrepair. The elegance of foreign hospitality shifted to newer, more modern hotels across the city. The Cultural Revolution in the 1960s sealed the hotel’s fate as furniture and supplies were looted and destroyed and the property was eventually acquired by the International Youth Hostel Federation in the 1990s and became, essentially, a cheap backpacker’s hangout. This was the state of affairs when I arrived in 2007.

Today, however, the cheapest room I could find in the hotel cost about $100 and prices range up to about $200. Not the price of luxury but not a backpacker’s refuge either. The hotel is now owned by Chinese investors and apparently significant renovations are in the works to try and revive some of the hotel’s original grandeur.

I walked back out of the hotel, to the smoggy haze of the streets. A private car pulled up and the doorman let out some classy middle aged Chinese ladies, smiling and laughing, enjoying themselves. I kept walking, back to the metro.