We are just 10 days away from Chinese New Year, and soon the city will become pleasantly empty and quiet! So if you decided to avoid high prices of plane tickets and enjoy the Spring Festival's blissful silence, our expert - Nicolas Grevot - came up with this list of intriguing houses that - he believes - you just can't miss!
1.Ba Jin’s house
Address: 113 Wukang Road, Xuhui District
Opening hours: 10am-3pm (closed on Sunday and Monday)
Admission: Free!
Ba, whose real name was Li Yaotang, was the grand old man of Chinese literature. He was born in Chengdu on November 25, 1904, into the family of an important Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) official and received a good education from private tutors. In 1926, he went to study in France. He could speak and write in English, French and Russian.
Ba was renowned for prerevolutionary works like "The Family" (1931) about the brutality and decline of a feudal household, based on his own childhood. His major works include "The Love Trilogy: Fog, Rain, Lightning" (1931-35), "The Torrent Trilogy: Family, Spring, Autumn" (1933-40), "A Dream of Sea" and "Autumn in Spring," - all landmarks in modern Chinese culture.
2.Former Residence of Sun Yatsen
Address: 7 Xiangshan Road, near Sinan Road
Opening Hours: 9 am – 4 30 pm daily
Admission: 20 RMB/ 10 RMB for students
The Chinese revolutionary and father of modern China, Dr. Sun Yat-sen lived in this house from 1918 with his wife Soong Ching-ling. After his death in 1925, Sun's wife continued to live here until 1937, when the Japanese army occupied Shanghai. Eight years later, upon China winning the war, Mrs. Soong offered to provide her home as the permanent site to Mr. Sun's memory. In 1961, the Former Residence of Sun Yat-sen was listed as being one of a Key State-preserved Cultural Relic Unit.
3.Soong Ching ling’s Memorial Residence
Address: 1843 Middle Huai Hai Road, near Yuqing Lu, Xuhui district
Opening Hours: 9 am – 4 30 pm daily
Admission: 20 RMB/ 10 RMB students,
When Soong Ching-ling donated her residence, located at 29 rue Molière (present-day Xiangshan Road) to the government of the Republic of China as a memorial to her deceased husband, in return the government conferred this house on her. In spring 1949, Soong moved from 45 Jingjiang Road to this residence, where she soon witnessed the capture of Shanghai by the Communist Party of China.
After the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949, Soong served in several prominent positions in the central government, including Vice-President of China. Her residence in Shanghai became an important working space. In the house, Song met not only senior CPC leaders, including Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, Liu Shaoqi, Chen Yi and Deng Yingchao, but also foreign statesmen, such as Sukarno, Kim Il Sung, Kliment Voroshilov, U Nu, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan and Sirimavo Bandaranaike.
The residence includes a mansion – style main building, a 2,200sqm garden with fragrant magnolias and camphor trees, a garage with two 1950s luxury limousines (one a present from Stalin), and a dovecot. It hosts a collection of over 15,000 of Song' items. Among them, there are pictures, letters, Song's college diploma, collected books, daily utensils, presents from state activities, and also some articles belonging to her relatives. In addition, there are the seals of Sun Yat-sen, preserved by Song after many troubles.
4.Sassoon Villa
Address: 2409 Hongqiao Rd, Changning District
Private residence and not open to the public
The private villa of Sassoon is one of the outstanding constructions of Shanghai built between 1880 and 1930. With 1225 square meters of garden and a floor area of 800 square meters, this English countryside villa was the summer resort of Victor Sassoon, a British Jewish, called "King of Real Estate" in Shanghai.
Sassoon built two villas in similar styles along Hongqiao Road.
Both villas were constructed with expensive imported materials and designed by Palmer & Turner Architects and Surveyors, a leading British architecture firm.
After World War II broke out, the Japanese took over a lot of properties in Shanghai. The Japanese sold the villa and after several rounds of auctions, it was purchased by the owner of Shanghai Yinfeng Wool Textile Co
Although Sassoon had tried to take the house back after the end of the war, the company refused, saying it had been obtained legally.
According to the book "The Best Historical Buildings in Shanghai - Changning District," the owner moved to Hong Kong in 1956 after his company was nationalized into the state-owned Shanghai Textile Industry Bureau, like many other private enterprises. And from then on the building served as a sanatorium for hard-working textile workers.
As the textile industry was declining, the villa was rented to a real estate group in the 1990s.
5.Hudec Memorial Hall
Address: 129 Panyu Lu, Xinhua Lu, Changning District
Opening hours: Tuesday 1.30 - 4 pm, Sunday 9.30am-12.30pm and 1.30- 4pm
Admission: Free!
We have written several times about Hudec – Hungarian born architect, who was one of the key figures in Shanghai’s emergent Art Deco movement in the 1930s (check the links below this post!) He built a number of Shanghai’s most iconic buildings including the Shanghai Grand cinema and the Park Hotel at People’s Square, famously the city’s tallest structure until 1983.
6.Zhang Leping's house
Address: 288 Wuyuan Road, House Nr 3
Opening Hours: Tuesday – Sunday, 9 am – 4 30 pm
Admission: Free!
Zhang Leping (1910–1992) was a Chinese cartoonist, most famed for his 'Sanmao the Orphan' comics. In the late 1920s, Zhang moved from his coastal hometown to Shanghai, where he quickly found work as a commercial artist and cartoonist. He debuted the Sanmao the Orphan comics — China's first cartoons produced specifically for young children — in 1935 and drew them until 1937, when the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War led Zhang to leave Shanghai as a member of a cartoonist propaganda troupe.
He traveled all over China during the war, finally returning to Shanghai in 1945, and quickly returned also to his Sanmao character, producing new series of cartoons that depict Sanmao as a child recruit in the corrupt Nationalist army. Zhang's biggest hit came in 1947 with the serial publication of 'The Wandering Life of Sanmao', a narrative about the trials and tribulations of life on the streets for Shanghai's orphan children.
After the Chinese Communist Party’s victory in 1949, Zhang and his family moved into the second floor of a house on Shanghai’s Wuyuan Road, in the Former French Concession. He would live there for the rest of his life, as he worked as a cartoonist at state media publications, suffered criticism during the Cultural Revolution, and continued drawing new iterations of the Sanmao comics after he was rehabilitated in the 1970s.
7. Feng Zikai’s house - "Ri Yue Lou" (the building of the sun and the moon).
Address: No. 93, Lane 39, South Shaanxi Road, near Middle Huai Hai Road
