Former French Concession Tour

My sister Kate and her husband David are visiting Peter, Nickle and the kids for a month and I'm lucky enough to tag along with many of their activities.  They arrived last Tuesday and on Thursday, March 13, we took a guided walking tour of the Former French Concession area of Shanghai.

The first part of our tour of the Former French Concession was in FuXing Park.  It is a wonderful, lively park with such a serene feel of life to it. Groups of people throughout the park meet daily, always in the same various locations in the park, to sing, dance, fly kites, practice Tai Chi, dance with swords, play cards, anything - part of their daily life. We even saw men doing calligraphy on the sidewalks with a paint brush and water - no idea what they were saying, but it was beautiful.  The groups of singers were singing what the tour guide indicated were old Maoist songs, although the woman walking on her own was singing what sounded like opera and she was incredibly talented.  Of course, I think in the U.S., a woman wondering through the park singing opera to herself might raise some eyebrows.

According to our tour guide, these people are in the park nearly every day, unless it is raining incredibly hard.  Generally they are there until about 11 a.m., when they go home for lunch.  Many return later in the afternoon again. What a great cultural statement, that all of these (generally) older adults find activities they enjoy outside every day - creating a community and a sense of tradition.


The park itself is quite lovely and will surely be even more beautiful in a few weeks when all the flowers start to blossom.  I definitely want to go back and spend some time one morning with my camera, the flowers, and the people.

After touring FuXing Park, we walked the Former French Concession, where we saw two distinct personalities.  The first is the heavily European (and Russian) influence in architecture juxtaposed against the purely Chinese way of life.

According to our tour guide, the British and French Concessions were adjacent in Shanghai, but distinctly different.  The British Concession was relatively small and focused on the utility of the Hangpu River and the Suzhou Creek and trade routes.  

The French Concession was very large - much larger than we could have traveled during our tour - and filled with people from many nationalities, not just the French.   Many British settled there, other Europeans, as well as a large population of Russians.  And, of course, the Chinese lived there when it was under the French control and have continued to do so since the area was turned back over to China in the mid-20th century.  Many of the buildings still have the European look, but even more have been torn down and replaced with high-rise apartments and Chinese store fronts.

We spent a good part of the tour walking through Shanghai’s lilongs, (里弄) aka the longtang (弄堂), a traditional urban alley-community in Shanghai, which is loosely equivalent to the hutong, a Mongolian word, in Beijing. As with the term hutong, the Shanghai lòngtang can either refers to the lane that connects the houses, or a group of houses connected by the lane.   When we were in Beijing in 2005, we took a tour of the hutongs and this tour of the lilongs had a very similar feel.

Our tour guide told us that whenever we see metal gates in this part of the city, we're welcome to walk through them, into the maze of alleyways inside.  The alleys are generally narrow, although some of the center areas were quite spacious.  Not surprisingly, although we saw a few cars, mostly we saw bicycles and scooters parked in the lilongs as methods of transportation.  We even saw the milk delivery bicycles as well as the postal carrier bikes.  

Our tour guide also told us that many of the lilongs are now protected architectural areas, although this was not always true, so high rises can be seen popping up next door.

Even though many of the buildings have added air conditioning units, with power lines bunched in clumps on the outsides of the buildings, there is often no heat.  Running water is generally cold and often only outside the front door, so we saw washboards leaning against the outdoor sinks and people outside doing dishes.

As is often the case in Shanghai, clothes are hung out both to dry after washing and to get sunshine, in order to clean and disinfect.   It's interesting to see red clothes on nearly every clothes line or on the metal rods that stick out perpendicularly from the houses.  Red is a color of good luck and fortune in China and it's highly recommended that you wear some red clothing, even if it's just your underwear, every day.


Apparently some people believe that the sunshine can clean and disinfect everything, as we even saw a toilet seat hanging out in the sun.

The people we saw in the lilongs were generally quite friendly.  They seemed interested to see a group of 10 or so westerners walking through the alleys and sometimes stopped to speak to us.  Unfortunately, my Mandarin is pretty limited, so it generally just involved hello and good-bye.

The part of Shanghai that we live in, JinQiao on the Pudong side of the river, didn't exist 20 years ago, never mind 200 or more years ago.  It is so unlike these lilongs and this part of Shanghai, it's hard to believe we were even in the same city.  We have two Mexican restaurants within two blocks of our apartment building, as well as an Indian restaurant, a burger joint, a sports bar, and a New York-style pizza place.  There's an American style grocery store in our building that sells the same things you can buy in the U.S. and other western countries, although in smaller quantities and for much higher prices.

There are many expats living in the confined area of "Green City" here in JinQiao, although some wealthy Chinese as well.  And there are also migrant neighborhoods in JinQiao, but you have to go looking for them. I hope to take a guided tour of the migrant neighborhoods soon.  I really like the convenience of JinQiao - I can find food that I can eat, even with my allergies; I can find people in restaurants and stores that speak some English; I can smile and speak to some of the people I meet on the street.  The streets of JinQiao are wide enough, with sufficient bike lanes, that I feel safe riding my electric bicycle (e-bike), as long as I wear my helmet and am very vigilant at intersections.  But, it's a different experience than we would get if we lived in the Former French Concession area, as so many expats do.  While neither is right or wrong, they are very different, so it was great to be able to tour the area, learn a little about the history and lifestyle of that part of the city, and know that we can go back and keep visiting different areas of Shanghai to learn more.