Behind Shanghaiâs skyscrapers, Art Deco edifices, and colonial bungalows lies a maze of lanes lined with teahouses, ancient markets, and sidewalk stallsâa parallel world that reveals an untold history. Recent transplant Emily Prager steps out her back door and into a hidden city few outsiders ever find
I had lived in Shanghai for about two months when I learned that behind every building which fronts the street is a second and far more enticing world: a labyrinth of winding lanes and alleyways that contains all kinds of eclectic little businesses and historic houses. It is an intimate Shanghai, and one that I got to know mostly by setting out and searching on foot.
I had moved here from Manhattan with my twelve-year-old daughter, Lulu, and had rented a lane house in the former French Concession. For the first few weeks, all of our movements were concentrated on the front of the house. Then one day, I unlocked the back door and stepped outside.
Here was a narrow sunlit passage with two-story, gray-brick lane houses like mine on both sides. It was lunchtime, and the weather-beaten wooden doors and rusty casement windows were flung open wide, and inside, people were bending over sizzling woks on hot plates in tiny hallway kitchens. Brown sparrows swooped and chirped and alighted on bamboo poles overhead, prancing on the laundry hanging there. Some women were laughing and chatting with one another as they scrubbed greens at an outdoor sink, and others squatted over pink and red tin basins of water, peeling root vegetables. Farmers, their faces dark brown from countryside sun, hawked cherries with a songlike cry, the fruit piled in woven baskets hung on shoulder poles across the back of their bent necks.
I walked slowly down this lane, turned the corner, and found that the lane wound on, connecting to an even narrower alley which led to two other lanes that twisted and turned around a natural garden of fruit trees and rose bushes and eventually snaked out onto Xinle Road, the street parallel to mine.
I stared up at the old Art Deco apartment buildings which line that road, and I thought that they were almost like storefronts on a movie set. Behind them, thousands of people lived unseen. Further, there were secret ways to move around the city incognito. I determined in that moment to perform a Cheever-esque act. I would try to cross the entire French Concession by secret lanes without ever using a main street or avenue.
Two distinct worlds have existed in Shanghai since the end of the First Opium War in 1842. After the British attacked the Tao-Kuang emperor and took the city, they demanded that Shanghai become an open trading port and that Britain be granted city land for an exclusive settlement run entirely under British law. Not long after, the French and the Americans each claimed the same thing, and lands along the Huangpu River were designated the International Settlement and the French Concession, behind which lay the all-Chinese city proper.
In time, the foreign settlements expanded and eventually encroached on the Chinese city, shoving it back behind the new, elaborate colonial buildings (which we now identify as the Bund), forcing it to squeeze itself into a warren of alleyways and lanes. So was born a Westernized, urban Shanghai, peopled for the most part by foreigners, rich Chinese and their retainers, and the desperately poor. That modern, bustling Shanghai of the 1920s and â30s flourished until the Japanese invaded in 1939.
