“If you enter a longtang, you will find urinals, snack stalls, flies flying in hordes, children fighting in groups, fierce turbulences and sharp curses. What a disorderly small world!” This is how Lu Xun described a working-class longtang in his 1933 essay “Children of Shanghai”.
“Looked down upon from the highest point in the city, Shanghai’s longtang—her vast neighbourhoods inside enclosed alleys—are a magnificent sight. The longtang are the backdrop of this city. Streets and buildings emerge around them in a series of dots and lines, like the subtle brushstrokes that bring life to the empty expanses of white paper in a traditional Chinese landscape painting.” This is the opening of Wang Anyi’s 1995 novel The Song of Everlasting Sorrow (长恨歌).
In Wang’s novel, the longtang embody the essence of a Shanghai culture that has survived a brutal history but is now on the verge of disappearing: “Amid the forest of new skyscrapers, these old longtang neighbourhoods are like a fleet of sunken ships, their battered hulls exposed as the sea dries up.”
Walking Shanghai Lilong
What Is a Lilong?
Lilong (里弄) is the Shanghainese term for longtang (弄堂), or “lane houses”: rows of dwellings that adapt the layout of mid-nineteenth-century English terraced housing to traditional Chinese domestic architecture. Li means neighbourhood and long means lane. Together they describe the urban housing form that has shaped Shanghai for some 150 years. Integral to the city’s growth between 1840 and 1949, lilong settlements made up most of the housing stock in the city centre until the end of the twentieth century.
In 1963, the Shanghai Committee of the Communist Party described the lilong as “the frontier posts for class struggle, the home front of production, places of living, and important battle positions for the struggle to foster the proletariat and destroy the bourgeoisie”.
Structure
As a low-rise, ground-level housing type, the lilong offers many advantages:
- a hierarchical organisation of space;
- a clear separation between public and private areas;
- a high level of security;
- strong neighbourly ties and social cohesion.
These qualities make the lilong a pleasant place to live and explain the affection local residents feel for it.
A settlement is typically served by one or two main lanes, entered from the surrounding commercial streets. Narrower side lanes branch off from these to reach the individual houses. This clear, rational layout creates a safe, quiet interior, in sharp contrast with the noisy streets outside. Houses along the perimeter are usually converted into shops, and some of those inside host small family businesses that serve the community’s daily needs.
Lilong varied widely in type and quality, serving different social classes and evolving over time. The earliest style, the shikumen (石库门, “stone-gate house”), was built after the First Opium War and the Treaty of Nanking (1842). It housed wealthy families, foreign residents, white-collar workers and the middle classes who settled in the new foreign concessions. Over time maintenance declined, population density rose, facilities became obsolete, buildings were subdivided and patched up, and living conditions deteriorated. Some neighbourhoods came to house the city’s poorest residents; others became slums.
Decline
From the 1990s, economic reform drew people from all over China to Shanghai in search of work, triggering a severe housing shortage. The government responded with large-scale redevelopment, replacing low-density neighbourhoods with imposing but impersonal high-rise estates. The result was a loss of architectural diversity, the destruction of the historic urban fabric and a profound change in the way people live.
Life in a longtang is certainly not without its problems. Privacy is scarce: neighbours cook side by side and often eat outdoors in full view of one another, toilets and washrooms are shared, and a quarrel between two families soon involves the whole lane. Many residents are therefore glad to move to “modern” apartments, often without realising how deeply this will change their lives. When the old houses disappear, so does the community that lived in them.
To anyone familiar with urban planning, Shanghai’s mistakes are all too recognisable: many were pioneered in Europe and North America decades earlier. The question is whether traditional street life can survive economic growth and ever-higher density, and whether the public and private spaces of a modern city can be designed to foster the same sense of community.
High-Rises or Theme Parks?
Years of demolition peaked in the run-up to the 2010 World Expo, when residents of tens of thousands of longtang homes were relocated to high-density estates on the city’s outskirts. After that, the authorities began promoting the lilong as a symbol of a unique “Shanghai culture” and launched several restoration programmes. Three main approaches have emerged.
The first preserves only the façades and converts the interiors into shops, bars and restaurants. Xintiandi is the best-known example: the “outer skin” survives, but the life it once contained does not.
The second applies to high-quality architecture such as the Cité Bourgogne in the former French Concession, where the buildings are restored for residential use. The architecture is saved, but the coexistence of social groups with little in common prevents a genuine community from forming.
The third, exemplified by Tianzifang, turns part of a lilong into a creative district of galleries, studios, craft shops and cafés, while the rest remains residential. Here too the original character has been largely lost, and the influx of tourists and nightlife has caused friction with residents. Even so, this bottom-up model, driven by local neighbourhood committees, remains preferable to top-down developments such as Xintiandi, which are shaped by political and commercial interests.
The Reportage
This brings me to the subject of my work. The city has designated some traditional neighbourhoods as “Model Quarters” (文明小区, literally “civilised communities”). As part of a redevelopment programme, these were given basic services and their housing was allocated to low-income residents. I believe this is an interesting compromise. However, the precarious living conditions and the pressure of powerful real-estate interests make the long-term survival of these neighbourhoods highly uncertain.
My photographs were taken in a few lively Model Quarters in Huangpu District. They lie around Huangpi South Road (黄陂南路), south of Xintiandi Metro Station (新天地), between Huaihai Road (淮海中路) and Zhaozhou Road (肇周路). I have tried to offer an unfiltered view of daily life in a place that is poor but quiet and welcoming, if undeniably chaotic. Despite very modest surroundings, social cohesion and basic services are still clearly visible there.
The walk begins on the outer streets, lined with shops, public spaces and services. It then moves into the heart of the neighbourhood, following the main and side lanes to meet the people and see where they eat, sleep, chat and play (where, in short, they live) before returning to the crowded, noisy streets.
You will not find elegant colonial buildings, embassies, monuments or gardens here, nor the futuristic skyline of twenty-first-century Shanghai. Nor will you see the graceful shikumen houses, with their stone-framed gateways opening onto small front courtyards: these are plain, working-class neighbourhoods. Yet it was precisely in this unassuming simplicity that I found a sense of calm, of warmth, almost of memory.
These images are simply fragments of ordinary life: work, leisure and boredom. A nostalgia, felt in advance, for things destined to disappear.
In Wang Anyi’s own words:
