Historic Shanghai: The long reign of the Lu clan

Lujiazui is Shanghai’s signature futuristic skyline. Lujiazhai Lu, a narrow lane in the guts of Old Town, is a dwindling section of historic Shanghai that couldn’t be more different from the towering new China of Lujiazui. However, the two areas are linked in history by one of the wealthiest Shanghai families of the first millennium.  

Beyond the main gate is an elegant building with a sloped roof -- likely the family’s ancestral hall -- now used by migrant workers as a tool shed.

Meet the Lus

The Lu clan owes its eminence to the victories of general Lu Xun, immortalized in the novel “Romance of the Three Kingdoms.” In the third century CE, Lu Xun became the lord of Huating (all of present-day Shanghai and the surrounding areas). For more than a thousand years the Lu family were the most prominent landowners in the region. Finally, by 1400, the clan’s power had diminished and their holdings were reduced to the riverside corner of Pudong. It was Lu Shen, according to "Statecraft & Intellectual Renewal in the Late Ming China," a prodigious scholar, who restored the family fortune, becoming the highest-ranking official ever to hail from Shanghai.

In 1524, Lu’s peaceful retirement in his gated villa in Lujiazui was threatened by the rampages of famished Pudong peasants, so he moved across the river to the walled city of Lujiazhai Lu. His new compound outdid his old property. Surrealist rocks, bowed bridges and lofty pavilions became the model for opulent garden residences that would soon flourish behind the city walls. Lujiazui was neglected; only a small hillock was maintained as the Lu clan’s burial site. 

Historic Shanghai unearthed

Ignore the mess and look up for epic carvings and that tell you that you're not in an ordinary warehouse.

In 1970, while digging civil defense trenches along Dongchang Lu, workers accidentally unearthed Lu’s long-forgotten tomb. With the waft of fresh air, the scholar’s mummified corpse blackened and shriveled in a matter of minutes. In the middle of the night, a caravan of paramedic vehicles, sirens blasting, delivered Lu’s coffin to Shanghai Museum. This was thought to be the last physical evidence of the once omnipotent clan. Thankfully it was not.

In the depths of the Old Town, a part of Lu Shen’s city residence has been unknowingly preserved for centuries. Stone ornaments adorn three sunken doorways along the wall of No. 54-60 on Lujiazhai Lu, according to government records. Beyond the main gate is an elegant building with a sloped roof -- likely the family’s ancestral hall -- now used by migrant workers as a tool shed. Above the jungle of power tools and bamboo ladders are epic carvings, elaborate joined beams and bowed ceiling brackets that reveal Ming Dynasty craftsmanship and extraordinary antiquity.

The workers are bemused that anyone would be interested in an old warehouse. Some neighbors suspect this was once a great manor. But few in this slum neighborhood know that they live beside the last monument of Lu clan’s twelve centuries in Shanghai.