Historic Shanghai's Catalpa Garden: The Old City's last stand

The history of old Shanghai is not restricted to the French Concession. Far from it. Much of the city's past can be explored in the Chinese Old City, the ancient downtown that was always separate from the European precincts and governance. The strange fruit of this separation yet the area's continued proximity to foreign influence is embodied in an old mansion called Catalpa Garden.

In the nineteenth century, the rise of international Shanghai mirrored the decline of Chinese Shanghai. As the European Bund thrived, residents of the walled city found themselves in a civic limbo and their centuries-old lifestyle deteriorated. Provincial officials extorted the city bureaucrats who in turn exploited the locals.

Contaminated drinking water ran from putrid creeks; mountains of garbage filled narrow alleys. Scholars from the privileged classes moved out of the Chinese city, lured by the opportunities (and gas streetlamps) of the concessions, and the exodus of the merchant families followed. By the 1870s the city’s wealthy core had shifted north.

Still, there were vestiges of gracious living in the Old City.

Before the city wall was felled and its canals filled, Qiaojia Lu was a verdant waterway running through the Chinese city, with opulent homes lining the banks. One of these was the garden of Zhou Jinran, built in 1682 and considered to be one of the most elegant properties in the Old City.

Resurrection

At the turn of the twentieth century, Shanghai’s celebrated painter, industrialist and Japanophile Wang Yiting purchased the lot and renamed it Catalpa Garden, in celebration of the ancient catalpa tree that had stood on the property since the Ming dynasty.

Wang Yiting graced the compound with an eccentric new mansion combining Italian shutters, gothic windows and Greek colonnades. The grounds surrounding the house became a dreamscape of whorled pavilions and surrealist rock gardens.

It attracted international personalities, and in 1922, Albert Einstein and his wife ate river fish with Wang Yiting in his octagonal dining room. While the Old City declined, Catapla Garden thrived. As a token of the Japanese emperor’s friendship with Wang, imperial architects were sent to Shanghai to design a lavish new roof for the mansion.

The downfall

But like so much of historic Shanghai, the war with the Japanese changed everything. Imperial soldiers occupied the house and destroyed Wang’s artwork. Wang retired to Hong Kong and threw himself into Buddhist meditation.

Liberation brought a horde of proletarian occupants. Wang’s mansion grew two stories taller with a haphazard penthouse of corrugated tin. The gracious columned veranda was walled with sheet-rock, squeezing in two more families. With aggressive petulance, red guards destroyed the garden, replacing it with a crude metal workshop.

Today, as you walk by, you’ll see a red revolutionary star of pig iron on a rusted gate just where the catalpa tree stood, illuminated by acetylene torches, glinting under the balcony of one of the Old City’s storied mansions.

getting there

Catalpa Garden
113 Qiaojia Lu, near Xundao Jie
乔家路113号, 近巡道街