Lane living - the spirit of community behind the storefronts
ONCE most Shanghainese lived in lilong, low-rise lane and courtyard housing that emphasized the spirit of community. Nancy Zhang traces their history back to the first real estate boom of the mid-1800s.
If the Bund is the public facade of Shanghai, then the lilong, or lane housing of the back alleys, is its core.
Blending Eastern and Western architectural styles, these houses and housing concepts have evolved with the city over the past century and a half.
Housing millions of ordinary Shanghainese through the city's most significant times, lilong has bred a peculiar community way of life that's at the heart of being "Shanghainese."
The word lilong (colloquially known as longtang or lanes) combines a sense of community with the physical space of a lane - it roughly means community alleyway. It captures the imagination of visitors and the nostalgia of Shanghainese. Shikumen (stone-gated) houses were part of the lilong.
Once Shanghai was a city of lilong, but most were bulldozed to make way for more modern housing and new office towers. The remaining lilong neighborhoods, however, are generally preserved.
Dominant from the 1850s to the 1940s, lilong is characterized by commercial shop fronts enclosing residential compounds. They were well suited to a trading city in the mid-19th century, since street-facing facades were valuable commercial spaces. As an old Shanghainese saying goes: "An inch of space on the street front creates a lifetime of fortune."
Inside lilong compounds, individual houses are Chinese in design, but clustered in a way that was inspired by housing forms of industrializing Europe where space efficiency was crucial.
This walled-in structure makes lilongs particularly serene and safe for private life.
A primary lane runs through the middle of a lilong compound, with housing organized in rows along smaller secondary lanes perpendicular to it. The crowded life inside the houses spills out onto the quiet lanes outside, creating a tight-knit sense of community.
Even today you can see in secondary lanes laundry hanging outside, old people sitting, fanning and chatting, families cooking dinner and children playing.
Though local Chinese have embraced this way of life, lilong actually started in typical Shanghai fashion - as money-making ventures by foreigners.
Predating the recent real estate boom by more than 150 years, the building of lilong marked the first modern real estate boom in China.
In the mid-1800s, Shanghai was already divided into foreign settlements that initially segregated foreigners and Chinese. This changed in 1853 when a series of Chinese rebellions drove thousands of Chinese to seek shelter in the foreign settlements.
Foreigners debated whether to continue the segregation or make money from renting land and houses - profit won out.
By 1854, 20,000 refugees had flooded into the foreign settlements. By 1865, the number was estimated to be 80,000. One British merchant at the time noted that by renting land or a house to Chinese, foreigners could make a profit of at least 30 to 40 percent. Another contemporary in the early 1870s said this was the most profitable business in Shanghai.
Foreigners had found an ingenious way to make money by renting Chinese land back to the Chinese.
International trading companies, which initially made their money selling opium to Chinese, eventually made most of their money in real estate.
Lilong was therefore built in batches of identical units and on speculation - in anticipation of the market. This was unlike any previous building in China, which was traditionally built for individual use.
According to Lu Hanchao, author of "Beyond Neon Lights: Everyday Shanghai in the Early Twentieth Century," lilong marked the birth of the modern real estate market in China.
Even after wartime speculation died away, a stable real estate market developed in Shanghai. By 1949, lilong made up three-quarters of the city's housing, and many different types of lilong evolved with the changing times.
The first wartime lilong was hastily built wooden shacks. But due to fire and safety concerns, they were abandoned for brick and stone buildings from 1869 onwards. These were named shikumen.
According to Lu, the transition to stone buildings also marked a social change whereby lilong became permanent dwellings rather than refugee shelters.
New shikumen
Today the Shanghai government identifies five distinct types of lilong. The early shikumen brick structures adopted the row-housing pattern of industrial revolution-era London, but the interior retained the siheyuan (four-sided courtyard) style.
Early shikumen houses were followed by new shikumen around the time of World War I.
They provided cheap housing for migrant labor attracted to Shanghai's budding manufacturing industry.
They also housed smaller families resulting from the disintegration of the extended family this housing was densely packed and minimized the community courtyard.
As China's feudal system fell in 1911, Shanghai further prospered and new wealthy entrepreneurs and foreign-educated classes emerged. The new-type lilong developed from 1915 to provide lilong with considerably better facilities. Sticking less closely to the courtyard house format, the new-type lilong eventually became like Western townhouses.
Garden lilong of the 1920s to 1940s were more luxurious, with large detached or semi-detached houses in prestigious locations.
The final stage of lilong development coped with soaring real estate prices.
Like modern skyscrapers, apartment lilong that was popular from the 1920s, made efficient use of land by rising into the sky, with five to 10 stories of apartments.
The late 19th century real estate sector was dominated by foreigners such as the Sassoon family and Silas Aaron Hardoon (1847-1931). By the early 1930s, almost half of all lilong on Nanjing Road, the most expensive area in the city, were owned by Hardoon.
But inside the lilong, Chinese history was also played out. Chen Duxiu, one of the founders of the Communist Party of China, was a lilong resident. The first and second National Congresses of the CPC were held in lilong housing near modern-day Xintiandi.
The site of the First National Congress of the CPC has been preserved and renovated as part of the Xintiandi development and is now a museum.
Not all lilong fared so well.
After the 1949 liberation, lilong above 150 square meters were divided up. A structure formerly inhabited by a single family was often converted to a seven-family residence.
Today the lilong is crowded and lack basic facilities. As Shanghai entered its second real estate boom after the 1978 reform, some lilong houses were pulled down in favor of modern apartments and skyscrapers. Many lament the lifestyle that is being swept away. But they forget this process was already started with the development of the apartment lilong in the closing days of old Shanghai - these sacrificed proximity to alleyways for space efficiency.
Author:Nancy Zhang
Date Published:
Date Accessed Online: 2008-11-10
Labels: Architecture, China, Community, History
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