The Hindu : Opinion / News Analysis : Amid the new, China seeks out the old

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Wednesday, Jun 22, 2005

Opinion

Opinion - News Analysis

Amid the new, China seeks out the old

Nirupama Subramanian

The success of Xintiandi in Shanghai has fuelled demands for the preservation of historic buildings across China.

— Photo: Nirupama Subramanian.

LINK WITH THE PAST: 1920s-style buildings against the backdrop of modern skyscrapers in Shanghai.

SEVEN YEARS ago, when Vincent Lo, a Hong Kong property tycoon, was given the right to develop a 198-acre piece of Shanghai, he was told he could change everything but the house where the Chinese Communist Party held its first meeting in 1921. Mr. Vincent Lo decided he would preserve not just that one building but nine acres of the neighbourhood for its early 1900s shikumen lilong architecture, a distinctive style of two-storeyed grey brick row houses built along a warren of narrow lanes.

Working with Benjamin Wood, a famous American architect, Mr. Vincent Lo's development company undertook a $170-million restoration job, working to preserve the grey bricks, the art deco features and the shikumen, or the stone arches at the street entrance to the tenements after which the architectural style takes its name. Xintiandi, literally "new heaven on earth", is the result.

Tourist attraction

Today, Xintiandi is a major tourist attraction in Shanghai. Its low rise architecture provides much needed respite from the towering blocks of concrete and glass in the rest of the city, and its upscale shops, restaurants and bars throb with life through the day and night. It is quite the small scale model of Shanghai as it used to be in the early part of the last century — one of the first truly international cities of the world and a magnet for people from all over the world. The house where the Chinese Communist Party met for the first time is a well-maintained museum.

The success of Xintiandi has fuelled demands that it should serve as the model for the preservation of historic buildings across China as a new fascination with the old sweeps through the country. Ever since the economic reforms began, Chinese cities have turned into laboratories of architectural experimentation, exploding with every vertical possibility that concrete, steel and glass can offer — the taller the better.

Until 1990, the 24-storeyed Peace Hotel on Shanghai's bund, with its distinctive green roof, had been the tallest building for 70 years. Now, there are 5,000 buildings in the city taller than it. Viewed from the 468 metre Oriental Pearl television tower — the third tallest tower in the world — in Pudong, the recently developed financial centre across the river Huangpo, the hotel seems tiny and even out of place.

But China now knows the value of the old. In 2002, the National People's Congress passed a law on cultural heritage protection. Along with other historical colonial buildings on the waterfront such as the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank and Customs House, Peace Hotel is a listed heritage site; it is the task of the Shanghai Municipality to ensure that heritage buildings are preserved. "These buildings are our national treasure," said Yang Guo Qiang, director-general of the municipality's foreign affairs office, during an interaction with a group of South Asian journalists touring China as guests of the Chinese Government.

The municipality has also made efforts to preserve Nanjing Road, a part of its old city that was actually the original Shanghai — a small fishing village on the banks of the Huangpo — before the British, the French and the Americans came in and set up their own areas around it. The area, complete with old imperial style buildings topped by the traditional sloping roofs curved up at the edges, has been turned into a huge shopping arcade where Shangainese can find traditional Chinese goods difficult to find in the new shopping malls.

It is not just Shanghai that is concerned about its heritage buildings. Even before the spectacular success of Xintiandi, other cities were taking steps to preserve their traditional architecture, not least because of the realisation that this is a tourist attraction in itself. In Li Jiang in the south-west province of Yunan, an earthquake measuring seven on the Richter scale ravaged much of the city in 1996, including parts of the old town, just as the municipality was preparing to appeal to UNESCO to declare it a World Heritage Site.

"We held back our application to UNESCO, but two weeks after the earthquake, a UNESCO team visited Li Jiang and asked the municipal government and the national government to go ahead with the application. They said it was important to preserve the distinctiveness and the originality of the old town," said Yang Yiben, the city's vice-mayor.

Stunning results

The Li Jiang Government made all efforts to do this, with stunning results. The old town is a network of little lanes along a canal, lined by what were two-storeyed houses at one time but are now shops and restaurants catering to the vast tourist inflow.

In the centre is a square that is a hangout for tourists and Li Jiang's residents alike, much like Leicester Square in London. It does not have the international or cosmopolitan edge of Xintiandi but it gives off the same feeling of community that no high-rise apartment block can provide. "We have realised that Li Jiang's development depends on its distinctive culture and architecture," said Ms. Yang.

But these efforts at architectural preservation are drops in the vast ocean of concrete that China is today. Whether you are on the Pudong side of the Huangpo in Shanghai or Puxi, it is all about being the tallest building in China, or in Asia or in the world. After all, high-rise is where property developers make their money. Mr. Vincent Lo, who maintains a splendidly restored two-storeyed home in the middle of Xintiandi that he lives in when in Shanghai, obviously knew that even as he was working to preserve the shikumen. On the rest of the 189 acres that his company got the rights to develop, he put up skyscrapers, skyscrapers and more skyscrapers.

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