Central European residents of Shanghai

Pharmacy in 1920’s Harbin (dbs.bh.org.il)

Being a stateless person sucks. If you don’t believe me, ask the U.N.H.C.R., the United Nation’s Refugee Agency. In the East Asian context during the first half of the 20^th century they were the Russian refugees fleeing from the Bolshevik Revolution (1917) or the subsequent Civil War (1918-1921) who experienced this condition and made it well-known for everybody in the region. The tens of thousands of White Russian émigrés who arrived to Chinese territories during the 1920s had to endure tremendous hardships. Not only that they were financially destitute and culturally alien in both the Chinese and other foreign “worlds”, but they also lacked consular representation. Between 1921-1924 the Soviet Union in a series of laws denaturalized those formerly Russian citizens who fled after the Tsarist regime’s collapse. The so-called Nansen Passports issued by the League of Nation were an attempt to give means of identification for them, but the ultimate solution was of course to obtain Chinese or another country’s citizenship. Masses of such impoverished Russians flooded the Shanghai French Concession that was complied to accommodate educated people with degrees and certificates earned in a different system. [Read more…] about When being an ex-POW is worse than being a stateless Russian. The case of a Yugoslavian pharmacist in Shanghai’s French Concession

I have this list with names of Hungarian nationals and their Shanghai addresses from 1940. “Avenues”, “Rues”, “Lanes”, “Routes”, “Apartments” and “Terraces”, that wouldn’t show up in a Google Map-search, let alone in its Chinese counterpart Baidu Map (百度地图). These French and English designations – symbols of a past era, are long gone. “Avenue Joffre”, “Rue Cardinal Mercier” or “Grosvenor Gardens” are all renamed in Chinese thus could be quite painful to be found, unless you have a guide. Fortunately, a road name-index in Paul French’s The Old Shanghai A-Z can make your life much easier, not to mention the great digital databases like ‘Virtual Shanghai‘ or the ‘Shanghai Art Deco Building Database‘. These sites document the city’s historic architecture, one that has been changing so much in the recent decades of booming urban constructions.

Equipped with the necessary information, I decided to take a walk on a sunny Saturday morning in the city’s former French Concession-area (法租界) to discover these old residences. I wanted to find out whether these locations listed in my 1940 source would still lead me to the homes of the people that once lived there ca. 79 years ago. I have to say that sometimes I found only missing house numbers or gigantic malls that sell high-end fashion on the supposed spot, like in the case of the Viennese ‘Fiaker Café & Restaurant’ I wrote about in my previous post. Luckily though, more often than not I was able to take photos of some of the beautiful buildings that once hosted Shanghai’s Central European community. Stick around for the map and the photos after the quick textual introduction to the source!