Hungarian National Archives

Ferenc Schön was a clockmaker and run a jewelry store on the Kitaiskaia Street (Китайская улица) – the pumping artery of Harbin’s commerce and business. Between the 1920s and 1940s he lived just next door to the New Synagogue on Jingwei jie (经纬街), where he visited the weekly service. His wife, Elisabeta and their daughter, Rahil were both native Harbiners/Harbintsi (Харбинцы)*, while Schön himself was born far away, the Russian Empire stretching in between his hometown and his residence for most of his life in Manchuria. Probably none of them imagined that one day they will move from the frigid Chinese Northeast to the sun-scorched land of Israel. In this post, I will sketch up the life of an ex-Austro-Hungarian prisoner of war of Hungarian nationality and of Jewish confession living in the Russo-Chinese town of Harbin, that for the most part of the period was occupied by Japanese forces. The aim here is to give an idea of the kind of people my research is dealing with.

Ferenc Schön’s letterhead advertising his Kitaiskaia store in Harbin, China, written in German and Hungarian languages (MNL)

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!