Shanghai Old Town. The Walled City

The Walled City is a historical and photographic atlas of Shanghai's old town - an account of the disappearing architecture, mythology and street life inside the ancient city core. Shanghai is the largest, richest city in China, yet it encompasses a nearly unknown zone in its center that is over 800 years old and contains abundant undocumented relics and lanes rich with history and memory. The book is lavishly illustrated, and each chapter a genealogy of a street or an important site, with a narrative that branches into the surrounding neighborhoods, winding alleys, waterways and ruins. The Walled City also chronicles grand and tragic families with centuries-long ties to this place, who rose and fell with the fortunes of old Shanghai. This volume (2018) is the culmination of ten years of research and surveys the entirety of Shanghai old walled city. The first volume in this series, The Old Docks (2015), covered the Dongjiadu area outside the city wall, a former port zone largely erased by redevelopment in 2016.

Reviews

Knyazeva resurrects the Shanghai walled city in over 500 lavishly illustrated and exhaustively researched pages, including a systematic tour of every important street and lane, both those which survive and those which have been obliterated, and conjuring up the former elaborate gardens down to the fine stone and woodwork still plentiful to the discerning eye in many surviving buildings. There is a great deal that is informative here. [...] The argument of The Walled City rests on an act of imagination, a fantasy: what the old city would be like if it could be fully restored. This will never happen, of course. On the contrary, there will soon be nothing left, apart from the shlocky built-up tourist section surrounding the Yu Garden. This marvelous book got published in the nick of time. – Isham Cook, author of American Rococo: Essays on the Edge, At the Teahouse Cafe: Essays from the Middle Kingdom, The Exact Unknown and Other Tales of Modern China.

Shanghai Old Town. Topography of a Phantom City. Volume II: The Walled City (2018)

Written by Katya Knyazeva and Adam Sinykin

Layout and design by Zhdan Philippov

Hard cover (paper); 560 pages; 738 color illustrations

Size: 267x220 mm (10’’x9''), weight 2 kg (4.5 lbs)

Publisher: Suzhou Creek Press; 1st edition (2018)

Language: English

ISBN-13: 9781733590204