How exciting to meet a colleague who devised English-language tours in the walled city of Shanghai exactly 150 years before I did! In 1858, a reader of the North-China Herald pointed out that the walled Chinese City is virtually unknown to the travelers and foreign residents, so he suggested a walking itinerary inside and outside the city walls, ( Read more... )

This article was written in Russian for the Shanghai Architecture Series in Magazeta: https://magazeta.com/2019/05/arc-holy-trinity-church/
English version coming up soon.


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Hurray for the 19th-century Protestant missionaries and their perceptive eye turned on Shanghai! It took me years to grasp the full range of foreign missions in the walled city and find their (ever-shifting) locations. This intriguing church 天恩堂 was rewarding to research - simply because it still stands in its place, having been first built as an ( Read more... )

Historic photographs taken inside the walled city 老城厢 are painfully few; those with identifiable locations are even fewer. I cannot be 100% sure, but I am convinced the following two images found in the Francis Stafford collections, depicting the protestant chapel Fuyintang 福音堂, are taken in the old city. There were several such chapels in Shanghai ( Read more... )