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Highlights of this project appear on the Facebook page Mapping Old Shanghai. Here is a selection of some locations from the most recent 100 uploads:

Steering a boat on Suzhou Creek:

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Yu Garden 豫园 has been recarved and remodeled so many times that you could write a whole book just about its permutations. In 1949, the photographer Jack Birns documented an acrobatics performance on a small square west of the square pond, in front of the the famous ornamental Jade Rock 玉玲珑. Since then, the square has been turned back into a pond ( Read more... )

This piece of news is worrisome. With the word 'revamping' seeping into every other paragraph, you know this does not bode well for the residents' community and for the historic city. The developers are itching to sink their claws into the last authentic corner of the old town's north: the area east of the City God Temple. I don't believe any of ( Read more... )

It is always wonderful to see live footage of old Shanghai.

View of Yuyuan Garden in Shanghai, 1930s

I'm not 100% convinced this is Yuyuan, but so says the caption. There are many more amazing movie clips in the Moody Collection at USC.

Old photographs of the famous zigzag Bridge of Nine Turns 九曲桥 show the bridge looking quite different from today. Presently, the concrete bridge intersects the pond diagonally, from southwest to northeast, and its sections break at right angles. But on many old photos the bridge intersects the pond on a curve and its sections break at obtuse angles ( Read more... )