If you enjoyed our deep dive into the life of the New Yorker correspondent, Emily Hahn wild times in China, you won’t want to miss this special bonus episode. Sarah sits down with Tina Kanagarathnam of Historic Shanghai to answer the burning question: What is actually left of Emily’s world?

Every week, we transport you to a different time and place. Subscribe to get full show notes, reading lists, and historic itineraries like this one delivered straight to your inbox. No visa required.

From the smell of the Huangpu River to the preserved Art Deco apartment where Emily lived (and kept her pet gibbons), Tina reveals the ghosts of the 1930s International Settlement. Whether you are planning a trip to China or just armchair traveling, tune in to discover the hidden ballrooms, surviving bookstores, and jazz haunts that defined an era of glamour and chaos.

Sarah and Tina map out a specific “Emily Hahn Loop” you can walk today, taking you from the grandeur of the Peace Hotel (formerly the Cathay) to the exact apartment building on the old “Red Light” line where Emily wrote her early dispatches. We discuss what has been demolished, what has been gentrified, and the surprising corners where the spirit of Old Shanghai is still very much alive.

A co-founder of Historic Shanghai, Tina is an award-winning writer and, in her almost 30 years in the magic city, has authored several books and numerous articles on Shanghai. These include the original Insight Guides Shanghai guidebook, the Zagat Guide to Shanghai, and two historic walking guides to the city. She also wrote a column on historic Shanghai architecture for the Shanghai Daily for several years.

Know a friend who loves 1930s jazz, Art Deco architecture, or just a good travel story? Forward this dispatch their way and help them plan their next mental escape.

Podcast Transcript: Emily Hahn’s Shanghai

Host: Sarah Keenlyside | Guest: Tina Kanagarathnam (Historic Shanghai)

Introduction: The Emily Hahn Bonus Episode

Sarah (00:08)

Hi everyone, it’s Sarah. And today we’re going to be doing an Emily Hahn episode companion podcast, a bonus podcast, if you like, about how you can follow in her footsteps today. We want to go in a bit more depth about Shanghai because it’s such a wonderful city that I’ve spent a lot of time in. And today the person who is still there and knows even more about it than I do—much more about it than I do in fact—is Tina Kanagarathnam from Historic Shanghai.

Tina and her team have led deeply researched walking tours that bring the city’s past to life. For those of you who don’t know, I have a travel company called Bespoke Travel Company and we’ve worked with Historic Shanghai for many years. And yes, I can tell you that our clients, our guests, always absolutely love their tours. And so, there’s really no one better to speak to about Emily Hahn and the places that she went and that still exist that were in her orbit back in the 30s than Tina. So welcome, Tina, to the podcast.

Tina (01:10)

Thank you, and thank you for that very wonderful and warm introduction.

Sarah (01:14)

So let’s start. Let’s jump straight in. Obviously, Emily, she’s a real character. If you haven’t already listened to the podcast that we did, the episode that we did on Emily to our listeners, please go back and have a listen. Jeremiah and I talk in depth about her journey from America to Shanghai and beyond.

And today, we really want to jump straight in and find out a little bit about what Emily would have seen in 1935. For a traveler arriving around that time, Tina, what do you think Shanghai would have felt like to her on day one when she first stepped foot in the city?

First Impressions: The Bund and the Skyline

Tina (01:53)

Well, one of the best things about Shanghai is that history is all around us in terms of the buildings. And in those days, people came by ship. And so what Emily would have seen as she came down the Huangpu River would have been pretty much what a traveler today standing on the Bund would see. That is, all the buildings of the Bund. There were a couple that weren’t yet built in 1935 when she arrived in the spring, but the vast majority of the buildings were there.

It would have been—and again, this is not alien to anybody who’s lived in China—it would have been a city under construction because this was the period between the wars and things were going crazy money-wise. People were building and building and building. So, Emily, her first sight would have been the Bund. And the nice thing is, if you want to walk in Emily’s footsteps, all you have to do is just, you know, go down to the Bund and turn around and you’ll see the Peace Hotel where she spent a lot of time with her buddy Victor Sassoon.

Sarah (03:03)

And Tina, if we were to explain to someone who doesn’t know what the Bund is, can you explain what that is? Because I think before I went to China, also, I kept hearing this word and I didn’t actually know what it was referring to. In fact, for a long time, I thought it was referring to the other side of the river where the tall flashy buildings are.

Tina (03:07)

No, where the new buildings are. So the “Bund” is actually an Anglo-Indian term that just means the embankment of a river. And there are bunds all over the British colonies. The word came from, obviously, their colonies in India. But the Shanghai Bund is the most famous.

And it was known as the Wall Street of Asia. So it was basically the strip—it’s about a mile long—where all the banks and financial companies, a couple of hotels, were all built between the 1880s and currently the last one was 1948. And it’s interesting because it also tells you a little bit about how Shanghai progressed because the first buildings to be built on the Bund were the 1860s. But Shanghai’s DNA has always been: What is the latest? What’s the newest? What’s the most modern? So they just kept knocking down and building up and knocking down and building up. And I always say that if not for the communist Revolution in 1949, the Bund would look very different. It was a gift that it was frozen for 50 years. So we can see Emily’s Shanghai.

Sarah (04:39)

And I think it’s quite surprising to some people because it’s very European looking, isn’t it? It’s not necessarily what you’d expect when you think of Chinese buildings. You think of sort of temples and peaked roofs. And of course, this really famous waterfront is very European looking, isn’t it? Can you explain why briefly?

Tina (04:55)

It is very European because at that point, that part of the city was the International Settlement, which was governed by 14 different countries, but let’s say primarily Britain and America were sort of the leading forces. But on the Bund, you will find countries from all over the world. There’s Russian buildings, there’s Bank of China, there’s Japanese banks. There are hotels owned by Baghdadi Jewish businessmen. So it was a very international strip.

But yes, all the buildings did look very European. I’ve been told that it looks a lot like Liverpool. And that’s also because even if you were a Japanese bank or a French bank or a Russian bank, that was the status style of the era. You wanted to look Western. You weren’t going to be building a Russian building. You weren’t going to be building a fully Chinese building, although the Bank of China does have some Chinese elements.

The Sensory Experience of 1930s Shanghai

Sarah (05:58)

And if you had to choose one sound or one smell or one sight that sort of defines interwar Shanghai, what would they be? Bit of a tricky question, but...

Tina (06:09)

One sound. Well, you know, I think the sound... two things. People when they arrived in Shanghai, they always talk about the smell, the smell of the river. You know, there was a stench. People lived on the rivers. They lived on the Sampans and they, you know, waste went into the water. And so these Europeans who’d gone through these month-long voyages, they’d arrive in Shanghai and the first thing they’d do would step out—and if it was the summer, it would be unbearable heat—and they would smell this pretty awful stench. So that was your arrival smell.

But if there was a sound, I think it was also the sounds of the bells. There were all these vendors who would sell all kinds of—whether it was food or wares—and actually until very recently, they’d still go up and down the streets, you know, fixing your umbrella. And they all had different cries. You know, they’d have different sounds. So that is another part of the soundscape, I think.

The other thing that every single person who lived in old Shanghai talks about is the dead babies on the street. Because it was, you know, it was difficult times. Sometimes people couldn’t afford more children and they would wrap them up in rattan. And people talk about, you know, like kids, you know, they’d say that on their way to school, they know if they saw something wrapped up in rattan, what it was, and they just walk around and avoid it. And then trucks would come and carry them away. Every single person who lived in old Shanghai talks about the dead babies on the street. So that’s something that was there and was never forgotten.

Sarah (07:54)

So quite confronting actually for Emily. Probably wouldn’t have been... well, very much not like what it is today. But in terms of the buildings, they’re the sort of stalwarts that haven’t left, thankfully.

Emily Hahn’s Haunts: Where She Lived and Worked

Sarah (08:21)

So we know, obviously, Emily Hahn wrote in the New Yorker a lot. She wrote these dispatches. Well, she wrote an awful lot in general, didn’t she? More than 50 books, I think, and so on. So whereabouts in the city did she spend most of her time? She did talk about a few streets in particular, but they had different names than they do today. Is that right?

Tina (08:29)

Yes, they had different names or they were spelled differently. So she did spend a lot of time in the Bund area. Like I say, she was very good friends with Sir Victor Sassoon, who was a Baghdadi Jewish tycoon, whose family had been in Shanghai and been extremely wealthy for four or five generations. I say he was Baghdadi Jewish, but he was really English. He was born in Italy when his parents were on their six-month-long honeymoon and went to Eton and Cambridge. And he only lived in Shanghai for a short time as well, but he made an enormous impact because he decided his family was going to, rather, not his family, but he was going to invest in real estate. So he built all over Shanghai and his buildings are still there.

So she became very good friends with him. She spent a lot of time at what was then called the Cathay Hotel. She also worked about three buildings down from the Cathay at the North China Daily News. That was her first job. So when she arrived in Shanghai, she didn’t expect to like it. She was only gonna stay for a couple weeks, but she really did like it. And so she ended up getting a job at the North China Daily News, which was the British-owned newspaper. There were also quite a few American-owned newspapers. But she only lasted there for five months.

And then she went off to another job where she taught at Customs College. And that was in the former French Concession. I don’t think that building’s still there.

But she also lived very close to the Bund, about two blocks from the Bund, at Jiangxi Lu, which was spelled with a K [Kiangse Road] and then, you know, differently back then. And that apartment, that building is still there. Her third-floor apartment is still there. The number is still there. It looks—I mean, it really is one of these buildings that hasn’t changed. I mean, you go up there, you can feel the ghost of Emily Hahn.

We took a man there recently who I figured out after a while that he was really just an Emily Hahn fan. He said, you know, I want a tour... he just read, I think, Taras Grescoe’s book about the Cathay and Sir Victor and Emily. And I mean, the thrill that he had! We went to Emily’s apartment, we knocked on the door, we talked to the people who are living there, who lived there for about 40 years. It’s a Chinese family. We met the young son who’s like about 30, young... who’s about 35. And he said he lived there his whole life. No idea who Emily Hahn was.

Sarah (10:54)

Who is living there now? Really? None?

Tina (11:08)

And we met his parents, so I mean, that’s sort of the, you know, the post-Emily generation, but that building really, really hasn’t changed exterior and interior. You can imagine, you know, Emily... we peered inside and some of the doors have like the original numbering. So, I mean, they all have original numbering, but some of them have not been replaced. So they’ve got like wooden numbers from, you know, when it was first built.

Sarah (11:23)

What? Yeah, I think that’s one of the lovely things about Shanghai is that there’s a lot of 1930s... some of those elements are still there. When I... we had an office in Shanghai for a little while on Julu Lu, Julu Road, and it had all the original wrought iron windows, even this lion’s foot bath that looked like it hadn’t been moved from the 30s. You know, and that’s one of the nice things, that none of that has really been destroyed, it is still there.

And one of the things I love about doing tours with you guys is that part of the tour is diving in and out of buildings and sort of being a bit opportunistic, right? And sort of going in and just trying your luck. And so that story that you just mentioned is a perfect example of why tours... going around Shanghai with you guys is very different than the usual kind of tour and what’s so wonderful about it.

But it used to be that street that she was on, it was the red light district, right? And she... it was called “The Line”?

Tina (12:28)

It absolutely was, yes.

Sarah (12:29)

She said it was a crowded screaming street and obviously it was, yeah, not the most...

Tina (12:35)

Yeah, I have a feeling that Emily’s section was less... was kind of more civilized than Jiangxi Lu and the “Line” and the brothels. And remember the Line was very, very fancy brothels and very, very discreet. But there were other parts of the street that I think were as exactly as you describe it.

Sarah (12:39)

I think she liked the chaos though a little bit, didn’t she?

Tina (12:57)

But she was very excited. I think she liked the chaos. Yeah, I think she was like Zhang Ailing in that way. I think, you know, she liked the chaos. She liked hearing the noise outside. But I think she just also liked the idea of being on the street of the brothels. Because, you know, she just found this romantic or something.

Sarah (13:14)

Mm. And what’s Jiangxi Road like today? Because some, obviously some cities retain their red light districts, but I’m pretty sure this one is not.

Tina (13:27)

Sadly, no. I mean, I don’t know anyone who’s ever even seen the exterior of what would have been... what’s her name? Gracie Gales. She was the famous brothel owner, you know, so who even seen hints of what that would have looked like. So it must have been gone by the 80s.

Social Life and Salons

Sarah (13:45)

And where else would Emily have hung out apart from the Bund? Obviously we know that she spent a lot of time... she went to a lot of parties of Victor Sassoon’s. Where would they have taken place? Would they have taken place in the Cathay Hotel, which is now the Peace Hotel, which is run by the Fairmont, right? It’s a Fairmont?

Tina (14:02)

Yes, run by the Fairmont, but soon to be run by the Raffles, I understand. Raffles is taking over, in a couple years. So he did have parties in his ballroom, but he also had parties out at his country estate in Hongqiao. So he had two houses out in Hongqiao, where people would ride, it’s sort of very country gentleman type of life and he liked to entertain out there as well.

She was also very good friends with Bernadine Fritz, who was a salon hostess. And Bernadine was famous for bringing together Chinese and Westerners, so sort of well-known Chinese intellectuals and well-known Westerners as well, people who were visiting. Charlie Chaplin, for example, and Miguel Covarrubias, the artist. So she’d bring them all together at these salons.

And that’s actually where Emily met her Chinese lover, Zau Sinmay [Shao Xunmei]. Because, you know, she brought people together. So she met him there. So she would have spent a lot of time, you know, with Bernadine. And Bernadine lives in the heart of French Concession, actually at the end of the same block that I live on. I walk by Bernadine’s house all the time. And it’s pretty much unchanged.

There’s a wonderful book about Bernadine called Bernadine’s Shanghai Salon by Susan Blumberg-Kason, which is how we know a lot of what we know about Bernadine. And also she and Emily wrote to each other for years and years and years. So a lot of information about Emily and what she did, you know, comes from these letters.

Sarah (15:54)

And also you mentioned Shao Xunmei [Zau Sinmay]. I think his family lived on what was then called Bubbling Well Road, right, which is now Nanjing West Road, is that right?

Tina (16:06)

So they first lived... I mean the big family house was out in Yangshupu, which was like way out in the Chinese section. And then when the Japanese bombed that part of the city, they moved in actually to Huaihai... but Emily lived on Huaihai and then she moved them in like, you know, right by her. That lane neighborhood existed until about the early 2000s. It’s right by the Shanghai Library. And then it was knocked down and rebuilt with houses, but they’ve kept the historic sign up, which is very confusing for people because the houses kind of look, you know, historic. They look old style western, so some people think they’re old, but they’re not. Anyway, so, yeah, so she lived there, I think from ‘37 on.

So in ‘37, she briefly moved to Yuyuan Lu to a place called the “Hotel Tiny,” which still exists, is still in a wonderfully shabby state. Every time you go by there, there’s like five people sitting outside and they’re always happy to engage you in conversation. There’s one guy there who’s maybe 70, says he was born in that house and so forth. So Emily lived there very, very briefly, I think right around the time of the Japanese bombing of the city during the Battle of Shanghai.

Sarah (17:27)

What about the Paramount Ballroom? Is that because that’s a bit of an iconic sort of Art Deco building that still exists in Shanghai that she went to, is that right? And is that nearby where you mentioned that same area?

Tina (17:40)

Yes, it’s not far because Yu Yuan Road is just up the street. It’s very close to Jing An Temple.

Preservation and Destruction in Modern Shanghai

Sarah (17:47)

So I think one of the things about Shanghai, and correct me if I’m wrong—obviously Art Deco is one of your specialisms, it’s something that you’re really passionate about. And it’s something that again, I think perhaps people don’t necessarily associate with Shanghai. I think we all know like Miami and I think, is it Melbourne has a lot of Art Deco?

Tina (18:04)

Miami, Melbourne, Bombay, Napier...

Sarah (18:09)

Yeah, so there’s certain hubs where you can still see loads of really amazing Art Deco and Shanghai is definitely one of them. But in terms of some of these older places, there has been a lot of destruction of Shanghai’s older neighborhoods in the last decade. Is that right? What’s disappeared that Emily would have been able to see? And just to give people a sort of visual image of when they go to Shanghai, obviously Shanghai has all of these incredible tall glitzy buildings on one side of the river. And then the other side of the river is a little bit more like the kind of Shanghai that Emily would have remembered, the former French Concession, as you mentioned. But it’s that section that quite a lot has disappeared, right? And more and more. Has that stopped now or is it still continuing a pace, the destruction?

Tina (18:53)

Yeah, I mean, I think... No, no, it’s still... well, it’s slowed down because I think developers are less eager to develop now. So what’s happened is people have moved out of lane neighborhoods, but nothing’s happened to the lane neighborhoods. So they’re all boarded up, but nothing... but they’re sort of just as they were.

So, but in terms of what has gone down, so a lot has been demolished in terms of lane neighborhoods, but a lot of the French Concession has been gentrified rather than demolished. Or they will like demolish much of it and leave one or two buildings and say, “Yay, we’ve done preservation.”

The parts of the city that have just disappeared are parts of Hongkou and what the foreigners called the Old Chinese City, the walled city where the Chinese lived before the first foreigners came to Shanghai. I mean, that has just been demolished at a rapid, rapid rate. I don’t recall reading of Emily going to the Old Chinese City, but it wouldn’t surprise me if she did because that’s the sort of person that she was. Maybe during her opium era, it might have been the kind of thing she did if Sinmay had had friends over there.

And the same thing with Hongkou. I mean, Hongkou is just across the bridge from the Bund, but it was considered sort of the low rent district. But again, it was the kind of place that a lot of foreigners like to go because further into Hongkou was where the very large Japanese community lived. And a lot of journalists and foreigners in general like to go there for the Japanese food. They always talk about the sukiyaki. So it seems like the kind of thing Emily would have done.

Literary Circles and Bookstores

Sarah (20:48)

Right, interesting. And she also sort of crossed into Chinese literary circles, didn’t she? So where would that salon culture have lived and what echoes of it still remain today in Shanghai, in your opinion? How do people get a feel for that?

Tina (20:56)

Very much. So she... I think a lot of that was with Sinmay and his... he had a bookstore which was on the Suzhou Creek. It was on what is Bei Suzhou Lu today, which still has a lot of intact buildings. It’s where the post office was. It was where, you know, there were large apartment buildings and many of those buildings are still there, but his bookstore sadly is gone.

So a lot of the salons were held there. And there were others in places like Hongkou where, for example, the Japanese bookseller Uchiyama had a bookstore and Lu Xun and his friends would have hung out there. You know, salons, I feel, just, you know... they don’t really like a lot of discussion these days. So there aren’t so many of those, but there are still some very lovely bookstores in and around the city. One in the old Russian church, which is really lovely. I love the ones in old buildings. There’s another one in the old Columbia Country Club, where I’m sure she went because Bernadine used to go there, which was the American Country Club out on Yanan Road.

So places like that, they do have a nice kind of like bookstore vibe. They do talks, they do different kinds of things. And I think that’s the closest thing you’d get to something like a literary salon.

Sarah (22:27)

And is that easy for foreign tourists to turn up to or all of those talks in Chinese?

Tina (22:33)

Most of them are in Chinese, yeah. But there is one language independent bookstore here, Garden Books, and sometimes they do talks in English.

Sarah (22:47)

Yeah, so Garden Books is still going then. I remember that one.

Tina (22:50)

Garden Books is still going. Yes, they have a new owner who used to work there. So yeah, it’s great. Lots of, you know, fresh energy and new things and all of that.

Sarah (23:00)

And... were gibbons common pets in Shanghai?

Tina (23:03)

You know, I don’t think so, but I think she talks about sort of seeing them, you know, like as, you know, like on the street. And I remember that too, from like, you know, about 10 years ago, sometimes you’d see a guy who’d have like this random monkey, you know, like outside the bars. I mean, I’m not really sure what the point was. I mean, maybe he was trying to get money, but you would see that. So maybe they’re more common than we think.

Sarah (23:19)

Yes. Yeah, especially back then, perhaps it was easier to procure one, but she had more than one, didn’t she? She was bringing Mr. Mills around, put a little jacket on him, a bow tie, mean... party piece, right?

Tina (23:37)

She did have more than one. And yes, exactly. And apparently her cook had one too, and she was unhappy with him because she didn’t think he was treating the gibbon right, and he was like, “It’s an animal.” But Emily didn’t think so.

The Emily Hahn Walking Loop

Sarah (23:55)

For a listener who might have an afternoon in Shanghai, where should they go if they wanted to sort of see... apart from if they obviously if they were with you, Tina, in which case they’d do it very easily. But if they had an afternoon by themselves, where should they go to sort of do a little loop walk around Shanghai and take in Emily’s Shanghai?

Tina (24:15)

So I would say:

* The Bund & Peace Hotel: Go first to the Bund and maybe have tea at the Peace Hotel because the interior really hasn’t changed all that dramatically. And then have a wander around. Go up to the eighth-floor ballroom. She would have gone to Sir Victor’s parties there. And then just kind of soak up the atmosphere.

* North China Daily News (AIA Building): When you’re done with that, take a walk over to the North China Daily News, which is now the AIA building. Very big sign saying AIA on the top, can’t miss it. And that’s where she worked. And so AIA, the insurance company, actually rented a floor in that building. And that’s important for Emily because the man who started that, C.V. Starr, he also invested in a bilingual publication that she did with Sinmay, Candid Comment. So that was important to her life as well.

* Customs House: So you’ve got the North China Daily News and then the Customs House. She didn’t actually work in that building, but after she left the North China Daily News, she went to teach at the Customs College, which was in the French Concession. But her students... she taught English literature. I think she taught English literature and composition. And her students, though, would all have worked for the China Maritime Customs, which then was operated out of that building. So that’s where her students would have been.

* Jiangxi Lu (Apartment 32): Then of course, you walk down to Jiangxi Lu, where her apartment was, and hang around outside and wait for someone to open to the door and go inside and go up to the third floor. And I think her apartment was 32. But yeah, go up and look for Emily’s apartment. And it’s one of these lovely buildings that actually has a huge courtyard on the inside. And it’s very, very pretty, very nicely designed. And you look at the courtyard and you think, yeah, Emily was looking at this. You know, she’d walk out of the room and that view hasn’t changed, that courtyard hasn’t changed.

* The Capitol Theater: Then you could continue on down... Sichuan Lu maybe... no, before Sichuan Lu, let’s go to the Capitol Theater, which is on Yuan Ming Yuan Road. And that was where she performed for the International Arts Theater and she took the lead in Lysistrata, the Greek play about the Peloponnesian War where women said we need to end this war by withholding sex. And Emily played the lead and she wrote to her mother about it and she said, “It was really easy, all I had to do was stand there and declaim women of Athens.” But anyway, so that theater is still there, it is being renovated. They seem to be doing a pretty good job and one day soon it will reopen and we can actually see, but the theater itself looks like it’s exactly the same. I mean, it hasn’t changed. So you can actually go in there and see where Emily performed.

The Music of Shanghai: Jazz

Sarah (27:24)

Actually, one other question for you, Tina, and then we’ll wrap it up. One of the things that I think was a little bit disappointing, or which I always felt that Shanghai Tourism Board, let’s say, could make more of is the music of that period and the sort of jazz. So in the Peace Hotel, you know for a long time some of the original band members would still play at the Peace Hotel. They would sort of do little renditions, but they weren’t necessarily playing the 1920s, 30s Shanghai jazz songs that you might know. Are they still going? Can you go and listen to the music?

Tina (28:00)

So they are, they are. And the story with those guys is that none of them actually played at the Peace Hotel back in the day. But yeah, and they started I think in the 1980s, and I interviewed them once in the mid-90s, and at that point, they had played jazz in old Shanghai. Many of them were members of a Chinese band known as the Jimmy King Band, which was a fairly well-known band.

And they said, you know, so they had played like in the 40s. So by the 90s, you know, they were still around, still able to play. Now they’re all much younger and, you know... but there was one guy when I went... I went to, I think it was the 90th anniversary of the Peace Hotel. There was one guy who was a hundred who had been in the old Peace Hotel band. He didn’t play, he just showed up. So they’re there.

But there has been a revival of jazz. Jazz is very much Shanghai’s signature tune. And there’s a place right on the Bund, Fuzhou Lu, called House of Blues and Jazz, run by a local celebrity, Lin Dong Fu, who used to be, I think it was television or something. They bring in jazz, they have local jazz, and it’s a very, very, very, very cool jazz club.

There’s also JZ Club, which has same thing, local jazz performers, as well as people that they bring in. Yes, and there’s lots of Chinese jazz, because this was one of Shanghai’s contributions to the jazz scene, was it sort of Sinified Chinese jazz. Buck Clayton and all the Black American musicians came and played in Shanghai. And it was at that point that the Chinese sort of trying to figure out how to get this music to a wider Chinese audience who didn’t really understand a syncopated beat. And they kind of created a Chinese jazz band. The most famous band was the Clear Wind Jazz Band, which every so often somebody tries to revive and redo their music and create a new Clear Wind Jazz Band. I haven’t had one of those for a few years, but maybe we will again. But in short, lots of good places to hear jazz in Shanghai.

Sarah (30:14)

Yeah, okay. And so occasionally you might be lucky enough to hear some of those sort of lounge diva kind of standards from the 20s and 30s, like Ye Shanghai [Night Shanghai], the Zhou Xuans.

Tina (30:26)

Yes, yes, yes. Ye Shanghai and Rose Rose, I Love You. Yes.

Sarah (30:32)

Yeah, okay, good. It’s really evocative. And I think you get the music, you get the cocktail, you’re there, then you’re in Emily’s Shanghai, right?

Conclusion and Next Steps

Sarah (30:41)

Okay, amazing. So Tina, if people want to do tours with Historic Shanghai or engage with you, they can do group tours, they can do private tours, right? Can you tell us a little bit more before they...

Tina (30:41)

So we do group tours, public tours, almost every weekend. And we’ve over 150 different types of tours, different neighborhoods, different themes, different people, sometimes following books. Obviously, we did an Emily Hahn one. People can also do private tours. Those are customized so they can be whatever you want. So if you want to just do Emily Hahn, if you want to follow the trail of a particular book, if you had a grandmother who lived in Shanghai and you want to find out where she lived and see if we could get into the apartment, we can do all those things.

Sarah (31:35)

Amazing. Yeah. And I think only only you can do that because you know it so so well. How long have you lived in Shanghai now, by the way?

Tina (31:41)

28 years and this month we will have been in China for 30.

Sarah (31:46)

Wow, congratulations, a Chinaversary as we call it. Well, thank you so much, Tina. I learned a lot. I’m sure our listeners learned a lot and I hope we’ve inspired them to go to Shanghai because it’s such a wonderful city and it is one of the few Chinese cities where you can still see so much history from the 20th century, which I think is quite refreshing and really lovely.

Tina (31:49)

Yes, indeed. Yes, yes, please come.

Sarah (32:07)

Thank you, Tina. We’ll put Historic Shanghai’s links in the show notes along with our Emily Hahn reading list and a simple Hahn loop map for first-timers like the one you just mentioned.

So if this episode helped you plan a walk, share it with a friend who needs an excuse to visit Shanghai. Next time we’re back with a full episode, a new traveler, a new city. So subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit bytheirowncompass.substack.com