Shanghai Snapshots: Goodbye Wujiang Lu

From @louisalim

Let’s all pour one out to our favorite little food street, which was cleaned up and moved into a shiny, but lifeless, food mall right next door sometime late last year. Today, the bulldozers came in and tore it down for good. The picture to the right is by NPR China correspondent Louisa Lim, who was there on the scene to witness the end to what once was known as Love Lane.

Speaking of which, a little Wujiang Lu history, courtesy of Bricole Urbanism:

…Situated in Jing’an district just off Nanjing Xi Lu near the subway station on Line 2, the street’s origins lie sometime before the 1860’s when its winding path following a creek made such a convenient shortcut that it became Shanghai’s first toll road and was known in chinese as Diamond Bridge Rd.

Wujiang Lu was (rather ironically) called Love Lane when it was part of the International Settlement and was notorious from the 1920’s as a den of brothels and vice unparalleled even in the Shanghai of the time. “Despite its romantic name, everything was for sale on Love Lane.”

And now, nothing’s for sale. Sadface.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 4th, 2010 at 1:55 pm and is filed under All about China. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.