Shikumen Houses

In case I gave you the wrong impression of Shanghai in my last post, Shanghai, despite being a very modern city, does have older parts as well. Aside from the instantly recognizable Bund, another characteristic of Shanghai's by-gone years are it's shikumen houses.

Shikumen houses are a specific style of housing built in the latter half of the 19th century in the foreign settlements to accommodate the influx of refugees from the neighboring Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces. Literally translated, the term "shikumen" (石库门) means "stone gate," which refers to the stone gates and black doors that were the cornerstone of shikumen architecture.

From the exterior, many of the shikumen houses look very Western in the sense that many incorporate architectural elements more traditionally found in Western cities into the buildings, such as it's namesake stone gates, and verandas. However, behind the gates most of the homes are still laid out in a more traditionally Chinese style that revolves around the central courtyard. In some ways, this mix, at least in my opinion, is the perfect mix of the blended Western and Chinese cultural atheistic that is so very unique to Shanghai.

While we were in Shanghai, Leslie & I spent a decent amount of time wandering around the shikumen houses in the older part of Shanghai. Although the shikumen houses (like the hutongs in Beijing) are constantly under the threat of a wrecking ball, there are still some areas with shikumen houses left, which I strongly believe need to be preserved. While the shikumen houses may not be glamorous or stunning like the Bund, they are also a vital part of Shanghai's heritage that is worth preserving.

Now for some pictures:

For more information on Shanghai's shikumen houses:   http://www.shanghaiholiday.net/shikumen/

Old Hangzhou

Near our fantastic hostel in Hangzhou, was an older portion of the city where many older locals still resided. As we meandered through the area, we actually found a small food market area where all the locals go daily to shop for fresh vegetables, fruit and other edible items for that's day meals.

Whenever I travel, I love to browse around the local food markets. Markets always are the best place to observe the local life, so I was happy that we found one by accident in Hangzhou.

The market that we ran into in Hangzhou was half indoors and half outdoors. At this market, you could find anything you might need to make a meal--vegetables, fruit, meat, dried goods, spices, fish and live poultry.

Yes, I said live poultry. Chinese people like to get their food as fresh as possible, meaning it's best if you actually met the chicken you're going to eat while it's still alive. Much of the fish being sold as well at the market was also still swimming.

For me, coming from my Chinese background seeing all the live poultry and fish didn't really bother me. After all, this is basically the way it's been done for years in China and in the US, my parents still prefer to buy live fish as opposed to frozen fish to cook.

But for Leslie, I think she might have been a bit startled to see just how much freshness really mattered to Chinese home cooks. She was also quite interested to see the vendors selling all the different soy products from tofu to bean curd sheets to dried tofu.What can I say? Tofu is really what cheese is like to the West. While cheese in the West comes in many shapes in sizes, in China, the tofu possibilities are seemingly endless.

Pictures from the older part of Hangzhou shall now commence forth, including one of (the woman we dubbed as) the tofu lady.

 

Tofu lady

More pictures on Angela Photo Musings.