What this day covers
The Tilanqiao historic area in Hongkou is the only place in China where the physical traces of Jewish refugee life during the Second World War survive, and it survives as a working neighbourhood rather than as a museum set. This day is spent on foot within a small area of it, with one museum and a series of streets.
We walk it in the order in which the history happened, and the guide does the historical work with the group. Nothing in this programme is dramatised, and the group is asked to remember that the lanes are people's homes.
The Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum and the Ohel Moshe Synagogue
The Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum was formally established in October 2007, when the restored former Ohel Moshe Synagogue was opened to the public. The synagogue itself was built in 1927, designed by a Russian Jewish engineer, Gabriel Rabinovich, in accordance with Jewish custom: three storeys with a partial fourth, brick and timber construction, an external gallery, and a red pantile hipped roof over the top. It was, and remains, the principal building of this history in the city.
The museum's collection has grown out of nothing. When it opened in 2007 it held no physical objects at all and had to build its display from published material; the objects have since come from the refugees and their descendants who came back to visit, from the residents of the surrounding streets, who kept furniture and household goods left behind when their neighbours departed, and from touring exhibitions taken abroad from 2011 onward. In 2020 the site was extended, roughly quadrupling the exhibition area, and the display grew from about 150 objects to nearly a thousand, including ten graded as first-class cultural relics.
Admission is about CNY 20 for an adult, reduced for students and seniors, and is payable locally.
Huoshan Park and the memorial
Huoshan Park on Huoshan Road was laid out in 1917 and carried an English name until 1944, when it was renamed. During the war the Japanese authorities designated the district as a restricted area for stateless refugees, and the park was both the main open space and the site of the cemetery. In April 1994 the district government erected the Refugee Monument in the centre of the park: a black granite stone two metres high and a metre and a half wide, carrying the boundaries of the designated area in Chinese, English and Hebrew. It is the plainest and most affecting thing on the route.
Zhoushan Road and the lanes
Zhoushan Road was laid out by the Shanghai Municipal Council in 1907, and the row of three-storey red-brick gallery buildings along it, put up around 1910, is the refugee housing itself. In the late 1930s and early 1940s the surrounding streets traded so briskly - German bakeries, Austrian coffee houses, orchestras, a theatre - that the district was known as Little Vienna. Walking these lanes with the history in mind is the whole afternoon. Two other buildings on the route are worth naming: the Tilanqiao Prison of 1903 on Changyang Road, a National Key Cultural Relics Protection Unit, and the 1933 Old Millfun on Liyang Road, the former municipal abattoir built in 1933 to a design by the British architect Balfours and now a creative quarter.
Meals
Lunch
Accommodation
Day programme - no hotel night included.
