The frescoes were there, they say, when this Art Deco building off Avenue Joffre (Huaihai Road) was completed in 1947. On one wall, a girl is leaping like a gazelle in the woods, plump cherries hanging from leafy boughs. She is completely free, unrestricted, nude. Pre-fig leaf Eve, in the garden of Eden? On the opposite wall, two women are playing horns on the banks of a river, the same cherries tantalizingly above their heads. One is wearing baggy pants, the other a short dress, maybe a gymslip—something a 1940s college girl might have worn. The building has twin lobbies, and the frescoes are repeated in each.
And then, in 1966, the frescoes were threatened.
Madame Liang Peihua remembers. We happened to run into her at the entrance to the lane–the building is deep inside–and she became our guide. Madame Liang moved into Huaihai Villas as a newlywed, in 1960. She’s still in the same apartment, on the second floor of the eastern wing, and the unofficial historian.
She explains that in 1966, when the Cultural Revolution began, the nudity depicted in the murals was considered pornographic, and the Western women portrayed—for they all had chestnut-hued hair—were considered bourgeois. The residents, reluctant to see these works of art destroyed, came up with a solution: paint over the offending images. [1]Improbably, this worked.
And so the images lay under a layer of paint, and later, a row of mailboxes. People had forgotten, it seemed, or perhaps the decade of chaos had taught them that to remember was inopportune. But one day in 2009, a French resident of the building noticed colors under the thinning paint as she was collecting her mail. She asked the older residents, and when she learned of the frescoes, she—and just imagine what a feat this was–convinced the building managers to remove the mailboxes, paying for the removal of the paint herself. [2]
Experts came in to examine the frescoes, and unanimously declared them rare and precious. Madame Liang was there, and briefly a celebrity, as she showed journalists around.
The Story of Huaihai Villas
The frescoes don’t match the classic Art Deco style of the building, or the rest of its interior Deco details, but their exuberant style and the way they depict women fit the era. And so does the style of the woman who used part of the building as her party place.
Huaihai Villa—we don’t know the original name, or even if it had one—was the home of real estate developer Yang Runshen. Construction began in 1942, the year the Japanese occupied the International Settlement and sent enemy nationals to camps. Vichy France, and therefore the French Concession, was allied with the Japanese, and therefore remained free. Yang hired a German-trained architect named Xi Fuquan to design the building.
Yang and Xi had worked together before: in 1940, Yang had helped a young socialite named Lan Ni—Rose—with an investment project: the purchase and development of a lane on Route Boissezon. Xi was the architect for the project, and designed all the houses in the Art Deco style: it became known as Rose Lane.
Yang was well connected. He had attended prestigious St. John’s University, and counted among his friends the top echelon of the Nationalist government. He was also very likely a Japanese collaborator, but even so, even in the unoccupied French Concession, it was still wartime, and the building was only completed in 1947, by which time the Concessions had ceased to exist.
Yang and his large family—nine children!–lived in the eastern wing of the building, where Madame Liang lives now. He offered the western wing to Lan Ni, she of Rose Lane, to use for entertaining: a party place. Perhaps Yang’s was strategic: Lan Ni was the second wife of Nationalist bigwig Sun Ke, the only son of founding father Sun Yat-sen, who held a series of top government positions for the ruling Nationalist government. In 1947, Sun was Vice-Chairman.
Photograph by Fu Bingchang. Image courtesy of C.H. Foo, Y.W. Foo and Historical Photographs of China, University of Bristol (www.hpcbristol.net).
RIGHT: Sun Ke’s residence, where he lived with Lan Ni.
At the time, Sun and Lan Ni were then ensconced in a beautiful Hudec-designed villa on Panyu Lu, but by 1948, a scandal had broken about their relationship that allegedly cost Sun the Vice-Presidency, and he retreated, with his first wife, to the United States. [3]Lan Ni remained with their young daughter, Nora, in a house on Rue Culty (Hunan Lu). She continued to use the apartment at Huaihai Villa for parties, until 1949, when she left for Hong Kong, and Yan left for Tokyo. Lan Ni returned to Shanghai in the 1980s, when her daughter Nora was working here, and took up residence in Rose Lane–the only property that was returned to her. She would live there for the rest of her life.
Madame Liang
Madame Liang delights in telling visitors the story of Huaihai Villas, but her own story is just as fascinating. Her grandfather, Gu Dingyuan, was secretary to Feng Yuxian, the warlord known as “the Christian general”; she is a graduate of Huadong Normal University and taught English at Min Li Girls’ School.
[1] Rare Western Mural, Hidden Behind a Mailbox of An Old Residential Building–Art China, art.china.cn, April 21 2009, accessed June 16 2020
[2] A Rare Western Mural, Hidden Behind a Mailbox of An Old Residential Building–Art China, art.china.cn, April 21 2009, accessed June 16 2020
[3] House of Scandalous Love, Shanghai Daily, May 26 2005, accessed June 16 2020
GETTING THERE: Huaihai Villa can be accessed via two entrances: 1984 Huaihai Zhong Lu 淮海中路1984号 (head all the way in the back) and 372 Xingguo Lu 兴国路372号 (this entrance was closed during COVID, not sure if it’s reopened yet).
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