Many Shanghai residents have experienced living in shikumen houses, which are crowded, noisy and at times even chaotic, but also hold happy memories. Photos by Shou Zhusen for China Daily

Vanishing houses

Since the beginning of the century, however, hundreds of squares of shikumen houses like Jing'an Lane have been demolished by the wrecker's ball, and the land has been reused for office buildings, shopping malls, high-end residences as well as public areas such as parks and roads.

Just one block away from Jing'an Lane, Shanghai's most famed fashion and dining hub, Xintiandi, attracts millions of tourists every year for its stylistic renovation of shikumen houses, by moving out the original residents and bringing in restaurants and fashion boutiques. It was once extolled as the most successful facelift project, widely copied by other districts and cities.

Ruan Yisan, professor of Shanghai Tongji University's Architecture and Urban Planning College and the dubbed "bodyguard of Chinese old houses", once called Xintiandi a "fake vintage", while shikumen houses are the living fossil of life of Shanghai, if not China.

If the Bund is the glamour face of Shanghai, shikumen houses are the limbs. They are not only bricks and mortar, but also a stage of real Shanghai life, as he put it.

Life of shikumen is memorized and depicted sensually by veteran residents who used to live there like Ruan, a native of Suzhou, Jiangsu province, who claimed to have spent years in Shanghai's shikumen during teenage.

It used to wake to the rolling sound of the feces-collecting vehicle in the morning, around 6 am, as flush toilets were yet a luxury for the majority back in the 1980s. As the patriarch, usually in pyjamas and slippers, emptied the spittoon that contained the family's overnight excrement, the busy morning of a usual workday was officially kicked off.