Before we walk in, look at the doorway. This kind of house is called shikumen, which means stone hoop gate, and the name comes from the heavy stone frame around a pair of thick black wooden doors. Houses like this went up from the 1870s onwards, in their thousands, because the settlements needed to house a great many people on very little land. They are terraced1, two or three storeys, arranged in rows along narrow lanes.
进去之前，先看这道门。这种房子叫石库门，意思是用石头箍住的门，名字就来自那对厚重黑漆木门四周的石门框。这样的房子从十九世纪七十年代起成千上万地盖起来，因为租界要在很小的地面上安置很多人。它们是联排的，两到三层，沿着窄巷一排排排开。
The doorway is where two building traditions meet. The plan behind it is Chinese, a small courtyard called tianjing, then the main room, then the stairs. But the frame2 around the door often carries Western ornament3, a Baroque scroll or a Greek pediment, copied from whatever the builder had seen. Inside, the room over the kitchen and under the roof terrace is the tingzijian. It faces north, it is cold in winter and hot in summer, and it was the cheapest thing you could rent in Shanghai, which is why so many young writers lived in one in the 1930s.
门头正是两种建筑传统碰头的地方。门后的格局是中国的，先一方小院叫天井，再是客堂间，然后是楼梯。可门框上常带着西式装饰，巴洛克的涡卷或者希腊式的山花，照着营造商见过的样子仿。屋里，灶披间之上、晒台之下那一间是亭子间。它朝北，冬冷夏热，是当年上海最便宜的租处，所以三十年代那么多年轻作家都住过一间。
Now for what happened to this particular block. In the late 1990s the whole neighbourhood was cleared and rebuilt as Xintiandi, which opened in 2001. The facades4 and the lane pattern were kept, brick by brick in places, but everything behind them was taken out and replaced with restaurants, shops and offices. So what you are about to walk through has the shape of a 1920s lane and the contents of a shopping street.
再说这一片后来怎么了。九十年代末，整个街区被清空重建成新天地，2001 年开放。立面和弄堂的走向留了下来，有些地方是一块砖一块砖照原样砌回去的，但立面后面的一切都掏空了，换成餐厅、商店和写字楼。所以你们接下来要走过的，外形是二十年代的弄堂，内容是一条商业街。
People argue about whether this counts as preservation5. One side says the lanes would have been demolished entirely without this project, and at least the street pattern survives. The other side says a neighbourhood is its residents, and they are gone. Both are fair. If you want to see the inside as it was, there is a small museum in the lane called Wulixiang, a shikumen house furnished as a family would have had it. That takes twenty minutes and it is the part I would not skip. We meet at the north entrance in an hour and a half.
这算不算保护，一直有争论。一种说法是，没有这个项目，这些弄堂早被整片拆掉了，至少街巷格局留住了。另一种说法是，一个街区就是住在里面的人，而人已经不在了。两边都有道理。想看看当年屋里的样子，弄堂里有个小馆子叫屋里厢，是一幢按住家原样布置的石库门。看它二十分钟，这一段我不建议跳过。一个半小时后我们在北口集合。