Abstract

Since Shanghai's Pudong area became one of China's Special Economic Zones in April 1990, a huge transformation has swept across the entire city, transforming it into a global metropolis of gleaming skyscrapers. Accompanying this process of destruction and renewal has been a growing sense of nostalgia for the city's colonial past (1842-1949), the period in which Shanghai was celebrated as the Paris of the East. Shanghai's makeover is thus different from Beijing’s: whereas for Beijing residents, urban transformation stands for China entering the new world of globalization, for Shanghai residents it stands for the revival of the old Shanghai in its heyday, as much as for the building of a new city. The typical Shanghai ‘lane houses’ (longtang) – built in the colonial period and characterized by a mixture of Chinese and Western architecture – have become one of the main symbols of this period. Accordingly, lane houses recurrently feature in contemporary Chinese fiction set in Shanghai. The influential novel Song of Everlasting Sorrow: A Novel of Shanghai by Wang Anyi is exemplary in this respect. In the first chapters, lane houses are brought to life by meticulous description and personification: the houses are ‘sensual’, ‘a little self-centered’, they ‘dream’ and ‘gossip’, and ‘have no clue of politics’. This paper will discuss possible symbolic meanings of the prominent presence of lane houses in Song of Everlasting Sorrow, and how this type of architecture features not just in the novel's setting but as a protagonist in its own right.