Hidden Treasures...

Welcome back!   The journey continues here at Yellow River Chronicles.  2011 is shaping up to be an epic year!  We've been traveling so much our passports are getting sore.  You can expect reports from Vietnam, the Philipines, Moscow, Mongolia and good old Naptown this Fall and Winter, and we still have Taiwan, Japan, Guilin, Jianxi, Nantong and the epic Silver Dragon Village trip to review for your reading pleasure.  So stay tuned and stay frosty while we take a breather this week to find some hidden treasure around faire Shanghai.

A typical lane off of ChangShu Lu

One of the true pleasures of living in the oh so colonial French Concession is discovering the small gems hidden down the "lanes".  Most of Shanghai's old neighborhoods are built on a grid pattern with a latticework of lanes connecting to the streets that form the "outer walls" of the neighborhoods.   Stores, shops, markets, restaurants line the streets while the folks live inside the squares with houses facing the lanes.   Very few houses have doorways that open onto the street.  Many of them house four families that share a bathroom and kitchen. If you wander down one of the lanes, you have chance to step out of modern Shanghai into "China".

"What are you doing here, Lauwai?"

Lanes have a spooky, lost vibe to them, and sometimes you will have the irrational fear that Hu Jintao is going to jump out of a doorway and demand "What you are doing there?  This is a CHINESE place!"

But luckily, for our last expedition, the Premier was too busy to chase us out of the lane that led us to the serene and beautiful Blue Calico Museum.

Before we go any farther, let me give you some perspective on serenity here in the 'Hai.  There is none.  Walking down a city street in Shanghai is a cross between dodging across a super highway swarming with turbo-charged clown cars and fighting your way through a no-holds-barred Chinese Army yard sale. Serenity is as rare in Shanghai as safe lunch meat or an orderly ticket line.

Following the silence and our guidebook and a few twists and turns back into the lane, we found The China Nan Tong Blue Calico Museum.  Blue calico is one of China's traditional printing and dyeing craftworks and originated from the Tang (618-907 AD) and Song (960-1279) dynasties.

The Sign for the Museum

Drying Textiles

Hidden courtyard

Yes, this is in Shanghai

The Museum Workshop

The museum has a workshop where the textiles are still produced and on a fine, sunny day, you can enter the courtyard and see the textiles drying.  You can also buy shirts, jackets, drapes, and other items made from the material.  This is Shanghai, the evolving shopping center of the Universe after all. We needed help from a guidebook to find it, even though it's only three blocks from our apartment.


Having discovered the Museum, you begin to wonder...(well, I do anyway).   Way back, in the many square miles lanes, alleys and streets, what else might you find where almost no one goes anymore.  Traditional Chinese medicine shops in the old part of the city?  Fortune tellers using the I-Ching?  Lucky amulets?

EP and I roam the streets as often as we can.  We have lived here for a year and a half and we have walked hundreds of miles.  We plan to explore many more, but we will only discover a microscopic portion of this city of 23 million.  The truth is this:  many of the treasures are destined to stay hidden.