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From www.jgballard.ca
Ballard, who passed away last year, was born in Shanghai in 1930 and is best known for "Empire of the Sun" - a work of autobiographical fiction that draws extensively on his childhood in the city's colonial era and his experiences during World War II. His old home at 31a Amherst Avenue (now 508 Panyu Lu, now a concrete block) was a mock Tudor mansion built by English architects in 1925, and featured prominently in his memories of Shanghai. It was a "magical" place where his family enjoyed the glamorous life of club receptions and horse-racing before the 1937 Japanese invasion led to their internment at Longhua Camp in the south of the city (now Shanghai Zhongxue).
Ballard's house has been a sort-of pilgrimage site for historians and fans. In 2008, Shanghaiist accompanied Canadian Rick McGrath on his search for Ballard's home and other places related to the author's boyhood experience in the city. This wasn't some impulsive, hurried trip on McGrath's part, but an extensively planned journey that involved years of correspondence with other Ballardians, and hard work compiling maps and satellite views of Ballard's Shanghai. The story of McGrath's trip, and photos of the house, are meticulously recorded on his website.
James Fallows also took a tour of Ballard's childhood home, which he recounts here.
The house that McGrath and Fallows both visited was, at that point, an upscale restaurant called SH508. The original structure of the house had been left intact, and the property listed as a heritage building. But when the restaurant's lease on the property expired by October last year, the house fell into the hands of rabid developers. While the house has not been torn down, it is now unrecognizable - according to Moore, it has been stripped down to its beams and rebuilt in concrete, while plans are afoot to add a fake front and increase floorspace. You can watch a video tour of the current cemented-over monstrosity on The Telegraph.
Photo by Dan Butterfield, November 2009. From www.jgballard.ca
And so the battle between preservation and development continues, the former seeming on the losing side. With every small victory, tens of cemented-over former architectural glories appear.
But what would J.G. Ballard himself have thought of the gutting of his former home? Judging from his letters to Rick McGrath, he might have been a little desensitized himself, and accepted it as the inevitable. While he was excited and immensely curious about his fans' journeys to his old Shanghai haunts, he wrote that "one would expect any city in the world to have changed virtually out of recognition in 40 years, and know that the emotional pickings from the nostalgia dish to be pretty meager". In response to McGrath's news that his home had become a restaurant, his seemingly flippant reply was "if it's a restaurant, let's hope it's a McDonald's or KFC". He also revealed that these trips into nostalgia felt a little "intrusive" due to the length of time gone by; "In an odd way it's quite reassuring that everything has changed so much -- the Shanghai I knew, along with 31 Amherst Avenue and Lunghua camp, only survive inside my head."
Reassuring it may have been to Ballard, but not to us. Perversely, perhaps his home should have been a McDonald's or KFC - maybe if it had been a hopping commercial fast food establishment, the house would have been spared its fate as a cement block.
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The ugly Shanghainese, corrupt, insensitive, and devoid of any taste.
The ugly foreigners, wanting to preserve memories of the days when they lived in the mansions while the Chinese were the city's underclass.
旧的不去，新的不来。。。
The ugly Shanghaiists, so quick to condemn each other!
The Torygraph article has McGrath as a 'fan'. He's actually an expert on Ballard with the world's largest collection of first editions. Among his many consults, his collection was recently featured in a major exhibition in Barcelona.
That's me who toured Rick around and did the Shanghai-end research.
We were both in agreement about thing philosophically, as was Ballard in his two letters he wrote when we did the tour/photos thing ...
It's interesting to find the sites and a pity they are all gradually falling victim to developers with no scruples ... but these are buildings that were forced on China during an occupation.
China as nation would be within their rights, ideologically, to knock down the lot. Of course, that's not the case, it's just cheap renovation companies who only know how to knock down the walls and rebuild them with concrete slabs.
This happens a few times a year on Xinhua Road. One of the "heritage architecture" buildings changes hands and then the company hired to revamp it just knocks it down and builds a simplified copy in it's place. The rule is you are not supposed to change the outer appearance. So they leave the frame up and just preserve the shape.
It's funny because, in the case of the Ballard house they made sure they put in the porthole style window and kept the veranda on the door - to give the illusion that it's the same. But, that door and that window are new additions made by the Shanghai 508 people, the front door was originally on the other side going into the lane.
It would be perfect if it had the original grounds and an empty swimming pool, of course.
All cities evolve, and JG Ballard himself recognized that nothing stays the same. In a 2007 letter to me about my Shanghai explorations with Andy Best, he wrote: "houses are constantly being altered -- many of the world-famous houses, by architects of the Richard Neutra/Shindler 1920s generation, in Los Angeles, have been enlarged and reshaped, like many of Corbusier's houses in France, some even fitted with pitched roofs!... In an odd way it's quite reassuring that everything has changed so much -- the Shanghai I knew, along with 31 Amherst Avenue and Lunghua camp, only survive inside my head."
What you may now know, however, is how helpful Ballard's father was to the Chinese. He stayed on for seven years after the war and helped to train workers on how to run the cloth factory he managed during the 1930s.
By now virtually all of JG Ballard's Shanghai is gone. Even "G Block", where his family lived at Lunghua during the internment, was knocked down in 2009 to create a swimming pool.
Ballard was neither sentimental nor nostalgic. He had no interest in saving the Amherst house, and only visited it once in all the years since 1946. For some of us it's too bad it has gone, but as Ballard says, it will live on in memory, and for Ballard, that in many ways was just as good as reality.
Andy and Rick, thank you for sharing your opinions on urban change in this city, and confirming Ballard's lack of sentimentality! I'm glad you guys have played a part in recording what existed in Ballard's world, so that it does live on, in memory at least.
Well, if you're curious, you can read about my entire obsessive adventure to research Ballard in Shanghai here: http://www.jgballard.ca/shanghai/shanghai.html
It reveals the history of the house, including photos from 1984, as well as Lunghwa and JGB's childhood haunts, with many great photos by Andy Best.