Nanjing Road: Then and Now

Nanjing Road in Shanghai has been compared to Fifth Avenue in New York.  In the 1920s and 1930s, it was the mercantile and commercial hub of the city.   As I was strolling along through the now pedestrian-only street, I got a nice surprise:  I realized that I was standing at the exact same intersection that has been pictured in this 1930s poster that will be in the exhibition Shanghai:

Nanjing Road – From Series of Views of Shanghai, after 1932

After having looked at this poster for the past six months, the image has been burned into my memory.  So, with this image in mind, I sought to take pictures of the same frame.

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“Shanghai Baby” and the World Expo 2010

"Shanghai Baby" (Hai Bao 海宝), mascot of the World Expo 2010

During my recent trip to Shanghai, I became somewhat obsessed with this figure of Hai Bao, the official mascot of the World Expo 2010 to be held in Shanghai in May 2010.  Hai Bao’s name can be translated as “Shanghai Baby,” and he appears all over the city (both in Puxi and Pudong) on billboards, shop posters, and bus advertisments, just to name a few.

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The British Punch

Punch, or the London Charivari, was a popular British magazine of humour and satire (1841-2002) that gained an international reputation for two things: 1) writing with wit and irrevance, and 2) using cartoons and comics to take on world politics and society during the 19th and 20th centuries.

The magazine had served as a model for Shanghai’s most popular, and historically most important, illustrated newspaper in the late 1800s, the Dianshizhai Pictorial (1884-1898), and Punch’s renowned cartoons also influenced the development of Chinese cartooning that experienced a “golden age” in 1930s Shanghai.

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