By Lincoln Kaye

　　At age 42, Erh Dongqiang is too young to have laid eyes on his native Shanghai during its cityscapes have become his stock-in-trade as a photographer. His family, ethnic Manchus, had extensive properties in the city and its environs before the communist takeover. And his handsome architectural vignettes betray his nostalgia for Shanghai’s vanished glories.

　　Erh and American authoress Tess Johnston co-founded Old China Hand Press two years ago. The Hong Kong-based imprint house publishes lavish colour albums depicting the material culture of Chinese and expatriate elites on the mainland during the early 20th century. They have produced a pair of idiosyncratic books: A Last Look, which captures old Shanghai buildings, and Near to Heaven, a look at pre-Liberation summer resorts. They plan a half-dozen more books.

　　Johnston writes the history and archival snippets that accompany Erh’s pictures. Each volume contains hundreds of them: two-page spreads and postage-stamp-sized photos in the margins of the text, sepia tone portraits from the 1920s and demolition shots of buildings now in their death throes.

　　For a generation after its 1949 Liberation, Shanghai moldered as a mummy of its former self. Beijing’s central planning and official neglect embalmed the city. The physical form of the streets and buildings remained intact. But with none of the commercial drive that once animated the place, it grew static.

　　Erh grew up in this stagnant milieu, the stigmatized offspring of New China’s capitalist “class-enemies.” The experience provided him with a handy explanation—Maoist dogmatism—for his childhood privations. Yet the eclectic architectural background of the city supplied a rich visual vocabulary that hinted at the possibilities of a more fulfilling life. No wonder he cultivated an artist’s visual sense.

　　That sense stood him in good stead, coming of age in the wake of the Cultural Revolution. Since 1981, he has worked as a freelance photojournalist. The slick, government-backed China Tourism monthly is a prime customer, airline magazines and other foreign publications also publish his pictures. Architecture dominates his work, especially his images of Shanghai. When they figure at all in his photos, people usually appear as no more than blank-faced scaling factors.

　　Unpeopled as they are, Erh’s architectural vignettes evoke all the more effectively the ghosts of these buildings’ pre-Liberation heydays. But now, the ghosts are coming back to life – and the revival of Shanghai’s free-wheeling spirit has doomed its embalmed cadaver. Apart from the “green field” site of the new Pudong development, planned urban re-newal in the old city will require demolition of nearly 4 billion square feet have fallen to the wrecker’s ball, sparking protests by displaced residents. Several of Erh’s ancestral properties have been demolished, including the downtown row-house that contained his studio.

　　Despite his nostalgia for old Shanghai, Erh feels ambivalent about the return of some of its crasser values. Is this, he wonders, the long-awaited Shanghai renaissance? “This place had a way of life worth preserving. They could have built a whole new metropolis in Pudong and left the old town intact.” Instead, he complains, city fathers have opted for a hybrid, homogenized Shanghai that could be summed up in Gertrude Stein’s famous quip: ”There is no there there.”

　　Urban renewal has already forced him to move to a farmstead way beyond the airport. Erh, a divorcee, has turned his home into a private Folk Art Museum (visitors by appointment only). His two-storey house and its yard are crammed full of his memorabilia from Shanghai and southern China: old shop signs, lattice-work windows, bridal bedsteads, street hawker stalls and more.

　　Now Erh is preparing to move again. He will take up “ a shapelier life,” he says, in a village in the backwaters of Anhui. Such upriver Yangtze enclaves, he says, are the last bastions of China to retain “a sense of place, of region, of particularity.” No coincidence, he adds, that such places “produced the great scholar officials like Tseng Kou-fan or Hu Shi, with their sense of ethics and proportion.”