The Cordier Apartments

The elegant Cordier Apartment building is the sophisticated beauty on the corner of Fuxing and Gaoyou Roads. Designed by G.E. Koster and built in around 1935, the five storey building has a delightful zigzag roofline that elegantly unfolds into two wings: one on Fuxing Road, and one on Gaoyou. Gorgeous Deco features appear in ironwork designs on the front entrance panels and on the geometric balconies, and it’s worth noting that in Shanghai, where so many balconies have been enclosed, every single one of the Cordier’s balconies is still open, adding to the beauty of the building.

“Its extreme simplicity is the epitome of all modern architecture,” said the Shanghai Sunday Times in December 1935. “Built with an eye to Shanghai’s intense summer heat, this apartment insures coolness. Its windows face in all directions and its large and completely equipped rooms offer every luxury to the modern apartment dweller.”

As with so many buildings in Shanghai, the Cordier took its name from the street. But in this case, not from the main entrance, Route Boissezon (Fuxing Road) but instead Route Henri Cordier (Gaoyou Road), named for a well-known Sinologist who had spent time in Shanghai.

Born in New Orleans, Louisiana, Henri Cordier arrived in China in 1869, at the tender age of 20. M. Cordier senior father worked for the Comptoir d’Escompte bank in Shanghai, and young Henri, who had been educated in England, worked for an English bank for a time.

By 1872, though, he had moved on from banking to more literary pursuits. He was the librarian of the North China branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, and wrote some 20 articles for a variety of publications, including the Shanghai Evening Courier, North China Daily News, and the RAS Journal.

Although Cordier didn’t have much knowledge of the Chinese language, he nonetheless made a significant contribution to Sinology with the the Bibliotheca Sinica. This standard bibliography–also known as the “Cordier”–covers 70,000 works on China, up to 1921. It was compiled upon his return to Paris, where he taught at the l’École spéciale des Langues orientales, Cordier was also the founding editor of T’oung Pao, the first international journal of Chinese studies, in 1890.