This Sunday (January 12, 2pm), part 2 of our Avenue Haig walk will take us to the less-explored parts of today’s Huashan Lu, including the mysterious hidden frescoes and untold stories of this 1940s Art Deco gem. Read on … and join us on Sunday! To book, click here.

The frescoes were there, they say, when this Art Deco building off Avenue Joffre (Huaihai Road) was completed in 1947. On one wall, a girl is leaping like a gazelle in the woods, plump cherries hanging from leafy boughs. She is completely free, unrestricted, unclothed.  Pre-fig leaf Eve, in the garden of Eden?

On the opposite wall, two women are playing brass horns on the banks of a river, the same cherries tantalizingly above their heads. One is wearing baggy pants, the other a short dress, maybe a gymslip—something a 1940s college girl might have worn. The building has twin lobbies, and the same frescoes are in each.

And then, in 1966, the frescoes were threatened.

Madame Liang

Madame Liang Peihua remembers. We happened to run into her at the entrance to the lane–the building is deep inside–and she became our guide. Madame Liang moved into Huaihai Villas as a newlywed, in 1960. She’s still in the same apartment, on the second floor of the eastern wing, and the building’s unofficial historian.

Madame Liang explains that in 1966, the murals were considered risqué, and the Western women portrayed—for they all had chestnut-hued hair—were considered bourgeois. The residents, reluctant to see these works of art destroyed, came up with a solution: paint over the offending images. [1]Improbably, this worked.

(Madame Liang delights in telling visitors the story of Huaihai Villas, but her own story is just as fascinating. Her grandfather, Gu Dingyuan, was secretary to Feng Yuxian, the warlord known as “the Christian general”; she is a graduate of Huadong Normal University and taught English at Min Li Girls’ School.)

Rediscovering the Frescoes

And so the images lay silently under a layer of paint, and later, a row of mailboxes. People had forgotten them, it seemed, or perhaps they had learned that remembering was inopportune. But one day in 2009, a French resident of the building, collecting her mail, noticed colors under the thinning paint. She asked the older residents, and when she learned of the frescoes, she—and just imagine what a feat this was–convinced the building managers to remove the mailboxes, paying for the removal of the paint herself. [2]

Experts came in to examine the frescoes, and unanimously declared them rare and precious. Madame Liang was there, and briefly a celebrity, as she showed journalists around.

The Story of Huaihai Villas

The frescoes don’t match the classic Art Deco style of the building, or the rest of its interior Deco details, but their exuberant style and the way they depict women fit the era. And so does the style of the woman who used part of the building as her party palace.

Huaihai Villa—we don’t know the original name, or even if it had one—was the home of real estate developer Yang Runshen. Construction began in 1942, the year the Japanese occupied the International Settlement and sent enemy nationals to camps. Vichy France, and therefore the French Concession, was allied with the Japanese, and so remained free. Yang hired a German-trained, Pudong-born architect named Xi Fuquan to design the building.

Yang and Xi had worked together before: in 1940, Yang had helped a young socialite named Lan Ni—Rose—with an investment project: the purchase and development of a lane on Route Boissezon. Xi was one of the the architects for the project, designed in the Art Deco style: the lane is known, to this day, as Rose Lane.

Yang was well connected. He had attended prestigious St. John’s University, and counted among his friends the top echelon of the Nationalist government. He was also very likely a Japanese collaborator, but even in the unoccupied French Concession, it was still wartime, and construction materials were not easily available. The building was only completed in 1947, five years after construction began, by which time the Concessions had ceased to exist.

Yang and his large family—nine children!–lived in the eastern wing of the building, where Madame Liang lives now. He offered the western wing to Lan Ni, she of Rose Lane, to use for entertaining: her party palace.

Yang’s kindness may have been strategic: Lan Ni was the minor wife–that is, concubine–of Nationalist bigwig Sun Ke, the only son of founding father Sun Yat-sen. Sun Ke held a series of top government positions for the ruling Nationalist government and in 1947, when Huaihai Villas was completed, Sun was Vice-Chairman.

Sun and Lan Ni were then ensconced in a beautiful Hudec-designed villa on Panyu Lu, but in 1948, their relationship was revealed, causing a scandal and allegedly costing Sun the Vice Chairmanship. He retreated from both the Vice Chairmanship and China, heading for the United States with his first wife. [3]

Lan Ni remained in Shanghai with their young daughter in a house on Rue Culty (Hunan Lu). She continued to use the Huaihai Villa apartment for parties, until 1949, when she left for Hong Kong, and Yan left for Tokyo. Lan Ni returned to Shanghai in the 1980s, when that young daughter, Nora, by then an American citizen, was working at the U.S. Consulate here. Lan Ni once again took up residence in Rose Lane–the only property in the lane that was returned to her. She would live there for the rest of her life.

Did Lan Ni ever return to Huaihai Villa, to see her party palace? Perhaps she just let let live in her imagination, because with its hidden frescoes and untold stories, it’s the kind of place you can let your imagination run riot. Except when it comes to Old Shanghai, the truth is often wilder than imagination.

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[1] Rare Western Mural, Hidden Behind a Mailbox of An Old Residential Building–Art China, art.china.cn, April 21 2009, accessed June 16 2020

[2] A Rare Western Mural, Hidden Behind a Mailbox of An Old Residential Building–Art China, art.china.cn, April 21 2009, accessed June 16 2020

[3] House of Scandalous Love, Shanghai Daily, May 26 2005, accessed June 16 2020