The modern homes and houses prevalent in Treaty-Port China highlight the interconnectedness and competitiveness of global markets in these urban landscapes. Elizabeth LaCouture discusses the urban landscape of the treaty-port city of Tianjin and how the modern home was developed as a result of foreign concessions competing to form a universal model of modernity. This, therefore, allowed a Tianjin modern style to emerge, where style and taste became a measurement of social status, thus allowing a bourgeois class to form.[1] LaCouture examines the role of rugs and how these rugs were initially created for a western market. However, Chinese urbanites eventually adopted it, “incorporating American and European Orientalism into their homes”. This illustrates the complex network of global capitalism and bourgeois tastes experienced in Tianjin.[2] In this chapter, she researched the role of women’s magazines and how domestic roles for women were emphasised in Republic-era China. In addition to this, the culture capital women held in this era (facilitated through women’s magazines) allowed them to be a proprietor of knowledge, therefore gendering the knowledge of the political landscape of treaty-port Tianjin, as women made sense of the world around them; by using, buying worldly goods and designing their homes.[3]

Reading LaCouture’s chapter on designing houses and homes in Tianjin made me curious about whether other treaty ports in China were facing similar experiences through the competitive global markets due to different western concessions. Therefore, I would like to examine Shanghai’s quest for homes called lilongs and whether or not they were influenced by the global markets and foreign concessions in the way that Tianjin’s modern homes were.

A lilong is a neighbourhood alleyway. These were homes in certain alleys that were “gated, hierarchically organised compounds”, from one to four storey’s high.[4] Lilongs almost “mirrored” traditional Chinese homes; they were a bridge between the public and private spaces, where the private space of their home directly met public alleyways, where residents sat talking to their neighbours or where vendors set up stalls.[5] Lilongs were constructed due to an increased Chinese population in Shanghai, as some Chinese were fleeing Taiping rebels.[6] The lilong was therefore a way to place the increased Chinese population into Shanghai, after Westerners took advantage of the housing shortages.[7]

Although Shanghai allowed for a westernised way of life, the lilong did not share the same experience as Tianjin. Lilongs resulted from an increased Western presence and forced the Chinese population to be housed in these alleys with their extended families and neighbours, restructuring the family life and cultural praxis of the Chinese population.

 

[1] Elizabeth LaCouture, Dwelling in the World: Family, House, and Home in Tianjin, China, 1860–1960 (New York, 2021), p. 187.

[2] Ibid., p. 185.

[3] Ibid., p. 188.

[4] Gregory Bracken, ‘The Shanghai lilong. A new concept of home in China’, International Institute for Asian Studies, Issue 86 (Summer, 2020). <https://www.iias.asia/the-newsletter/article/shanghai-lilong-new-concept-home-china>

[5] Ibid.

[6] Renee Y. Chow. ‘In a Field of Party Walls: Drawing Shanghai’s Lilong.” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 73: 1 (2014), p. 19.

[7] Ibid. pp. 20-23.