Retired mechanic Qu Yongfa is one of thousands of long-time residents moving out of derelict Hongzhen Old Street (虹镇老街) in Hongkou District. Qu has lived there for 62 years since he was born.

“Since back then, everyone said we would be relocated soon. Well, now it’s been more than 60 years since the area was just river, mud and tombs,” Qu says.

The street and its surrounding area — the largest remaining slum in Shanghai — once housed more than 100,000 people. Now, it’s being demolished, and residents are starting to move out today.

Some residents still use chamber pots since they don’t have toilets and plumbing and they cook outdoor with charcoal stoves — rarely seen in today’s Shanghai.

“There are two major elements in Shanghai’s development since it opened its port for trade in 1843 — foreigners who came for commerce and Chinese from nearby provinces who ran away from warfare and took refuge,” says Lu Qiguo, a historian at the Shanghai Municipal Archives.

Major refugee influx took place during the Boxer and Taiping Rebellions, while more flooded into the city during the Japanese invasion in the 1930s and the civil war in the 1940s.

“The two groups are equally significant to the city’s development and closely connected to each other,” he tells Shanghai Daily.

Early foreign businessmen and adventurers introduced all kinds of inventions, such as filtered tap water, gas lamps, electric lamps and rickshaws to make their lives far from home more comfortable and convenient.

They created more job opportunities, which attracted many peasants from nearby areas, especially when they lost their lands in conflicts. Battles were frequent and fierce in late 19th century and poor peasants from Zhejiang and Jiangsu provinces flooded into Shanghai.

The refugees often settled temporarily along rivers and railways, building houses with bamboo, grass and mud. These temporary hovels were also called gun di long (滚地龙), or rolling ground cages, because they were usually not high enough for a person to stand up inside.

The slums are also known as xia zhi jiao (下只角), or lower corner, meaning remote, high-crime areas for poor people.

The area is a rectangle bordered by Linping, Feihong and Tianbao roads. It is one of the city’s largest and most famous “lower corners.”

“My parents warned me (when I was young) not to tell my classmates where I came from, worried that they might discriminate against me,” recalls 33-year-old Jason Wu, who grew up in the area, got married and moved out three years ago.

He was the only one from his class at the Hongzhen Old Street Elementary School to score high enough in the entrance exam to get into the best middle school in the district, and then high school. It was then that he met classmates from outside the “lower corner” and felt the income and status gap.

“Back then, not many people were wealthy like today, but we were definitely especially poor. It didn’t take me long to understand why my parents warned me,” Wu says. “My wife didn’t want me to tell her parents that I’m from this area, either. They know it as a dangerous place of mobsters, prostitutes and gamblers. Growing up here, I didn’t feel it was that way, but I was happy to finally move out.”

Retired mechanic Qu doesn’t really want to move, despite the living conditions and the area’s reputation. Though both his parents were illiterate, Qu loved reading since he was little and started collecting books in 1970. He has collected nearly 100,000 books over the years and recently opened a second-hand bookstore in Zhabei District.

“I probably wouldn’t have collected so many books if I didn’t live in this area,” he says. “Only in this place was it possible to build extensions on our house to accommodate all these books. How could I have done that in an apartment building?”

Qu’s parents, among the early dwellers of the area, built a small two-floor cabin in 1950 when they first arrived.

Like most residents in the section, they put up with the temporary bamboo and grass houses for many years, hoping they would be relocated very soon. Word about demolition, renovation and relocation started circulating long before Qu was born.

“I ran away from home in suburban Jiangsu Province and moved here with my parents in the 1940s, not long after the place was completely destroyed during the war. Even then, people said the government planned to renovate the area and built nicer houses,” says 85-year-old Wu Aili, who thought she would die in her street.

Wu adds that the Hongzhen Old Street once contained a river and many people lived alongside it. Heping Park, only minutes away, used to be a graveyard for poor people. In those old days, Wu’s father pulled a rickshaw and her mother sold vegetables.

“It was basically the suburb, really far away from the downtown, which was for rich people and foreigners,” she recalls. “But my parents said it was still better than many other places. We probably would have starved to death if we didn’t come here.”

After Qu’s parents passed away in the 1980s, he rebuilt the house with bricks and expanded it into four floors, as did many of his neighbors. They all need more space and more permanent living conditions. They began to suspect the relocation would never happen.

People in these deep, twisting lanes let their imagination run wild, as they tried to expand their living spaces. Many tore down the original walls and built new ones until the alley between houses are so narrow that only one person could pass at a time. Virtually no houses are identical in the whole area.

Narrow lanes

“Only some 20 years ago, you still could drive cars into the lanes, but in some parts today, it’s difficult even to ride a bike,” says Wu. “For new kids delivering the mail, it usually takes them two or three months to learn their way around the area and deliver letters to the right address.”

Fifty-two-year-old Lao Wang is used to taking turns with his neighbor to open windows, since they kept expanding their second-floor rooms over the lane until the two windows were only centimeters apart.

“Sometimes, when I want to borrow something from my neighbor, instead of going downstairs and then upstairs in their house, we each open our window halfway and he can just hand it across,” Wang says, showing how he can touch the neighbor’s window from his quite easily.

An Anhui Province native, Wang moved to Lane 296 of Hongzhen Old Street 11 years ago and opened a small shop there, selling vegetables and house utensil. He is only one of a wave of migrant workers who moved to the city in the past 20 years, many living in places like Wang’s. Now around a third of the area’s population are from outside of Shanghai.

“It is one of the cheapest areas in downtown, and I save a lot in living cost and rent for the shop,” Wang says. “Many friends from home asked me to look for available housing here, and some of them have moved.”