Everyone knows the City God Temple and Confucius Temple in the Old Town, but few know the area was once a vibrant market and a cradle of daring new education ideas. Yao Minji explores.

One day in June 1932, an unusual celebrity fashion show attracted hundreds of onlookers at the corner of Penglai and Zhonghua roads in what is commonly known as the Laoximen (鑰佽タ闂�), or Old West Gate, in today’s Huangpu District.

Around a dozen top movie stars modeled form-fitting qipao made of traditional, handwoven cloth (tu bu 鍦熷竷). It was common to add the word tu, connoting unfashionable to the words for traditional, handmade products, while yang (娲�), connoting high-end, was added to imported goods, such as mass-produced textiles.

This particular fashion show was organized by scholar and educator Zhang Yi, who invited many cotton farmers and weavers to set up vending stalls on site and promote traditional tu bu.

As a part of the campaign to promote domestically made products, the show was a great success and tu bu became trendy for a short period of time.

Only 15 minutes’ walk from the City God Temple (Cheng Huang Miao 鍩庨殟搴�), the site of the fashion show is now a modern residential community. But in the 1930s, the area was the prosperous Penglai Market, a rectangular open mall with more than 150 vendors. Built by a Chinese businessman in 1936, it was the largest platform in the city for domestically made products and it was always buzzing.

“It was one of my favorite places in my childhood,” 87-year-old Ren Xiulian tells Shanghai Daily in a telephone interview from California where she now lives. 

“Now everyone only knows about the City God Temple and the Confucius Temple, but Penglai Road area was once equally famous, if not more. You could find basically everything in that market, from candies to bicycles, and from stationery to electric appliances,” she says.

In addition to the market, the area contained a theater, a skating rink, a donkey race course, a book market, a flower market and a flea market, among others. The main Penglai Market was burned by Japanese troops in 1937. Other venues were also damaged and gradually disappeared, leaving the once-prosperous area a little-known part of the city.

Daughter of a businessman and a teacher, Ren attended a girl’s middle school three blocks from the market. It was also where her mother went to school. Today it is the coed No. 9 Middle School, but at the time it was the Bridgman School, the earliest girls’ school, founded by American missionary Elijah Coleman Bridgman (1801-61) and his missionary wife Eliza Jane Gillett. She ran the school for 15 years.

It was founded in 1850, seven years after Shanghai opened its port to foreign trade and a time when traditional Chinese ideas about gender prevailed. Sending girls to school was unheard of back then. Teachers had to go out on the street to recruit orphans and poor children. The first class contained around 20 students.

As the graduates started getting good jobs such as secretarial work at foreign firm and housekeeping for foreigners, the school became better known. Better-off families started to send daughters. Early graduates included Ni Kwei-tseng, mother of the famous Soong sisters.

“In the 1930s when I went to the school, it was much more acceptable for girls to go to school,” Ren says. “I don’t remember the tuition, but it wasn’t cheap. My father had only just started his own business. He and his friends were lower middle-class, but they all sent their daughters to various girls’ schools. He wanted me to be a teacher, like my mom.”

Ren had around 40 classmates. Curriculum included English, science, mathematics as well as some classic Chinese texts. She briefly played on the school volleyball team.

Some of the city’s oldest schools were built in this area, including the original Dragon Gate Institute (Long Men Shu Yuan), which evolved into Shanghai High School in today’s Xuhui District. The city’s first modern primary school, Meixi Primary School, still operates in the area today, as does Jingye Middle School, the oldest middle school.

The old saying goes that “a carp jumps over the dragon gate to become a dragon,” a common saying describing the process of the traditional imperial exam, in which poor students could jump up the ladder, and Dragon Gate Institute, named after this saying, was built in 1855 by Ding Richang, a well-known politician and military strategist.

The institute was inside the vacation house of a famous book collector, on today’s Shangwen Road. The street name literally means respect culture/literature/civilization. Twenty students were picked from nearly 300 candidates who took two rounds of tests. Tuition was free and students received subsidies.

In late 19th century, China’s weakened state and ineffective government forced many intellectuals to rethink the education system. For more than 1,300 years, students learned in si shu (绉佸【), literally private schools, often sponsored by wealthy people. Children in the area learned classic texts, such as “Bai Jia Xing” (“Hundred Family Surnames” 鐧惧濮�) and the “Analects of Confucius.”

Some learned just enough to be literate, while others went on to take the imperial exam, leap over the dragon gate and become dragons. They had to pass several rounds of examinations before taking the final exam. These exams came to be considered useless, demonstrating only familiarity with classic texts.

New types of schools sprouted all over the country and in Shanghai, Dragon Gate was among the earliest. They were somewhere between the traditional si shu and modern Western schools.

Curriculum still focused on classic texts but they were taught in a more pragmatic way, encouraging students to apply them to the present day and consider more realistic issues.

Ren’s father was already a xiu cai (绉�鎵�), meaning he passed the first round of the imperial exam after years of study in a private school. He soon switched to a new type of institution, similar to Dragon Gate, and finally entered a shipping and maritime studies school, like many of his friends who attended modern schools.

Dragon Gate Institute was relocated and gradually evolved into today’s Shanghai High School. The original site was rebuilt in the 1930s into Long Men Village, today one of the city’s longest and most twisted lanes. Seventy-six houses of Chinese, Western and mixed architectural styles are still in the lane.

A Dragon Gate alumna, educator Zhang Huanlun, built the city’s first modern primary school in 1878, Meixi Primary School, which still stands today. He once wrote that the traditional Chinese education system could only accommodate a small number of people and could no longer adapt to rapidly evolving society.

He suggested the best way to help the country was to nurture future leaders who were not only good at reciting texts, but also could master practical problems. He suggested using Western schools as models and translating their textbooks.

Meixi Primary School was one of the first to merge Chinese and Western education methods to offer classic Chinese texts, as well as English and French classes. It also offered physical education and semi-military training. A few numbers down the street from the primary school is the oldest existing middle school in Shanghai, Jingye Middle School.