Travel Notes #石库门
Yu Garden: A Private Garden of Four Centuries Ago, Tucked Behind Nanjing Road
Yu Garden sits in the north-east of the old town in Huangpu. It began in 1559, when Pan Yunduan, a provincial treasurer of Sichuan, built it to keep his father comfortable, hence the name meaning joy for the elders. The original covered under thirty mu; today, with the Inner Garden, it is about 1.8 hectares, the only fully surviving Ming garden in Shanghai and a national protected monument since 1982. The great rockery of Taihu stone at the entrance is Ming original, and outside the gate lie the nine-turning bridge and the noise of the City God Temple.
Shanghai: Two Shores of the Huangpu, Foreign Architecture and a Skyline
Shanghai goes by the short form Hu and the old name Shen, sits where the Yangtze meets the sea and belongs to East China. The Huangpu divides the city in two: west, the foreign-built architecture, lane houses and plane-tree streets of the treaty-port years; east, the towers of Lujiazui. From the museum at People Square to the Bund, across on a two-yuan ferry, up to the 546-metre deck of the Shanghai Tower; then turn into the old town for Ming rockeries at Yu Garden, the nine-turning bridge at the City God Temple, or an afternoon in the narrow lanes of Xintiandi and Tianzifang.