Zhang Yuan

Zhang Yuan (张园, Zhāng Yuán) is a compound of restored shikumen (“stone-gate”) lane houses one block south of Nanjing Road West, beside the Metro station. The houses are now shops, cafés and event spaces, so you can walk through the gates and into the lanes without intruding on anyone’s home. It is one of the easiest places to see how a shikumen block fits together.

A garden before it was a lane

The name comes from a garden, not a house. In 1882 Zhang Shuhe (张叔和), a wealthy merchant from Wuxi, bought the land and laid out the Weichun Garden (味莼园). He opened it to the public in 1885, and it became the largest public gathering place in late-Qing Shanghai, nicknamed the city’s “number one garden”.

Its centrepiece was Arcadia Hall (安垲第), which held about 1,000 people and was then the tallest building in Shanghai. In the 1900s it was where political meetings and speeches were held; Sun Yat-sen, Huang Xing and Cai Yuanpei all spoke there. The garden also staged shows: in 1890 a Western performer parachuted from a balloon launched from the grounds, and the North-China Herald reported it.

Twenty-eight owners, one block

The garden declined and closed in 1918. After Zhang died a year later the land was sold, divided into 28 lots and built up by 28 separate owners. By 1935 the lots were covered with lane houses. That is why Zhang Yuan does not look uniform: classic shikumen terraces stand next to newer-style lane houses, a four-storey detached house at No. 41, and No. 77, a building with a central dome that now has the highest protection grade in the compound.

The count of what survives depends on the source. The Paper gives 43 buildings, 174 door numbers and 2,053 rooms, split by the main lane, Lane 590 Weihai Road, into 17 buildings in the west zone and 26 in the east. The developer’s release says “over forty” buildings and 16 in the west zone.

From crowded homes to shopping lanes

After 1949 most of the houses became state-owned and were divided: up to ten households could share one building, and by the 1990s many homes still had no proper toilet. In 2018 the city decided to move everyone out and keep the buildings. More than 1,100 families left from January 2019; the last household signed in November 2020. The state-owned Jing’an Real Estate Group called it Shanghai’s first “protective expropriation”, keeping the houses rather than clearing the site.

The west zone, between Taixing Road and North Maoming Road, reopened at the end of November 2022, run by a joint venture of Swire Properties and the state-owned Jing’an Real Estate Group. The first part of the east zone followed on 30 June 2026. Building work continues on the rest, including an underground link to the Metro.

The result is closer to Xintiandi than to a museum: the shells and lanes are kept, the rooms are shops. What you get is the layout, the gates and the variety of house types, with no residents to disturb. For lanes where people still live, go to Tianzifang, and keep your voice down.