Columbia Circle: the American suburb beyond the Settlement, the boy from Amherst Avenue, and what is left, 1925–2026

The short answer. Columbia Circle (哥伦比亚住宅圈, Gēlúnbǐyà zhùzhái quān) was a garden suburb for foreigners, laid out in 1928 on farmland west of the International Settlement and sold as an American subdivision: about seventy lots of one or two mu each, villas in a choice of ten styles, and a country club across the road. The land became saleable because in 1925 the Shanghai Municipal Council had built roads across it, outside its own boundary and against Chinese protests. The architect was László Hudec (邬达克, Wūdákè), who built his own house on the same road. Between 21 and 29 houses went up, depending on whose count you take. One of the children who grew up there was J. G. Ballard, whose novel Empire of the Sun begins in a house on Amherst Avenue. The developer collapsed in 1935, the war emptied the estate, and after 1949 the villas were divided among many families. Today the core of the estate is Lanes 211 and 329 of Xinhua Road (新华路, Xīnhuá Lù), still known locally as the “foreign lanes” (外国弄堂, wàiguó lòngtáng).

Why was there farmland to sell? The roads of 1925

The International Settlement had a fixed boundary. What the Council could not annex, it reached with roads built beyond it. These “extra-settlement roads” (越界筑路, yuèjiè zhùlù) were policed by the Council’s men and lined with houses that paid the Council’s rates. The Shanghai Concessions Gazetteer counts 39 of them built between 1900 and 1925, about 75 km in all, and gives its verdict plainly: the Council expanded in fact if not in name, at the cost of Chinese sovereignty, and the roads caused constant disputes with local people and officials. (The story of the boundary and its outside roads is told in more detail in the boundary stones and outside roads.)

The last great burst came in 1925. The Gazetteer’s list of roads begun “around 1925” reads like a map of today’s Changning district: Amherst Avenue (安和寺路, Ānhésì Lù), Columbia Road (哥伦比亚路), Edinburgh Road, Lincoln Avenue, Jernigan Road, Monument Road, Fahwa Road and a dozen more. The timing was not chance. The Gazetteer’s appendix on the western roads says the Council took advantage of the two Jiangsu–Zhejiang wars of 1924 and 1925, when the warlords who held Shanghai had other things to think about, to push several roads across the fields at once.

The Council’s own annual report for 1925 gives the engineer’s side. New roads outside the Settlement were “formed and graded” for 14.618 miles that year, with 29 wooden bridges and 1,409 yards of culvert. West of the Western District alone, “practically 15 miles” had been formed. Buying the land, the report admits, had been hard: more than 2,000 separate holdings were affected, and dealing with each owner was “practically impossible”. It then insists that the country people welcomed the roads, as shown by the fact that almost none of the boundary stones had been pulled up, that the opposition was “inspired”, and that owners would be the first to suffer if the roads were closed, because their land had risen in value.

Both things can be true at once, and the second is the reason Columbia Circle exists. A road turned a rice field into a building plot. The bridge list in the same report includes one on “Columbia Avenue” over the Fahwah Creek, a timber bridge built to carry the heaviest vehicles. That creek, the 法华浜 (Fǎhuá Bāng), was filled in 1958 to make what is now Fahua Town Road. By 1928 Columbia Road was a working road: the Council ashed it fifteen feet wide for 6,000 feet from Great Western Road, laid a kerb and a concrete footpath at its junction with Hungjao Road, and spent 599 taels on its upkeep that year.

The Chinese authorities did not accept any of this. In March 1925 they opened a police sub-station at Caojiadu with sixteen posts. In 1926 the warlord Sun Chuanfang put Ding Wenjiang in charge of negotiations over the roads, and in June Chinese police set up posts on Hungjao Road and three other western roads. The Council answered by threatening to stall the handover of the Mixed Court, and the fixed posts became mobile patrols. The Nationalist government in Nanjing and the new Shanghai municipality set up in 1927 were firmer. In August 1929 its police stopped the Council opening a road off Hungjao Road, and the Council promised there would be no more outside roads. In June 1932 the two sides agreed that administration and policing of the outside roads would pass to China. The agreement was never carried out. Columbia Circle was built in that gap: on land that was Chinese, along roads the Council patrolled, sold to buyers who wanted the Settlement’s services without its crowding.

Who were Asia Realty and Frank Raven?

The developer was the Asia Realty Company (普益地产公司, Pǔyì Dìchǎn Gōngsī), and behind it stood an American engineer, Frank Jay Raven (雷文, Léiwén). The Shanghai Famous Buildings Gazetteer gives his career in a few lines: he arrived in 1904 to work in a municipal public works office, founded the China Realty Company in 1905, set up the Raven Trust Company in 1914, and from 1922 chaired Asia Realty, founded that year. The Gazetteer calls China Realty the first company of its kind in Shanghai; it does not say which council employed him, and the phrase it uses for his first job is ambiguous.

The Council’s records show how far Raven’s companies reached. In its 1925 report, Asia Realty turns up not in the west but in the industrial Eastern District, surrendering 4.217 mow at Holung and Sungfow roads for 10,542 taels, and 1.140 mow at Kwenming and Ward roads at 2,800 taels a mow. In a Land Commission case the same year, the Council’s secretary explained that a disputed property had been registered in the name of “Mr. F. J. Raven” and that Asia Realty had handled the early correspondence. Raven’s firms bought, built and sold across the city. By the time of the 1934–35 guidebook All About Shanghai, “Asia Realty Co. (Fed. Inc., U.S.A.)” had its office at 50 Nanking Road, and the guide’s preface thanks Hugo Sandor of Asia Realty for editorial help. Sandor, a Hungarian, was the company’s executive manager. He is the link to the architect.

According to Feng Li (冯立), an architect at Shanghai Jiao Tong University who has studied Hudec’s work and wrote the fullest modern account of the estate, Asia Realty bought more than 100 mu of farmland along Columbia Road and Amherst Avenue as soon as the roads were finished. A mu is about 667 square metres, so 100 mu is roughly 6.7 hectares, or sixteen acres.

The plan: an American subdivision in a Chinese field

Feng Li writes that the plan was launched three years after the purchase. The land was divided into about seventy rectangular lots, each of one to two mu, the shape of an American suburban subdivision rather than a Shanghai lane. Sandor chose Hudec, then building his reputation, as chief architect. The houses went up between 1929 and 1932, and by 1930 twenty-one villas and a garage building had been completed.

The Famous Buildings Gazetteer gives a different total. It says Asia Realty built 29 two-storey garden houses, designed by Hudec and built by the Chai Shun Kee (柴顺记) construction firm, on 30,000 square metres of land with 20,000 square metres of floor space. The list of Hudec’s works compiled for the 2013 book Shanghai Hudec Architecture also gives 29 villas and dates the project to 1928. The two figures need not contradict each other: 21 is Feng Li’s count for 1930, 29 may be the final number. Either way, fewer than half of the seventy lots got a Columbia Circle house. Some were later built on by others, and the Gazetteer’s own list of houses in the lanes includes several that date from well after 1932.

The name was a sales pitch. “Columbia” was a poetic name for the United States; the road was already called Columbia Road, probably after the American club then moving there. “Circle” meant a social circle as much as a shape: Feng Li reads it as an American-built estate attached to an American club. The sales picture shows the idea. Painted from the air “looking north”, it shows the plots ruled out across green fields, a handful of red-roofed houses, Columbia Road running off towards the city, and the walled club compound beyond. A small inset map is headed 普益模范村, “the Asia Realty model village”. The legend adds a careful line: “subdivision plan subject to re-arrangement”.

The brochure, which Feng Li found among Hudec’s papers in the University of Victoria’s special collections, made four promises, each with its own illustration: a convenient location, ownership, comfort inside and good looks outside. What a buyer could actually own on Chinese land outside the Settlement, the sources used here do not say. What the brochure offered in place of certainty was choice. Hudec drew ten styles: English, Italian, Spanish, San Clemente, California, Colonial, Florida, San Diego, Hollywood and English Cottage. The list is a tour of American West Coast suburbs of the 1920s, offered to Europeans in China. The English and English Cottage types sold best, and Hudec split the cottage into four variants, A to D. Buyers chose a package of style, features and plan, and some sent their own sketches for Hudec to work up. The result, Feng Li says, was that no two houses were the same.

The timing was right for about two years. All About Shanghai gives the value of all new building in the Shanghai area as $63 million in 1929 and $100 million in 1930, then $87 million in 1931 and $50 million in 1932. Inside the Settlement, permits for foreign residences fell from 380 in 1929 and 327 in 1930 to 97 in 1931 and 95 in 1932. (Columbia Circle, outside the boundary, is not in those figures, but it sold into the same market.) Feng Li quotes Asia Realty’s annual report for 1930: buyers came in numbers that spring and summer, and the company’s net income was 165 per cent higher than in 1929. Land prices along Columbia Road and Amherst Avenue had been rising since 1926. The figures for 1931 and 1932 show the boom ending, and with it the building of the Circle.

The houses: who built what, and who lived in them

The Famous Buildings Gazetteer walks through the lanes house by house, and its entries show how mixed the estate became.

At 315 Xinhua Road, on the street front, is an English country house of 1930: steep red-tiled double roofs with deep eaves, white roughcast above red brick, a projecting gable with black timbering, doors and windows made from knotty timber left with the marks of the adze. It has a false third floor, 900 square metres of floor space and a garden of more than 700. Local legend, which the Gazetteer repeats as no more than that, says a foreign oil magnate bought it for his son’s wedding. After 1949 it became a sanatorium for the city’s No. 1 Commerce Bureau, and it is now company offices.

Inside Lanes 211 and 329, the Gazetteer picks out three houses. No. 1, Lane 211, is Spanish: two storeys and a partial third, pale yellow render, a light balcony on spiral brackets with S-curved iron railings, an arched porch, and two chimneys each topped with a row of three pointed arches. It stands on a plot of 934 square metres and dates from around 1940, which places it after the Asia Realty years. It was the private villa of the British manager of the Columbia record factory in Shanghai. After 1949 an agent looked after it, and the newly founded Shanghai orchestra rented it for its Chinese-instrument ensemble; some of the original furniture stayed, including a long kitchen table and the cupboards. The owner came back to see it at the end of 1957. Around 1980 his daughter came too, photographed the house she had grown up in, and was especially glad to find the gardenia she had planted by the door still flowering. She gave the family then living there a packet of British stamps.

No. 2, Lane 211, is an English country house with a tennis court and small pool. The Gazetteer says it belonged to Gilbert Reid (李佳白, Lǐ Jiābái), an American missionary who founded the Shangxian Tang (尚贤堂), an institute for bringing Chinese and foreign elites together, first in Beijing and then in Shanghai. It also says the house was built by Asia Realty and Chai Shun Kee and finished in 1925, three years before the Circle plan was launched. Either the house predates the estate, or the date is wrong; the sources here do not settle it.

No. 36, Lane 329 is the oddest building in the estate and, the Gazetteer says, the only two-storey round villa in China: an exposed reinforced-concrete frame with red brick infill, a central hall with a small European fountain ringed in marble, hardwood floors and glass-brick screens. It was first used by the Spanish legation, then sold to a family named Guo, then bought by the family of Zhou Junshi (周均时, Zhōu Jūnshí). Zhou, a physicist trained in Berlin, became president of Tongji University in July 1940 and moved it, as the war required, from Kunming to Sichuan. He was arrested by the Nationalist authorities in Chengdu in May 1949, held in the Bai Gongguan prison in Chongqing, and killed on 27 November 1949. The city listed the house in 1999.

The estate’s first residents, Feng Li writes, were more than 90 per cent foreign: bankers, doctors, civil servants, a fashion designer, the upper middle of Shanghai’s foreign community. Chinese developers took up the idea on the same road. At Lane 593, in 1933, the developer Wu Qida (吴其达) built Meiquan Villas (梅泉别墅), twenty modern two-storey houses with garages, to designs by Xi Fuquan (奚福泉), whom the Gazetteer counts among China’s first generation of modern architects. The name came from a small fountain garden by the entrance planted with plum trees; the garden was destroyed in the Cultural Revolution, and only the base of the basin is left. Meiquan Villas were listed in 2000.

Hudec on Columbia Road

Hudec was not only the estate’s architect; he was its neighbour. Born in Banská Bystrica in 1893, he had been taken prisoner in the First World War, escaped from Siberia and reached Shanghai in November 1918. The Moore Memorial Church was finished in 1931 and the Park Hotel, his best-known building, in 1934.

He built his own house at what is now 129 Panyu Road, a little north of the Circle on Columbia Road. The University of Victoria’s catalogue of his drawings includes heating and plumbing plans for “Mr. L. E. Hudec residence, house on Columbia Road”, dated 1930, and the Hudec Project, which documents his life, says the house was finished by 1931. It is half-timbered, in the English manner that Hudec, a Central European, would also have known from Germany and Hungary. It was the family home only for a few years: in 1937 the Hudecs found it too large, let it, and moved into a flat in Hubertus Court, a new ten-storey block. The house is now the Hudec Memorial Hall.

Further up Columbia Road, at what was No. 22 and is now inside the 1262 Yan’an West Road compound, stands another Hudec villa with a better story attached. The Famous Buildings Gazetteer says Hudec built it for himself but never moved in, and that when he ran into difficulties over the Moore Memorial Church, Sun Ke (孙科, Sūn Kē), Sun Yat-sen’s son and a senior Nationalist politician, helped him out; in gratitude Hudec sold him the house cheaply. The Gazetteer dates the house to 1920, which cannot be right for a house on a road built in 1925; Hudec’s works list gives 1930. It is a mixture the Gazetteer enjoys describing: Spanish in its low red-tiled roofs and moulded eaves, Italian Renaissance in its varied window heads and three pointed arches on the ground floor, plainly American in its clean walls, with a Chinese garden of lawns and a winding watercourse in front. It has 1,051 square metres of floor space. Sun Ke sold it in 1949, before leaving for Hong Kong; it went first to the Shanghai branch of the Central Epidemic Prevention Bureau and from 1953 to the Shanghai Institute of Biological Products. It was listed as a protected monument on 25 September 1989.

The club across the fields

The Columbia Country Club gave the Circle its centre of gravity. The 1934–35 All About Shanghai lists it at 301 Great Western Road as “an American club, purely social”, whose membership, as in most Shanghai clubs, was “not limited by racial lines”, and adds that this “country” club was “really in the country”. It was at its best in summer, the guide says, for its spacious verandah and its pool, and it had a few rooms for male members. The same guide recommends Columbia Road, with Great Western, Hungjao and the Rubicon, as one of the quiet outlying roads favoured for Sunday riding, and lists a Columbia and Great Western Riding Academy down the road at No. 470.

The club’s own history is less certain than its address. The local history site Historic Shanghai says the club for Americans was founded in 1918 on Route Doumer in the French Concession, outgrew its premises, and moved in the 1920s to about five acres of farmland at the corner of Great Western Road and Columbia Road, land acquired by Asia Realty. The buildings, in Spanish Revival style, were designed by the architect Elliott Hazzard. There were tennis courts, an outdoor pool with arcades, a bowling alley, billiards and squash. A 2019 page from the Shanghai government’s information office gives 1927 to 1942 for the club’s American years and credits the design to Hudec. Hudec did build next door, for Sun Ke; the design of the club itself is usually given to Hazzard, and the government page cites no source.

The boy from Amherst Avenue

James Graham Ballard was born in the International Settlement on 15 November 1930. His father, also James, was a chemist with the Calico Printers’ Association of Manchester who rose to run its Shanghai subsidiary, the China Printing and Finishing Company. The boy went to the Cathedral School of Holy Trinity, and the family lived at Amherst Avenue.

The address itself is disputed. In a letter of 1985 Ballard gave it as “31A Amherst Avenue” and said the house stood very close to the junction of two roads, one of them “the former Columbia Road”; in 2007 he wrote “31”. Feng Li gives 100 Amherst Avenue. The entrance today is 508 Panyu Road, on the old Columbia Road just north of the corner. Feng Li also adds, in a reply to readers in 2016, that Ballard’s house was not in the original Columbia Circle plan but was a later addition, and that, like the other later houses, it was not necessarily designed by Hudec. He gave no source, and said he had found no detailed records.

Ballard’s letters describe the house as he remembered it in 1945. It faced a lane running in from Amherst Avenue, treeless then. A brick garage for two cars was attached on the left as you faced the front door, and beside it a tradesman’s doorway led to the servants’ quarters and kitchen. There was one staircase. Upstairs, off a corridor running east to west, were three bedrooms, each with its own bathroom. The garden was about half an acre, with no trees near the house. A Daily Telegraph piece of 1991, written when he went back, describes it as Tudor outside and American inside, with five bathrooms and air conditioning, and the household as about nine Chinese servants and a White Russian nanny.

Feng Li’s summary of Ballard’s memoir, Miracles of Life (2008), fills in the life: a Buick with a chauffeur, Coca-Cola and ice cream, American films, toys ordered from London, strict lessons at the Cathedral School, and parents whose adult life seemed one long round of parties. Feng Li notes that the Chinese servants in the memoir have numbers or titles rather than names. Columbia Circle was built for exactly this life: a house in the country, with the club and the pool across the field.

The developer falls, 1935

Asia Realty did not outlast the depression. On 24 May 1935 the American Consul General in Shanghai, Edwin Cunningham, cabled Washington that three “closely allied American concerns”, the American-Oriental Banking Corporation, the American Oriental Finance Corporation and the Asia Realty Company, had closed that morning and would ask the United States Court for China to appoint liquidators. The immediate effect, he reported, was a mild run on a Chinese bank, the National Industrial Bank, and nervousness among the rest. The same telegram notes that Chinese banks were making it hard to change notes into silver in large amounts.

The collapse ended in court. In February 1936 TIME reported that Frank Jay Raven had been convicted in the US Court for China on seven counts of embezzlement and sentenced to five years in the federal prison at McNeil Island. The houses, by then, belonged to their owners; the estate outlived its developer.

War: the circle broken

After Pearl Harbor the Japanese occupied the International Settlement, in December 1941, and Americans and Britons in Shanghai became enemy nationals. The club was the first part of the Circle to go. From the autumn of 1942, according to Greg Leck’s history of the civilian camps as summarised on Wikipedia, the Japanese used the Columbia Country Club to hold Allied nationals brought in from the outports while they waited for the few repatriation ships. In May 1943 it became an internment camp in its own right. Space was short; internees slept in the bowling alley and the bars. The pool was used at first and then drained, because there were no chemicals to keep it clean. In all, 386 people were held there. In April 1945 the remaining internees were moved to a camp at Yangtzepoo. Historic Shanghai adds that Elliott Hazzard, the club’s architect, was interned in his own building and later moved to Lunghua, where he died.

The houses went the same way. Feng Li writes that some were occupied by the Japanese army and some by officials of the Wang Jingwei government, set up at Nanjing in 1940. The Ballards were among the Allied families sent away in early 1943, to the Lunghua Civil Assembly Centre, a school compound south of the city whose windows had been broken in the fighting of 1937. Leck counts 1,988 people interned there. The family stayed for about two and a half years, until the war ended. In late 1945 Ballard, his mother and his sister sailed for England on the SS Arawa. He was fifteen.

Empire of the Sun: the house in the book and on screen

Ballard waited almost forty years to write about it. Empire of the Sun was published in 1984, won the Guardian Fiction Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and was shortlisted for the Booker. The novel opens with Jim’s house on Amherst Avenue and then takes away his parents: Jim is separated from them when war comes to Shanghai and survives the camp alone. In fact the Ballards were interned together. In Miracles of Life Ballard described the book as “firmly based on true experiences”, while admitting that some events were imagined; former internees have pointed out other liberties.

Steven Spielberg’s film began shooting on 1 March 1987. The unit spent about three weeks in Shanghai, filming on main streets that, according to studio notes cited by the American Film Institute, had not been closed for filmmakers since 1959, before moving to England. Ballard himself can be glimpsed, uncredited, as a guest at the fancy-dress party. The house was not filmed on Amherst Avenue: the 1991 Telegraph piece says the production found it unusable and recreated Jim’s home in England at Sunningdale, and the AFI catalogue notes that the credits also suggest Knutsford. An English commuter village stood in for a Shanghai suburb that had been built to look English.

What happened to the Circle after 1949

After 1949 Columbia Circle took a new name, Xinhua Bieshu (新华别墅, “Xinhua villas”). Feng Li describes what followed in three steps. First, houses were divided among several households, some passed to the army for officers’ families, and some were taken over by public institutions. Second, during the Cultural Revolution more families were moved into the houses that were still homes. Third, from the 1980s some front gardens along Xinhua Road were opened up as public green strips under the plane trees.

The road changed names more often than the houses. Amherst Avenue was renamed Chahar Road and later Fahua Road before it became Xinhua Road in 1965. It acquired a political role: before Pudong airport and the Yan’an elevated road were built, visiting heads of state were driven from Hongqiao airport into town along it, and Shanghainese still call it a “state guest road”. Columbia Road became Panyu Road (番禺路, Pānyú Lù).

Ballard’s house followed a path of its own, which he tracked from England. In 1985 a correspondent, Peter Brigg, sent him photographs: the house looked “almost ramshackle”, he wrote, and its ground floor held offices and a depository for Chinese machinery manuals. In 1991 he went back for the first time and found it “a near ruin” but still recognisably the house of 1945. The front door was disused, a new entrance had been cut from the old Columbia Road, and the open upstairs verandah had been enclosed, with the bedrooms knocked into one long room. In September 2007 a reader of Ballard’s, David McGrath, found it reopened as a restaurant, SH508, with the original front door bricked up and the pool gone. Ballard joked in a letter that it ought to have become a McDonald’s or a KFC. He died in Shepperton on 19 April 2009. The restaurant closed that autumn, and over the following ten months the interior was stripped and a new brick-and-concrete structure built alongside the old frame. A visitor in 2011 found a private club in the building and described its structure as intact. What it is now has not been checked on site for this article.

The club had a steadier afterlife. The US Navy used it after the war, and from 1951 to 2014 the site belonged to the Shanghai Institute of Biological Products, which kept the clubhouse, the pool building and Sun Ke’s villa. The developer that took over the site reopened it in 2018 under the old estate’s English name, Columbia Circle, with the Chinese name 上生·新所 (Shàngshēng Xīnsuǒ); the clubhouse became a bookshop in December 2020. So the name “Columbia Circle” now belongs, in everyday Shanghai use, to the club grounds rather than the houses.

The houses themselves were caught by the conservation rules of the 1990s and 2000s. The round house was listed in 1999 and Meiquan Villas in 2000. In 2003 Xinhua Road and its surroundings became one of the city’s historic conservation areas, with more than 270 villas, and the road is on the list of streets that will never be widened. Since about 2000, Feng Li writes, houses with clear title have become restaurants, boutique hotels and design offices, while others in the lanes still house a dozen families each. In 2020 the Xinhua Road sub-district began a public-space project in the lanes with the Dayu community design group, whose series on the “foreign lanes” published Feng Li’s history.

Where the sources disagree

• How many houses. Feng Li counts 21 villas and a garage by 1930, out of about 70 planned lots. The Famous Buildings Gazetteer and the Hudec works list say 29. The Gazetteer also includes houses from 1933, around 1940 and 1946 among the lane’s buildings, so “Columbia Circle” in later writing often means the whole quarter, not Asia Realty’s estate.
• When the land was bought. Feng Li has Asia Realty buying “as soon as the roads were finished”, in 1925. The Gazetteer says the company “bought much land from the 1930s”; it also dates Gilbert Reid’s house, which it says Asia Realty built, to 1925.
• Raven’s first job. The Gazetteer places him in a municipal public works office in 1904 without making clear whether it was the Settlement’s or the French Concession’s.
• The Sun Ke villa. The Gazetteer gives 1920; Hudec’s works list gives 1930. A 1920 house on a road opened in 1925 is unlikely.
• The club. Founded in 1918 (Historic Shanghai) or active from 1927 (Shanghai information office, which probably dates the move); designed by Elliott Hazzard (Historic Shanghai) or by Hudec (the government page). The institute took the site in 1951 (Historic Shanghai) or 1953 (the Gazetteer, for Sun Ke’s villa).
• Ballard’s address. 31A Amherst Avenue (Ballard, 1985), 31 (Ballard, 2007), or 100 (Feng Li). Whether Hudec designed it is unknown.
• The roads. The Council’s engineer in 1925 called local opposition “inspired” and the roads welcome; the Chinese Gazetteer calls them an encroachment on sovereignty. Both are describing the same fields.
• The house today. Paul French reported in 2010 that the inside had been gutted; Spike Magazine in 2011 found the structure intact. Both may be right about different parts of the building.

What to look for

Start at the corner. Stand at Xinhua Road and Panyu Road. This is the crossing of Amherst Avenue and Columbia Road, the two roads the Council pushed across the fields in 1925; Columbia Circle was built in the angle east of here, between the two roads. Walking times and metro exits for this area have not yet been checked on site.

Walk east along Xinhua Road. Look for the half-timbered gables of No. 315 behind its brick wall on the north side. Then find the entrances of Lanes 211 and 329. The lanes are people’s homes, not a museum: keep to the lane, keep your voice down, and do not go through gates. Inside, look for the variety the brochure promised. English cottage roofs sweep down almost to the ground floor; Spanish houses have pale render, red barrel tiles and arched porches. Look for the two arched chimney tops on No. 1, Lane 211, and the circular No. 36, Lane 329. Look also for the signs of later lives: extra doors and meters on a single villa, kitchens built into garages, and front gardens turned into public lawns along the road.

Walk north up Panyu Road. No. 508, near the corner, is the house Ballard grew up in; it is private, and its current use was not checked for this article. Further north at No. 129 is Hudec’s own house, the Hudec Memorial Hall. Opening times are not given here because they have not been checked.

At Yan’an West Road, the former Columbia Country Club is open as the Columbia Circle development. Look for the clubhouse’s arcades and red tiles, the restored pool with its arcades, and Sun Ke’s villa. The fields, the creeks and the riding roads are gone; so are most of the club grounds and Ballard’s pool. The Fahua creek that Columbia Road once bridged lies under Fahua Town Road.

Lunghua. The site of the camp is Shanghai High School, far to the south in Xuhui. It is a working school, not open to visitors, and there is no public memorial.