Behind the stone gate: how Shanghai's shikumen lanes were built, let and divided, 1853–2022

The short answer. The shikumen (石库门, shíkùmén) is a terraced house built for letting, and almost everything about it follows from that. It was invented in the 1870s to replace the wooden shacks foreign merchants had thrown up for refugees, after the Municipal Council began to ban timber houses as fire risks. It spread because land in the settlements was valuable and the Chinese population kept growing: from about 75,000 in the International Settlement in 1870 to 759,839 in 1920. And it changed shape, from a two-storey house for one family to a building shared by four or five families, because rents rose faster than wages. In 1936 the cheapest room in a lane house cost nearly a fifth of a worker’s monthly pay. The lanes you can visit today are what survived a renewal programme that, by its own count, moved well over a million households between 1992 and 2022.

Why the settlements needed Chinese houses at all

The foreign settlements began on the principle that Chinese and foreigners would live apart (华洋分居), and only foreigners could take out permanent leases on land. Then in 1853 the Small Swords Society seized the walled city, and people fled north into the settlements. The Chinese population there rose from about 500 to more than 20,000. Foreign merchants, who held the leases, saw the opportunity: they put up rows of plank houses and let them, 800 in the English settlement alone.

The Taiping war turned that into a flood. As the Taiping armies came close in 1860 and 1862, merchants and gentry from Jiangsu and Zhejiang crowded in. The Shanghai Concessions Gazetteer puts the Chinese population of the settlements at 300,000 in 1860 and 500,000 by 1862, and the English settlement’s wooden rental houses at over 8,000. When the war ended the boom went with it. On Christmas Eve 1864 the British consul counted 6,256 occupied and 2,461 empty Chinese houses in the Settlement; builders stopped halfway and landlords cut rents to fill rooms.

The numbers still tell you who the town was really for. In 1865 the Anglo-American settlement had 12,491 Chinese-style houses and 357 Western ones. In 1873 the two settlements together had 11,919 Chinese-style buildings and 457 Western. The Settlement was governed by foreign ratepayers, but it was housed by Chinese tenants.

From plank rows to stone gates

The wooden rows burned easily, and they burned close together. After 1870, the gazetteer says, the Council suppressed them step by step, and the old-style shikumen lane house took their place: brick walls on a timber frame, two storeys, set in rows along a lane. Chinese Wikipedia, citing district gazetteers, gives 1869 for a ban; the Concessions Gazetteer, compiled from the Council’s own files, describes a gradual suppression from 1870 rather than a single date. The firms that did the rebuilding were the same trading houses that had built the shacks: Old Sassoon, Jardine, Matheson and a dozen others pulled down their plank rows around 1870 and put up two-storey brick houses on the same lots.

The plank rows had already given the city its word for a housing estate. The Shanghai Famous Buildings Gazetteer, in its survey of lane housing, notes that the rental rows were laid out in terraces and named “so-and-so li” (里, lǐ), an old word for a neighbourhood that the classics define as twenty-five households; by 1860, it says, the Settlement had 8,740 houses in such “li”. The alleys between them were longtang (弄堂, lòngtáng), the Wu-dialect word for a lane. The two words joined as lilong (里弄), the estate and its lanes, and outlived the timber.

Which brick lane came first is not settled. The national heritage entry for shikumen building craft names Xingren Li (兴仁里, Xīngrén Lǐ) on Ningbo Road, built in 1872 and demolished in 1980, as the earliest recorded. The Famous Buildings Gazetteer lists an older one, Gongshun Li (公顺里) on what is now Guangdong Road, which it dates to 1852, before the plank-house boom; it gives no source for the date. Its list of early lanes goes on through Hongde Li on Xiamen Road (1907) and three lanes by the old Shiliupu docks (1910). Almost none survives.

Property soon became a business in its own right. The British firm 德和洋行 (Déhé), founded in 1870, was the first foreign firm whose main trade was real estate; the Shanghai Land Investment Company followed in 1888 and came to own about 3,000 houses, most of them let to Chinese families and shopkeepers; Hardoon’s firm built two lanes on Bubbling Well Road with more than 100 houses between them. The ratepayers noticed. At their meeting in 1874 one proposed that no more Chinese houses be built east of Henan Road. He was opposed by a man named Smith, the largest owner of Chinese houses in the Settlement.

The house itself

A standard old-style shikumen is easiest to understand walking through it from the street. You enter through the gate that gives the house its name: in the gazetteer’s description, a frame of granite or red Ningbo sandstone about 1.4 metres wide and 2.8 high, holding two thick black-lacquered doors with brass or iron rings, under a stone arch with a triangular, rectangular or semicircular panel of moulded ornament above. Behind it is a small open courtyard, the tianjing (天井, tiānjǐng). Facing you across the courtyard is the main hall, the ketang (客堂, kètáng), about 4 metres wide and 6 deep, opening onto the courtyard through full-height folding windows; it was the room for gatherings, weddings and banquets. Wing rooms, xiangfang (厢房, xiāngfáng), flank the courtyard. Behind the hall is the staircase, then a rear courtyard half as deep as the front one, with a well, and then the single-storey kitchen, zaopijian (灶披间, zàopījiān), and storerooms, with a back door onto a rear lane. In later houses a small room was built over the kitchen, reached from the turn of the stair: the tingzijian (亭子间, tíngzijiān), north-facing, with a flat sun terrace above it for drying laundry.

The structure was Jiangnan, not European. The frame was the post-and-tie timber frame of the region’s farmhouses, four or five fir posts about 15 centimetres thick, inside brick walls; the gables often took the stepped “horse-head” or rounded “Guanyin hood” shapes of Jiangnan houses. What was new was the arrangement. A courtyard house of the region spread sideways; the shikumen was a courtyard house squeezed into a terrace, units back to back and side by side along a lane about 3 metres wide, closed to the outside by the gate wall in front and the high wall of the kitchen behind. The gazetteer borrows a line of verse for the effect: shut the door, and you were in a world of your own, however loud the neighbours.

The Council fixed the type in its Chinese building rules of 1901. A “Chinese house” was one whose weight rested on timber posts rather than walls. A standard house measured 24 feet by 12. Ordinary dwellings and shops could not exceed two storeys, and eaves and balconies could project no more than three feet over the street. The rules were rewritten in 1911, when plague threatened the city: ground floors had to be solid and hollow ceilings were banned, because rats lived in them. That year 5,000 houses in the Northern District had their floors filled and ceilings taken out, and 2,433 houses in a 250-foot strip along the Zhabei border were rebuilt as “rat-proof houses”.

The lane was the unit of building, not the house. The Council’s 1915 list of new works includes one block of 198 Chinese houses with four gatehouses, on four roads at once; the list warns that it counts blocks, and that “the number of houses would be considerably greater”. Gates on the main lane, a name ending in li (里) or fang (坊), and rows of identical doors inside: that was the developer’s product.

The boom: new-style lanes for a city of millions

The second wave came with the First World War and its aftermath. Between 1909 and 1918 the Council approved 43,025 new houses, more than 4,000 a year. In 1918–21 the yearly totals were 2,968, 3,131, 3,542 and 5,344, and in each year Chinese-style houses made up three-quarters or more: 4,064 of the 5,344 in 1921, against 66 Western-style. Between 1919 and 1931 more than 80,000 houses were built in the Settlement, about 6,000 a year, and more than 30,000 in the French Concession between 1915 and 1930. The French table for 1920 shows 6,901 Chinese-style houses built that year and 225 Western.

The houses changed as they multiplied. The Famous Buildings Gazetteer divides the shikumen into three generations. The early old-style houses, 1869 to 1910, kept the full three- or five-bay courtyard plan, two storeys, timber frame and lanes about 3 metres wide, with no distinction between main and side lanes. The late old-style houses, 1910 to 1919, were narrower, one or two bays with a single wing room; lanes were wider and straighter; the gate panels became Western pediments; balconies got cast-iron or wrought-iron rails, and floors went from Chinese fir to imported Oregon pine. Baokang Li off Avenue Joffre (1904) and Siwen Li on Xinzha Road (1914) belong to this group. The new-style or “improved” shikumen, 1919 to 1930, went to three storeys, with a back wing of two floors: kitchen below, tingzijian above. Main lanes widened to 4 metres or more, for cars, with side lanes of 3. Front walls dropped from 5 metres to 4. Concrete appeared in the tingzijian floors and sun terraces, brick replaced the stone gate frame, and the better houses had a water closet.

The gazetteer gives the reasons. Land prices had made big units unsaleable, families were getting smaller, and Shanghai’s middle class was splitting into many different budgets, each of which wanted its own size of house. The Concessions Gazetteer, from the Council’s side, dates the new type to about 1919 and counts Siwen Li, with 664 units in a single lane, as the largest shikumen group in the city.

Beyond the stone gate: the other lanes

By the 1920s the lane had become a format for everyone. Below the shikumen, the gazetteer notes a small number of lower “Cantonese-style” lanes, built for Cantonese and some Japanese residents. Above it came three newer types that kept the lane plan and dropped the stone gate.

The new-style lane (新式里弄), which the gazetteer calls a terrace of “linked small garden houses”, replaced the high-walled courtyard with a small open garden of 2 to 5 square metres behind a low wall or railing. Houses were three storeys, shallower and wider, with a living room, dining room, bedrooms, and bathrooms on two or three floors; main lanes were about 6 metres wide and side lanes 3.5. The garden lane (花园里弄) gave each house, or each pair, its own garden, sometimes larger than the house. The apartment lane (公寓里弄), mostly built from 1931 to 1945, put two to four flats on each landing of a three- or four-storey block and replaced the private walls with a gate at the lane mouth.

The gazetteer’s figures for 1950 give the proportions. New-style lanes covered 4.69 million square metres of floor space, 24.2 per cent of all lane housing; garden lanes 1.341 million, 6.92 per cent; apartment lanes 916,000, 4.73 per cent. On those figures, lane housing of all kinds came to about 19.4 million square metres, and the old shikumen, with the few Cantonese lanes, made up roughly the remaining two-thirds. Set against the 23.59 million square metres of housing the city counted at the end of 1949, lanes of all types were about four-fifths of all the housing in Shanghai.

Who lived there, and how many

The Council’s Health Department saw the result before anyone else. Its report for 1921 says rents had risen 30 to 100 per cent in five years. Families were adding beds wherever they fit: the kitchen was “invariably” a bedroom, food was cooked in the back yard, and “temporary partitions, lofts and sleeping stages” were cutting out light and air. The same report blames rents, not tenants: the alterations were made to pay “exorbitant” rents. In 1919 the Land Investment Company had raised its Chinese tenants’ rents twice in one year, by 15.5 per cent in all (the gazetteer also gives 15.12).

The mechanism was subletting. A tenant who could afford the lease on a whole house, the er fangdong (二房东, èr fángdōng), or “second landlord”, kept a room or two and let the rest. Each part of the house had its price. A Council survey of 1936 gives average monthly rents: 8 yuan for a whole upper floor, 5.36 for the front upper room, 5 for the front hall, 3.91 for the tingzijian, 3.33 for the kitchen, 2.45 for the back loft. The average monthly wage of workers that year was 14.08 yuan.

What the second landlords did to the houses is in the Council’s 1937 report on housing conditions, as summarised in the gazetteer. Almost no old lane house was unaltered. Courtyards were roofed over, halls split in two with lofts above, sun terraces walled in as rooms. A house built for one family of eight or nine now held four or five families; the worst case held fifteen. In 1933 the Council served 1,105 notices for building work done without a permit, mostly on Chinese houses: a third storey on top of a kitchen wing, a room on a sun terrace. Its answer was to require new houses to be built three storeys high, on the reasoning that they were harder to extend; by 1939 most new Chinese houses were three-storey.

Key money made a tenancy an asset: a lump sum (顶费, dǐngfèi) paid for the right to take over a tenancy. In November 1940 the French Concession issued rules that banned it in name and, the gazetteer says, legalised it in practice; in 1942 both settlements capped a sub-landlord’s profit at 20 per cent, licensed subletting and banned key money again. It went on being paid, in cash and without receipts.

Seven lanes, house by house

The general picture comes alive in particular lanes. The Shanghai Famous Buildings Gazetteer has entries on several dozen, and seven of them, all still standing, show the range.

Shangxian Fang (尚贤坊), Huaihai Middle Road, Lane 358. A typical new-style shikumen lane, built on most of the land of the International Institute of China (尚贤堂), an institute founded by the missionary Gilbert Reid, in 1921 by the gazetteer’s main account (1924 by another). It has 74 houses on a main lane with three side lanes, laid out like the character 丰; the houses at the end of each row are two bays wide, “two up, two down” in Shanghai speech, and those in the middle one bay, “one up, one down”. A three-storey row of shops faces the main road; a covered passage, the guojielou (过街楼), bridges the lane entrance. Inside, the plan is the old one: black-lacquered gate, courtyard, a hall opening through full-height windows, six white-painted screen doors behind, then kitchen and back door, with the tingzijian and sun terrace above. In late 1926 and early 1927 the house at No. 40 was let room by room. Sun Baigang and his wife had the front upper room; the scholar Li Jianhua and his wife, and a law professor, Zhao Yunyi, had the front and back wing rooms. Wang Yingxia, who had come to Shanghai from Wenzhou with the Suns, met the novelist Yu Dafu there in January 1927; they married the next year. It is the sort of household the Council’s surveys counted only as numbers.

Siming Cun (四明村), Yan’an Middle Road, Lane 913. Built by the Siming Bank and named after it, with investments in 1912 and 1928; the lane as it stands was designed by Huang Yuan of the Kai Tai architects’ office and built in 1928. The houses are single-bay and face south. The older ones are two storeys; the later ones, near Julu Road, are three storeys with bathrooms. The main lane is 7 metres wide and the side lanes 4, the walls about 4 metres high, and the kitchen roofs and sun terraces are concrete. In 1998 its main gate and the houses along Yan’an Road were demolished for the elevated road. When the poet Xu Zhimo and the painter Lu Xiaoman moved to No. 923 after their marriage, they rented the whole house for about 100 silver dollars a month and used it as a family would: the ground-floor hall as a passage, a wing room for her father, the tingzijian for her mother, the front wing room upstairs for the couple, the upstairs hall for guests. In 1936 the Council’s surveyors priced a whole upper floor of an ordinary shikumen at 8 yuan a month.

Jingyun Li (景云里), off Duolun Road, Hongkou. A small lane of 1925: three rows, 32 three-storey brick-and-timber houses, each with its courtyard. Ye Shengtao, Lu Xun, Mao Dun, Rou Shi, Zhou Jianren and Chen Wangdao all lived there or met there in the late 1920s. Ye Shengtao lived at No. 11 from May 1927 to the spring of 1932: a sitting room at the front of the ground floor, the kitchen behind, bedrooms above.

Bugao Li (步高里, Cité Bourgogne), Shaanxi South Road, Lane 287. Built by a French developer in 1930: 78 houses on a main lane about 2.5 metres wide with four side lanes. Its gateways are its signature. On the south side a Chinese-style archway with three tiers of red tiled roof carries the name in large characters and, beneath, “1930 CITE BOURGOGNE”; the west gate is grander still. The houses keep the courtyard axis but use Western details on the gables and windows. In 1932, after his lodging in Zhabei was hit in the Japanese bombing, the writer Ba Jin stayed at No. 52 with two friends who had rented its front hall, the ketang, and wrote a novel there. The lane was listed as a municipal protected site in 1989.

Jianye Li (建业里), Jianguo West Road, Lanes 440–494. Built in 1930 by a French-owned property company, 中国建业地产公司, which gave it its name: 254 units on 1.8 hectares, in the gazetteer’s count. It is the gazetteer’s model of the late shikumen. A main lane opens into a small public space; two side lanes divide the estate into east, middle and west blocks; covered passages join the houses at every lane mouth, closing the estate off from the busy junction, and the houses along the street have shops on the ground floor. The east and west blocks differ in plan: in the east, courtyard, front hall, back hall, stair, kitchen; in the west, the stair is folded into the back hall and part of the kitchen given up to a back yard. Two old features survive on this late lane: gables finished with upturned “horse-head” tips, and stone corner guards set into the walls against the iron wheels of handcarts.

Jing’an Bieshu (静安别墅), Nanjing West Road, Lane 1025. A new-style lane of 1928–32 running through from Nanjing West Road to Weihai Road, wide enough for cars, with main and side lanes at right angles. Three-storey red-brick houses of one or two bays have small front gardens; the double-bay houses put a sitting room, dining room and bedroom on the south side and a bathroom, kitchen and garage on the north. During the war the Commercial Press rented No. 174 as a store for the books it had collected to rebuild its Oriental Library, burned in 1932; a survey in 1950 found about 120,000 volumes there.

Wanyi Fang (万宜坊), Chongqing South Road, Lane 205. Built in 1928–32 by the French International Savings Society, the same company that built the Picardie apartments, and sold house by house from 1930. It has 90 houses in four rows behind a row of 11 shops, with 20 garages fitted into the leftover corners. The houses are single-bay with a false third floor under a mansard roof. A low wall replaces the shikumen gate; behind a 1.8-metre front yard come a living room with a veranda, a stair hall with storage under the stairs, and a kitchen; upstairs are a tingzijian at the half-landing, a large bedroom with built-in cupboards and a balcony, and a three-piece bathroom, with a second on the floor above.

A few streets west, Xiafei Fang (霞飞坊, now Huaihai Fang), 199 houses built by the Catholic mission of Pu’ai Tang, shows the final step: no stone gates at all, garden walls only 2.5 metres high, cast-iron gates, steel windows, fireplaces, gas in the kitchens and a water closet on the second floor, though not on the third, whose occupants had to share. Its residents included the scientist Zhu Kezhen, the writer Xia Mianzun, from 1937 to 1946, and, in 1937, the painter Xu Beihong.

Below the lanes: the straw huts

A shikumen room, however crowded, was not the bottom of the ladder. The same 1921 health report that described the lofts and sleeping stages went on to the Settlement’s edges, where “thousands of people live under conditions of indescribable filth in mud hovels and straw huts”, many of them working inside the Settlement by day. The Council counted about 2,000 such huts inside its own boundaries in 1925, 1,200 of them along Yangtszepoo and Pingliang Roads in the industrial east, and 2,041 registered huts in 1931.

The Council’s answer was to pull them down, and the huts came back. In November 1925 police cleared a stretch of huts on Yangtszepoo Road; within a day new ones stood on the same ground. A notice of March 1926 ordering all huts removed by 1 April was withdrawn after protests in the press. In 1938, with refugees from the fighting camped on the western industrial edge, the Council demolished the huts of at least 31,800 households there and still did not clear them. Against that, even a back loft at 2.45 yuan a month had a solid roof that the Council did not pull down.

War did the rest. In 1936 the Settlement had 82,123 houses and 8,960 of them were empty, after the slump of 1934. In 1937 fighting destroyed more than 13,000 houses in the Eastern and Northern districts, about a third of the houses there. From 1937 to 1941 the population of the settlements surged and the city ran short of housing.

After 1949: one city, the same houses

By the end of 1949, according to the head of the city’s housing bureau writing in 1999, lane houses, garden houses and apartments built by private developers made up 86.3 per cent of Shanghai’s housing floor area, 20.36 million of 23.59 million square metres. That figure combines three types; most of it was lane housing, but no official figure for the lanes alone has been found for this article. The heritage entry puts it more loosely: in the modern period the shikumen was home to about 70 per cent of Shanghai’s people.

The houses stayed divided. In 1952 each resident of the city had 3.4 square metres of living space on average; by 1998 the figure was 9.7. Many lane houses never got plumbing. Every morning residents carried chamber pots to the lane’s collection point.

Renewal: how the lanes were cleared, and how some were kept

The city’s large-scale renewal of old districts began in March 1992. The first phase cleared shacks and the worst housing; from 2000 the target became lane housing graded “second-class old lane and below”. The two national papers that reported the end of the programme in 2022 count it differently. People’s Daily gave more than 30 million square metres and about 1.3 million households over thirty years; China Daily gave about 40 million square metres and 1.65 million households for 1991 to mid-2022. The difference is not explained in either report.

The programme’s last large project was in blocks 67 and 68 on Jianguo East Road, where on 24 July 2022 97.92 per cent of households signed to move. In the Xu’er area more than 900 households had used chamber pots until that July. The end of large-scale renewal did not mean the end of old conditions: a city survey at the end of 2023 still found 14,082 households carrying chamber pots, in housing outside the large-scale projects.

Protection arrived in parallel. By 2008 the city had designated 44 historic-character areas, 12 of them in the central city covering about 27 square kilometres, and listed 2,138 Outstanding Historical Buildings at 632 sites. In 2016 it counted about 260 blocks of shikumen lanes to be protected, mostly in Huangpu and Jing’an, and asked Ruan Yisan’s team at Tongji University to work out how; Dongsiwen Li and Tongfu Li were the pilots.

The kept lanes show different answers. At Xintiandi, redeveloped by Shui On from 1996 to 2001, the house fronts were kept and the interiors merged into restaurants and shops; critics say only the shell of lane life survived. At Jianye Li, whose 1,093 households moved out, two of the three lanes were pulled down and rebuilt from measured drawings and the west lane kept, about a third of the original fabric in all, as a hotel and serviced apartments. At Zhang Yuan in Jing’an, a merchant’s garden of 1882 that became a lane compound in the 1920s, more than 1,100 families were moved out in 2019 under a policy of keeping the buildings and relocating the people; the west zone reopened as shops in December 2022. At Tianzifang, by contrast, the houses were renovated rather than rebuilt and residents still live upstairs from the shops; the area was due for demolition in 2006 until residents, shopkeepers and the painter Chen Yifei objected. At Hengfeng Li on Shanyin Road, nearly a hundred three-storey houses were renovated around 2020 with shared kitchens and toilets added and the residents in place.

Where the sources disagree

The first lane. The national heritage entry names Xingren Li (1872); the Famous Buildings Gazetteer lists Gongshun Li and dates it to 1852, without citing a source. Other accounts put the first shikumen in the 1860s.

The end of the plank houses. The Famous Buildings Gazetteer says the wooden rows were taken down from 1869; another entry in the same book says from 1870; the Concessions Gazetteer, written from the Council’s files, describes a gradual suppression after 1870 and gives no single order.

When the new type began. The Famous Buildings Gazetteer dates new-style shikumen to 1919–30 and puts Siwen Li (1914) among the late old-style lanes; the Concessions Gazetteer puts the new type at about 1919 in one chapter and simply in the early twentieth century in another, and treats Siwen Li as an example of it.

How big some lanes were, and when. Jianye Li has 254 units in the gazetteer and 260 houses in a 2016 report on its rebuilding. Shangxian Fang is dated 1921 in the gazetteer’s main account and 1924 in another. Xiafei Fang is 1924 in its own entry and 1933 in the gazetteer’s survey of lane types. Wanyi Fang is 1928–32 with 90 houses and 11 shops in its entry, 1923 with 101 units in the survey; Jing’an Bieshu is 1928–32 in its entry, 1926 with 183 units in the survey.

How many people the renewal moved. People’s Daily and China Daily give about 1.3 million and about 1.65 million households for the same programme, without explaining the difference.

What to look for

The gate. Stop at any shikumen door and look at the frame: granite or reddish Ningbo stone in the older houses, brick or render in the later ones, under a panel shaped as a triangle, a semicircle or a rectangle. Two heavy wooden leaves, usually painted black, with iron or brass ring handles.

The lane mouth. Look up as you enter: a covered passage over the lane entrance (过街楼, guojielou) is a room, often let separately. At Bugao Li and Jianye Li the gateways themselves are the show: a three-tiered Chinese archway with the date 1930 at Bugao Li; a whole street front of shops and passages at Jianye Li.

The corners and the gables. At Jianye Li, look for stone guards set into the house corners against handcart wheels, and for gables finished with upturned horse-head tips, a Jiangnan detail on a 1930 lane.

The new-style lanes. Compare a shikumen lane with Jing’an Bieshu or Wanyi Fang: low front walls instead of the gate wall, small gardens, wider lanes, garages. The step from one to the other is the step from courtyard house to terrace house.

The lane name. Over the entrance to the main lane, look for a name ending in 里 (lǐ) or 坊 (fāng) and often a date. That is the developer’s label for the whole block; the lane, not the house, was the product.

The back. Walk round to the rear lane if you can. The kitchen doors open here, and the tingzijian windows sit above them. Extra storeys on kitchen wings and walled-in sun terraces are the alterations the Council fined in the 1930s.

Inside. The Shikumen Open House Museum at Xintiandi, on Xingye Road, furnishes a house as a 1920s–30s family home, tingzijian included. It is the easiest way to see the plan without walking into someone’s home.

Lived-in lanes. In Tianzifang and on Shanyin Road the lanes are still homes. Laundry, bicycles and front doors are private; keep to the lanes and keep your voice down.

What is gone. Xingren Li, the earliest recorded lane, was demolished in 1980. Most of the 1.3 to 1.65 million households moved by the renewal programme lived in lanes that no longer exist.