The former station

By:  January 1, 2025 Categories: 

Today we visited the Former Site of Songhu Garrison Command (淞沪警备司令部旧址) — or in the words of Ash who gave the tip “the former police building”.

The place is around a hundred years old and recently renovated. There’s a gatehouse, an office, an interrogation/torture room, and places for guards and inmates to sleep. It’s part of the park that includes the much larger Longhua Martyr Memorial Site. Around the 1930s, many Communist party members were held or executed here by the Kuomintang — so today it’s a red tourism spot. That said, it was rather quiet today, so despite its dark history, it was a great place to hide from the busy city on this New Year’s Day.

Latest

Degrees of wealth

Degrees of wealth

In eight years of living in China, taxi drivers or older colleagues loved to ask, “Which is better, the Netherlands or China?”, hoping for a single insightful answer that would explain everything. And now, back as a resident in the Netherlands, people ask the mirrored version: do I miss living in China? Neither question is […]
July 11, 2026
Goodbye to Guanyin

Goodbye to Guanyin

It’s a Saturday morning, and we’re in a taxi on the way to the airport. My clothes cling to my body and already reek of sweat, and that’s even before our 12-hour flight has started. Today I woke up at 5:30 to get up early and throw away the last furniture and items we used […]
June 30, 2026
Half a Jin, Eight Liang

Half a Jin, Eight Liang

Learning Chinese, or any language, makes you more aware of language in general. And one thing that surprised me is that, despite Mandarin being so different from my mother tongue (Dutch), both languages reach for the same units when weighing things: the kilogram (公斤, gōngjīn) and the half-kilogram (斤, jīn). It’s a small thing, but […]
June 24, 2026
Cake and Timepieces

Cake and Timepieces

There are multiple ways to define Shanghai. There’s the more modern version, with beautiful lanes full of expensive yoga studios or artisan coffee shops, lined with the London Plane Tree (法国梧桐) and the Wukang Mansion (武康大楼), and renovated parks like the North Bund (北外滩) and West Bund (西岸). There’s also the Shanghai as the international […]
June 23, 2026