Wukang Road

Wukang Road (武康路, Wǔkāng Lù) is a street of about 1.2 kilometres in Xuhui District, running north to south through the former French Concession from Huashan Road to Huaihai Middle Road. It is lined with plane trees and early twentieth-century houses and apartment blocks, and in 2011 it was named a National Historic and Cultural Street of China.

The road began as a private project. From 1897 John C. Ferguson, an American who headed Nanyang Public School, paid for it from his own salary so that teachers and students could reach the school more easily, and it became Route Ferguson (福开森路). The French Concession authorities widened and paved it in 1907. In 1943 it was renamed after Wukang County in Zhejiang Province, though the old name is still known locally.

Many of the houses carry plaques naming earlier residents. No. 1, Lane 40 is a Spanish-style villa of 1932, designed by Dong Dayou (董大酉), where Tang Shaoyi (唐绍仪), the first premier of the Republic of China, lived in 1937 and 1938. He was assassinated at the house on 30 September 1938. No. 393 was the home of the revolutionary Huang Xing (黄兴) in 1912 to 1916; its older part dates from 1912 and its later part from 1933, in Art Deco style, and it now holds a tourist information centre. No. 113 is the former home of the writer Ba Jin (巴金), who lived there from 1955. Built in 1923, it was opened to the public in December 2011.

At the southern end, on the corner of Huaihai Middle Road, stands Wukang Mansion (武康大楼), formerly the Normandie Apartments. It was completed in 1924 to a design by László Hudec. Chinese reports describe it as Shanghai’s earliest veranda-style apartment block, and film actors including Zheng Junli, Zhao Dan, Qin Yi and Sun Daolin lived there.

The street is also one of 64 roads in central Shanghai classified in 2007 as never to be widened. That status requires the style and scale of the buildings beside them to be kept. In December 2013 the district began a pilot on Wukang Road in which fallen plane leaves are left unswept, and in 2021 the Wukang Road and Anfu Road district was rated a municipal tourism and leisure street. Cafes and restaurants have opened along the road, and more visitors now come to walk it.