NANJING DONG LU

From the Bund, this is the main shopping artery in Shanghai. The central avenue of the old international concession, Nanjing Lu belonged almost entirely to Silas Hardoon at the beginning of the twentieth century. Born in a Jewish family in Baghdad in 1851, refugee in India at the age of 5, Silas Hardoon was educated in a charitable school founded by David Sassoon. He was then hired in the Sassoon company and sent to Hong Kong in 1868 to explore the Chinese market. Returned from the company six years later, without a penny in pocket, he embarked on Shanghai where the local Jewish community helped him find a job (always in a Sassoon company!). Aware of the opportunities presented by the real estate market in Shanghai, Hardoon invests its own funds in the purchase of land… in less than 10 years, he had become a wealthy landowner (also involved in opium trade) and one of the most prominent personalities in the city!

Nanjing Street has since been considerably refurbished. Its last lifting date dates back to 1999, when a portion of almost one kilometre was made entirely pedestrian. The facades of the large stores bordering the street have been harmonized, the public spaces have been reassembled and decorated with statues, fountains, flower tanks and other urban decorations at all levels of the kitsch scale. The pinnacle of local kitsch: The square of the century, in the middle of the pedestrian zone, with its gigantic bronze tripod and its giant TV screen. The Nanjing Lu portion between Henan Lu and Xizang Lu is dedicated to major stores: there are a good, announced with a great deal of neon and advertising posters, between which there are a few office buildings. More than two million hikers, foreigners and mostly Chinese, are wandering every weekend on this street as a symbol of the city's shopping prosperity. A bathing experience in the neon is not missing.