Huxi Mosque

This guide to Huxi Mosque in Shanghai opens in the market lane behind Changde Road, with an elderly Uyghur prayer-bead merchant and a small act of generosity toward a stranger that the guide keeps circling back to. It traces the mosque itself to 1914, when Muslim laborers who had come to Shanghai from Hubei, Shandong, Henan and Anhui pooled what little they had to rent a single prayer room, and follows the building through its 1935 expansion and a long closure during years of upheaval. Listen for the naan sellers and juice vendors along the lane, who carry that same quiet generosity into the present day.