Sinan Mansions

This guide to Sinan Mansions in Shanghai opens in 1946 with a Nationalist agent watching a rented room across from Zhou Enlai's Shanghai residence, as an uneasy peace slid toward civil war. It follows the fifty-one garden villas built here in the 1920s for the French Concession's bankers and opera stars, their crowding after 1949, and the wave of demolition that swept the neighborhood in the 1990s. The district reopened in 2011, rebuilt to look exactly like what had stood before.