新天地北里

This guide to the North Block of Xintiandi in Shanghai returns to the night of July 30, 1921, when a stranger in a gray robe stepped into an ordinary stone-gate house on this lane, looked around, and walked back out, leaving thirteen men frozen upstairs. It names the young delegate from Changsha among them, and follows the shikumen houses themselves from ordinary family homes into the 1990s restoration that saved this block from the demolition that took its neighbors. Listen for the carved doorway and narrow brick facade of the house itself, kept as it was.