Zhongshan Park

This guide to Zhongshan Park in Shanghai opens with two competing stories about the woman the park was first named after, one a romantic tale of a Portuguese trader and a circus girl, the other a plainer account involving a British liquor merchant named John Macgregor. It follows the grounds from an English-style colonial pleasure garden in the early 1900s, complete with hothouses and a small zoo, through the years its paths were closed to Chinese residents of the city around it. A dispute over funding a monkey house is one of the small fights the guide lingers on along the way.