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During the colonial era, just south of Yan’an Donglu (then called Edward VII Avenue) ran the Rue du Consulat – today’s Jinling Donglu – leading from the waterfront to the French Concession. Somewhere off this road was a small lane called Rue Chu Pao San, renamed Xikou Lu after 1949, but since, apparently, swept away in the tide of redevelopment.<br/><br/> In its heyday Rue Chu Pao San rejoiced in the European nickname ‘Blood Alley’ – a lane of teeming vice, brothels and low bars frequented by sailors on shore leave from the Huangpu docks. Ralph Shaw, a Briton who lived in Shanghai during the 1930s, records that Blood Alley fairly swarmed with ‘a legion of Chinese, Korean, Annamite, White Russian, Filipino and Formosan women’, in search of a similar legion of ‘kilted Seaforth Highlanders, tall U.S. Navy men, seamen from the Liverpool tramps, and French Grenadiers’, who ‘had ears only for the girls clinging to them in the half light of dance-floor alcoves’.<br/><br/> Blood Alley, as the name suggests, was a rough and violent place ‘entirely dedicated to wine, women, song and all-night lechery’.
During the colonial era, just south of Yan’an Donglu (then called Edward VII Avenue) ran the Rue du Consulat – today’s Jinling Donglu – leading from the waterfront to the French Concession. Somewhere off this road was a small lane called Rue Chu Pao San, renamed Xikou Lu after 1949, but since, apparently, swept away in the tide of redevelopment.<br/><br/> In its heyday Rue Chu Pao San rejoiced in the European nickname ‘Blood Alley’ – a lane of teeming vice, brothels and low bars frequented by sailors on shore leave from the Huangpu docks. Ralph Shaw, a Briton who lived in Shanghai during the 1930s, records that Blood Alley fairly swarmed with ‘a legion of Chinese, Korean, Annamite, White Russian, Filipino and Formosan women’, in search of a similar legion of ‘kilted Seaforth Highlanders, tall U.S. Navy men, seamen from the Liverpool tramps, and French Grenadiers’, who ‘had ears only for the girls clinging to them in the half light of dance-floor alcoves’.<br/><br/> Blood Alley, as the name suggests, was a rough and violent place ‘entirely dedicated to wine, women, song and all-night lechery’.
Illustration by the Austrian artist Friedrich Schiff, who lived in Shanghai during the 1930s and 1940s. His images exemplify the 'anything goes' atmosphere and indulgence amidst poverty that characterised Old Shanghai and which would soon be brought to an abrupt end by Japanese invasion (1937) and Communist revolution (1949).