Many Shanghai residents have experienced living in shikumen houses, which are crowded, noisy and at times even chaotic, but also hold happy memories. Photos by Shou Zhusen for China Daily

A bygone era

Peddlers selling traditional breakfast cried their wares with their self-made rhymed slogans as they hawked along the lanes. Housewives competed with each other for being the earliest, if not loudest, to rush her kid out of bed and off to school, neat, tidy and well fed.

The dusk life was more aromatic. The smell of one family's special of the day, say, sweet and sour pork ribs, travelled all the way to the other end of the lane, as if every household en route had been fed with a piece of rib. In summer, dinner tables might be even moved out of the houses to the lanes, which, after dinner, could become more crowded as they were filled with bamboo chairs and even mats for people to enjoy the nightlife and the coolness of the open air, and later to sleep, as air-conditioners were not yet introduced.

Lyndon Neri, one of the most recognized architects in Shanghai, noted that the ambiguous line between private and public life is the very essence of life in shikumen, and dubbed these occupied public spaces "the middle ground that makes the city tick".

In one of his early projects, a boutique hotel along the Bund, Neri massively used glasses as walls to intentionally offer people outside the hotel a peek inside and essentially, to recreate the vitality of shikumen life.

But some residents think there is a romanticized image of life in shikumen.

"Some say there are no distinct four seasons in Shanghai, but you can always tell (by living) in shikumen, with the help of different insects and pests," said a woman who would only give her surname as Jin.

The 56-year-old native of Yangzhou, a neighboring city of Shanghai in Jiangsu province, spent her first two decades of marriage in a less-than-40-square-meter duplex shared with her in-laws in downtown Shanghai. Yet, what annoyed her most was the "unexpected guests" regardless of day and night, instead of the privacy issue.

Rats celebrate the arrival of spring; summer marks the carnival for flies and mosquitoes; spiders help decorate the house with their webs in autumn; and cockroaches take the rein of winter, as Jin put it.