History
This style of housing originally developed when local developers adapted Western-style terrace houses to Chinese conditions. The wall was added to protect against fighting and looting during the Small Swords Rebellion and proved useful against later burglars and vandals during the social upheavals of the early twentieth century. By World War II, more than 80% of the population in the city lived in these kinds of dwellings. Many of these were hastily built in slum conditions, while others were of sturdy construction and featured all modern amenities such as running water and flushing toilets.
During and after World War II, massive population increases in Shanghai led many shikumen houses to be heavily subdivided. For example, the spacious living room was often divided into three or four rooms, each lent out to a separate family. These cramped conditions continue to exist in many of the shikumen districts that have survived recent development of the Reform and Opening period.
The landlords who sublet the shikumens out to other families were called "second landlords" (二房东, èr fángdōng), as opposed to their primary owners (大房东, dà fángdōng). Such "second landlords'" families often shared the same shikumen building with the tenants.
Read more about this topic: Shikumen
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“When the history of guilt is written, parents who refuse their children money will be right up there in the Top Ten.”
—Erma Brombeck (20th century)
“A great proportion of the inhabitants of the Cape are always thus abroad about their teaming on some ocean highway or other, and the history of one of their ordinary trips would cast the Argonautic expedition into the shade.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“History has neither the venerableness of antiquity, nor the freshness of the modern. It does as if it would go to the beginning of things, which natural history might with reason assume to do; but consider the Universal History, and then tell us,—when did burdock and plantain sprout first?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)