Today was the day subway line no.10 finally opened, albeit for very limited hours. However, the prospect of not having to do bus plus subway journeys to get to and from Fudan/Wujiaochang is very appealing!

In the afternoon, Dan and I met Mr Zhang Jingyue, of the Shanghai Audio-Visual Archives, which is part of Shanghai Media Group (SMG), the same folks who run the big screen hanging off the New Era Mall at Wujiaochang. We had been put in touch with him as part of our search for photos of early Wujiaochang. The neighborhood has a complex history, having been designated as the site of the Shanghai City Government in the first city plan back in the early 1930s. Various government buildings and the Jiangwan Stadium — now part of KIC — were all built around here. Mr. Zhang showed us a lot of documentary footage he had painstakingly gathered over the years and put together, and it was very interesting. But there were almost no glimpses of the Wujiaochang intersection itself, sadly.

Mr. Zhang was very helpful and full of information. He explained to us that almost all documentary filmmakers and even photographers were focused on famous people and sights, and there was little interest in recording everyday life until the late 1970s. Then a famous Japanese filmmaker came to Shanghai with that sort of project. Local filmmakers and photographers did not follow suit until even later. Furthermore, the five roads intersection was way out in the countryside, even as late as the 1980s, when Mr. Zhang remembers that people living out there got different, lower ration amounts than people living in the middle of the city. That means that photographers of the city would not necessarily have gone out there very much. The first time the neighborhood got much development was when the Japanese occupied Shanghai and built a large building there. That is knocked down now and people don’t discuss it much, he said. Finally, in the early years of the People’s Republic, there were a lot of military bases out there, also making it difficult to photograph.

Afterwards, Mr. Zhang gave us a lot of suggestions of other places to track down images. I guess we have to decide how much energy we really want to put into what is not a top priority for the project. I’m also concerned about how to get permission to use the images even if we do find them. But I’m sure we’ll keep looking, even if slowly. Dan and I had a big summing-up session about all the things we’d still like to try and get. We’ve got a lot of information already, but there’s quite a lot more we need to amass, I feel.

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