The Mid-Autumn Festival public holiday continues, so we cannot ambush any more bureaucrats! Today, I went over to Hongkou district, the former Japanese concession area and where Dr. Yang Ji of Fudan was born. He walked me around the neighbourhood. Despite its historic value, it’s not an area I’ve spent a lot of time in before.

In a way, this was a bit like the Talaat Harb walk in Cairo, because it took us to a lot of 1930s and earlier cinemas, including the site of the first ever movie theatre built in China. I had not realized before that was in Hongkou. In relation to our project, a few things caught my eye. First of all, a new screen installation has appeared at the entrances to all the subway stations. Instead of a fixed plaque or poster, there are 2 screens where you enter/exit the station. One says it has news concerning that particular exit, but really gives basic information. The second one is the subway system’s equivalent of the slide show screens you find at the entrance to residential neighbourhoods, with 3 slides: map of the station, subway map, and map of the neighbourhood. They alternate at 30-second intervals.

The old movie theatres we went to first were on 3 of the four corners of a crossroads. So, this feeds into my idea that the intersection rather than the mall is the topography of leisure/shopping/recreation activities in Shanghai. Later on, when we got to the intersection of North Sichuan Road and East Baoxing Road, we discovered another situation a bit like Wujiaochang, with a big department store on at least two of the corners, each with its own huge screen. The screen on Bali Chuntian (Paris Printemps) there was showing a long (several minutes) public advertisement about how to evacuate a department store in the event of fire. It did not make me want to go into the store.