Pacific Tides
My name is Thomas Sturm and I'm a programmer, photographer and writer.

Now go outside and look at the sky.

Forgotten Shanghai

During my travels in China I was always fascinated by Shanghai's history and by how close to the surface of modern Shanghai much of its past still is.

It's still possible to find pre-revolutionary signage on some store fronts in the more quiet side streets and a lot of the building substance of the 1940s has survived - even with a war, a communist revolution and the storm of modernization that has been unleashed in the 1990s.

Shanghai in Images is a collection of historical photographs mostly from the 1920-1940s with many bustling street scenes and interesting views of old Shanghai.

And Shanghai's Historical Western Architecture is a project to document many of the major historical buildings. The pictures were taken in 1994 and many are high-contrast black and white pictures that have the same quality of light as most historical photos.

Here for instance is the Shanghai Club in the 1930s and here the same building in 1994.

© 1998 - 2024 Thomas Sturm