Astor House: Will Visits Shanghai

Since its early days as an international settlement, Shanghai was a regular stopover for ships from the navies of the world.

On October 5th 1905, the U.S.S. Oregon - an Indiana class battleship launched in 1893 - visited Shanghai. Many of its crew of 473 officers and sailors took advantage of what the city had to offer.

One sailor - Will - took time to write a few postcards to folks back home and he sent this card with the note "Keep a good lookout on the mail." Maybe he had also sent a package filled with curios like carved jade, ivory, or embroidered silk.

This photo takes us back seven years from our previous entry. If the photographer would have turned around, we would see the wooden predecessor of the Garden Bridge, which was in a bad state by 1905, with long rows of lepers and beggars sitting along its rotting sides.

In front of us is again the entrance to Broadway and Seward Road, this time labeled as "Broad Way". There is no tram line yet and the traffic is exclusively hand-drawn carts and pedestrians.

This area will undergo wide-ranging construction in the coming years, and almost nothing of what we see here is still there only a decade later. To the right, the old Astor House will be taken down by 1910.

The modern buildings we saw in the last photo haven't appeared yet, but at least the south-west corner is still the Mactavish pharmacy, but again with a slightly different name: Mactavish & Lehmann Limited. The corner of the pharmacy looks also different - in later photos the entrance is at a 45 degree angle to the two roads, while here it is to the south.

For now we are going to leave Shanghai pre-1911 behind and we will move forward by six years for the next post. We will cross Seward Road to look at the Astor House construction site.