Every culture has a flat bread (falafel, lavash, paratha, injera, naan, nang, tortilla, matzah) and every culture has stories or legends. Cities have stories too -- real and urban legends. Once we know them, these stories make us feel like insiders. Do you know how to use the ceiling in Grand Central Terminal, outside the Oyster Bar, to tell a secret across the room? Do you know the best fragrant garden in London, which is accessible even without the resident key? (Clue it is in an unlikely Hackney location.) Or that in Rome, some of the best Caravaggio painting are actually in a church near the Pantheon, 5th chapel on the left? With each of these secret places comes a tale.
Craig and I once found an old tattered book called New York in Sunshine and in Shadow, about NYC at the turn of the century. The “sunshine” part of the book was very “Ragged Dick” --- “immigrates make good” stories – pull yourself up by your boot straps and make something of yourself. The second half was a police blotter of sorts. Every kidney harvesting internet tale you have ever read doesn’t come close to the warning tales of life the 1900s in NYC, where a drink in a bar you didn’t know, could land you under the floor boards penniless, naked and freezing.
I’ve started to seek out Shanghai “tales of the city,” albeit, not as exciting at "New York in Shadow." One of the first ones I heard was the tale of the sleeping dragons or the tale of the nine dragons. (Now, those doing their middle school research projects on Shanghai – this is a tale told to me second hand, so I don’t want to find this in your footnotes!)
Isabel, our real estate agent told us this story one day in a van to distract us while stuck in mid-day traffic on the loop road at the Chengdu Bei Lu and Yan’an Lu intersection. This intersection is a point in the city where “all the roads converge.”
As Isabel told me the story, the new elevated roads were being built at great speed, getting ready for the Expo. The massive construction project called the Yan’an elevated highway was started in 1995 and completed in 1999. To build this web of loop roads around the city, entire historic buildings were literally moved out of the way (e.g. The Russian neo-classical building, which is now the Shanghai International Exhibition Center was picked up and moved back.)
Although he knew it was bad luck, he acquiesced and told them that under this spot slept nine dragons. All of the banging of the construction had woken up the dragons and they would not let the road continue, since they had not been paid the right respect. (Basically no one asked their opinion.) The monk told the engineers that if they paid tribute to the dragons they might settle down and allow the construction to continue.
So the city commissioned a noble monument to the nine sleeping dragons on the pillar, which would hold up the roads. The sculpture was designed by Zhao Zhirong, the now-retired deputy director of Shanghai’s Oil Painting & Sculpture Institute. (Some say the tale has nine dragons because the number nine (jiu) is a pun on the word ‘long lasting,” which is good for a pillar that literally holds up the whole Shanghai highway system.
The monk was not so lucky. He had broken his vow to keep what he knew about the dragon world secret and he died shortly afterwards, but the city was better off because of what he did.
Now that I live here I pass the flying dragons every morning and knowing how they got there (or at least one version of how they got there) makes me feel a little bit more like an insider – even if it is only one tale of the city. It is now becoming my city.
