The bus from the train station, no matter which one, the closest to the front door is the "holding seat", the passengers sitting there from time to time with the driver small talk, a song and a harmony to tease, but also remind you that you have come to the "Chinese capital" - Tianjin. Arriving at Tai'an Road Station, the bus spat out people in the Liberation North Garden, formerly known as Victoria Garden, and the flourishing flowers and trees reminded people that they had reached the ground of the British Concession more than a hundred years ago.
Facing the Haihe River, tai'an Road (Midos Road) to the east and Jiefang North Road (Victoria Road) to the south, the Astor Hotel has also been "entrenched" here for more than a century and a half. For this museum that can live, there are many outrageous rumors: it is said that living in a certain room will ghostly press the bed, the door can be opened by itself, and even the cries of women can be heard - in fact, this is the honor of the old house: not haunted, embarrassed to say that it has a long history.
Night view of Lee Soon Tak (Meng Huizhong/Photo)
The haunted rumors of Lee Soon Tak have yet to be "examined", but the long history brooks no doubt. After the Second Opium War, Tianjin was forced to open its ports, and about 3 square kilometers of land from Haihe In the east, to Dagu Road in the west, to Yingkou Road in the north, and to Zhangde Road in the south became the British Concession. From 1860 to 1902, the United States, France, Germany, Japan, Russia, and Obi followed in the footsteps of Britain, and came to the concession for a total of nearly 15 square kilometers; adventurers, rich merchants, politicians, missionaries... Come here to open warehousing, shipping, import and export trade, build banks, shops, gardens, office buildings, casinos, hospitals, schools, bungalows, villas – and of course hotels.
In 1863, two years earlier, John Innocent, a British Methodist missionary from Shanghai and Tianjin, had signed a lease with The Queen's representative in Tianjin, Gibson, to lease 19.9 acres of land for 600 taels of silver, and built an Indian-style restaurant and warehouse on the southernmost beach of the Haihe River, which was jokingly called the "mud house", which is the prototype of today's Lishunde.
Unfortunately, the "mud house" now has no pictorial data, as the first foreign-related hotel in China, it has attracted the prussian deputy consulate, the German Imperial Consulate, and the Japanese consulate to move in one after another; it is also particularly favored by "Li Zhongtang" - in 1870, Li Hongzhang served as the minister of Beiyang and directly subordinate to the governor, and the direct general officer in Tianjin replaced the prime minister Yamen and became the actual ministry of foreign affairs, which made Tianjin the second power center and diplomatic center of the Qing Dynasty, improving the reception level of Tianjin, and becoming a problem in his heart and mind. He urged gustav von Detring, his foreign adviser and chairman of the British Concession Bureau.
Around 1883, after the Englishman George Ritter bought the hotel, he expanded the hotel with De Cuilin, the chairman of the Chamber of Commerce, The Chairman of the Chamber of Commerce, Marshall, and Liang Yanqing, and changed its name to Li Shunde. The Victorian three-storey victorian hotel, which debuted in 1886 in Jinmen, added a Gothic-style watchtower, which is quite a medieval relic, and today from the Liberation North Garden, you can see It is like the "majesty" of chocolate chip cookies, which is the symbol of Lishunde's more than 100 years of time.
From The Liberation North Garden to Li Shunde (Meng Huizhong/Photo)
The wooden turnaround door on the west side of the watchtower, like the historical celebrities who have been transferring from here to the hotel since 1886, walk into the old lobby, and the bright sunlight outside the door and the warm yellow light inside the lobby are mixed with the frosted glass of the wooden door into a fickle of ambiguous light, as if entering a time tunnel, especially the "EST.1863" nameplate on the wooden turnaround door, and the wooden staircase that still creaks when walking up with a thick handmade carpet, reminding people that people have entered the historical scene.
Li Shunde and its builders, and even its residents, also participated in the process of China's modernization in all aspects: as a shareholder of Li Shunde, De Cuilin controlled the Tianjin Customs tax department for 22 years, and also founded the Tianjin Customs Correspondence Museum in Victoria Road in 1878, and in the same year, the first set of Chinese stamps, that is, the 5-cent silver Dalong stamps, was renamed the Letter Museum of the Daqing Post And Tianjin Bureau in 1897, and is still on Jiefang North Road, in the "posture" of the Tianjin Postal Museum. It shows the beauty of brick carvings and arched doors and windows. The Tianjin Printing House, which is also on Victoria Road, can be said to be close to Li Shunde, founded by De Cuilin, Yin Sende, Di Jinsheng, etc., and also shows the façade of "square control" today. In 1883, Li Shunde invested in the construction of the auxiliary ship "Li Shun" for the Beiyang Marine Division, and Constantin von Hannekon, de Cuilin's son-in-law, also participated in the Sino-Japanese War.
At this time, Tianjin also became a city that rose because of the concession. Xi Qingyuxuan's "Jinqiao Butterfly Video" said that before the opening of the port, Tianjin "was just a prosperous county rule." Since the qing xianfeng ten years, the renewal of the contract with the British, the opening of the commercial port, gradually changed the former stubborn and despicable appearance." The November 3, 1888 China Times also reported: "The disgusting and hateful roads that were once full of deep ditches, large holes, and stinky ditches have been bulldozed, straightened, paved, widened, and equipped with street lamps to make people and animals feel comfortable, and at the same time, the garbage accumulated over the centuries in the trenches has been removed." ”
In the spring of 1899, he was already acquainted with Herbert Hoover, an engineer of the British Merlin Mining Company who had been asked by Zhang Yi, the superintendent of the Kaiping Mining Bureau, to come to Tianjin, and then they also "cheated" the Kaiping Mining Bureau together. Hoover is not typical of "less money and more close to home" - he does not work in the "diagonal door" of Lishunde, the Kailuan Mining Bureau on the east side of Tai'an Road - in 1912 Kaiping Mining Co., Ltd. and Luanzhou Mining Co., Ltd. negotiated and merged after fierce competition, and in 1919 the majestic Kailuan Mining Bureau Building was established, of course, compared with the nearby Anligan Church built in 1903, it is still "small characters". By the time the lonely church of a fairytale castle was destroyed in 1935 and rebuilt in 1936, Hoover, who had lived for three years, had long since left and had even completed the highlight of his life, the 31st President of the United States.
When they first arrived in Tianjin, 24-year-old Hoover and his wife, Lu Henry, "bathed in the moonlight of the Lishunde Hotel, walked along the candlelit streets of ancient Tianjin, surrounded by cigarettes, the rumbling music of the Spring Festival sounded in their ears, and the dragon dance team passed by" ("Herbert Hoover's Road to Success") - and the situation of Tianjin being besieged for 27 days a year later is completely different: at that time, Hoover had left Lishunde to live on the Fifth Avenue, and did not fight with the great powers because of the Boxers. Part of Lee Shun Tak was destroyed and there was a risk of death, otherwise American history would have been rewritten – but the famous Wanghailou Church was not so lucky.
Jiefang North Road Huaru Daosheng Bank site (Meng Huizhong / Photo)
The Wanghai Tower, also known as the Church of Our Lady of The Sheng, which stands by the Haihe River, was only one year old and burned down in April and May 1870 by a series of rumors and conflicts in Which "foreign nuns kidnapped and killed children as medicinal materials under the guise of a nursery". The Tianjin teaching plan of the Fire Of the Wanghai Tower on this side of the box has been written into modern history, and the staff of The Xiang Zeng Guofan on the other side complained that Tianjin was "full of Miscellaneous Places in Huayi and the City, so the city was completely devoid of elegance", while swimming in the Zizhu Forest Concession, eating foreign snacks, playing marbles, boarding steamships, and living a full of foreign addiction - after the opening of the port, the first wharf built by foreigners was the Zizhulin Wharf, which was also a very famous Western scenery of that year.
After the burning of the Wanghai Tower, the British and French expatriates were deeply disturbed, and the church activities gradually shifted to the concession, and two years later, the Church of St. Louis (Zizhulin Church), located in the village of Zizhulin at the junction of the Anglo-French Concession, was completed, with green brick and wood facades decorated with traditional Chinese brick carvings, and the inner altar is said to be flanked by statues of King Louis IX of France and Joan of Arc – like the Church of the Sacred Heart, which stood on the top of Montmartre because of the Paris Commune in the same period. In the 1900 Boxer Rebellion's "Church Destruction Movement" in which "it didn't rain, the ground dried, and all the churches covered the sky", the Zizhulin Church survived because it was in the concession, and the Wanghai Tower was burned down for the second time - the gothic style of the towering tower in the middle of today, which looks like a pen holder, was rebuilt in 1903 with Geng.
Along with the church, there were also all walks of life and all kinds of people who entered the Republic of China era. The Englishman Brian Bauer's memoir, Life in the Concession: A Childhood of an Englishman in Tianjin, records: "Warlords besieged the city of Tianjin and fought and scuffled for the railway. Tianjin East Railway Station was sometimes occupied by this warlord and sometimes by another warlord. At the same time, the armies of foreign powers were increasing. It was a time when rickshaw drivers and street vendors had no value" – all walks of life could only survive and prosper if they grew into the concessions.
At the end of the Qing Dynasty and the beginning of the People's Republic of China, China's political arena was full of ups and downs, and the power changes were frequent, and the warlords, bureaucrats, politicians, and even emperors in the wilderness all ran to the "backstage" of Tianjin to hide in the wind, and once the time was ripe, they waited for the opportunity to return to the "front desk" beijing and appeared in ink. The 1.28 square kilometers, 23 roads and more than 2,000 buildings of the Fifth Avenue are inhabited by two presidents, seven prime ministers, more than 100 general ministers, overseers, and provincial mayors, and today's deep and quiet neighborhood style with thousands of Western-style buildings; and Li Shunde, which also shoulders the task of refuge or seeking power, has also become a witness to the changes in modern Tianjin because of "various people".
The old lobby of Lishunde is full of nostalgia. (Meng Huizhong/Photo)
Turning left from the old lobby of Lee Soon Tak, the Thames Hall is noisy in the evening, as if Miss Zhao Si is still setting up a feast here to celebrate her 24th birthday. She did not often live here - in 1924, Zhang Xueliang bought an eclectic style bungalow on No. 32 Road (No. 78 Chifeng Road) in the French Concession in the name of Zhang Shouyi, the fifth wife of Zhang Zuolin, and lived with Miss Zhao Si until 1931. The cries of the haunted woman of Li Shunde will not come from her, and naturally will not come from Wanrong: during the Jujin Zhangyuan and Jingyuan, in the golden autumn season, the "emperor" who "dresses up like a Westerner" and "emits the mixed smell of the cologne of the ancient dragon of the Mith Buddha and mothusin" and the "queen" who is dressed in strange costumes will sing and dance in Lishunde, often until the next ugly time. In Lishunde, Puyi also ordered a cup of coffee for the attachés and talked about "the learning of drinking coffee".
Nor will the cries of a woman be made by Aloha, the first female globetrotter, even though she followed her husband Walter Wanderwell to Tianjin in August 1924 and stayed in room 411 of the hotel. "Today", her next door is "Panchen X", downstairs "lives" Chen Jiageng, the second floor is "Gu Weijun's room", as well as Sun Yat-sen, Li Yuanhong, Cao Kun, Cai Yi, Huang Xing, Mei Lanfang, Ma Lianliang, Fu Zuoyi, Xu Shichang and other "friendly neighbors" - Li Shunde's celebrity rooms have nameplates outside the room, describing the past relationship between celebrities and hotels. Press the "card" and knock on the door to see if he or she will come to answer the door?
Liang Yanqing, one of the hotel's shareholders, also has a room, but what commemorates William O'Hara, the most important chairman of Lishunde in the 20th century, is not a guest room but a bar - the Hevelin Bar, which turns right in the old lobby, is also very lively, and in 1924, Haivelin presided over the demolition of the north gable and the construction of a four-story brick and wood building, so that the entire hotel plane was "E" in shape, and the 300-seat ballroom added in the recess of "E", that is, the Victoria Garden in the hotel today, is holding a wedding Other guests can only enjoy afternoon tea at the bar.
Yuan Shikai, who had hosted a banquet in Lishunde, did not eat afternoon tea here, he and the "emperor" loved the Cheeselin who first opened in the French Concession and then in the German Concession, those butter braised pigeons, German-style steaks, canned braised beef, red cabbage soup, cakes, chocolates and ice cream satisfies the stomach of the dignitaries and nobles, but in fact, The dishes of Lishunde are not inferior - from the bar to the guest room area, next to the first batch of American and the oldest existing OTIS elevator in China purchased in 1924, is the entrance to the Lishunde Museum. In this Li Shunde Museum, which was once transformed from the basement of the motor room, boiler room, pump room, bakery, warehouse, hidden room, etc., it collects Chinese and Western menus and tableware from various historical periods and different festivals and seasons, as well as the first batch of digital machines made in the United States, which calculates the hotel's countless profits - a total of more than 3,000 collections, silently telling the first generation of Li Shunde's pioneering style: the introduction of China's first generation of telegraphs, telephones, electric lights, elevators, tap water and fire equipment, Western music, drama, fashion shows, Billiards also originated in restaurants...
In the middle of the first exhibition hall of the museum, a precious silver key is displayed. In March 1925, all shareholders decided to make a special silver key as a symbol of the hotel's power, and granted it to Hevelin until he handed over the hotel and the silver key to the Tianjin government in 1952, and the whole family moved to New Zealand – although during the fall of Tianjin, he lost power and was escorted to the concentration camp in Weixian County, Shandong Province, along with all the British shareholders, and Li Shunde was also renamed "Asia Hotel" until it was accepted by the Kuomintang government in 1945 and the name of Li Shunde was restored. It was also during the Japanese occupation period that The Kishilin and Vigdoli Restaurant merged and moved to the site of the Xiaobailou store, which is quite close to Lishunde today - the white store is reminiscent of the big cake made by Albert Kiessling for Yuan Shikai's Heshou, and there is a "K" in the middle of the building, and the west point of "K" is still famous in Beijing and Tianjin.
Cheeseling Restaurant (Meng Huizhong/Photo)
No restaurant can represent the history of a city, but Lee Soon Tak may be able to. Five expansions, nine changes of ownership, weathered the storms of the times - the fall of the Qing Dynasty, the colonial aggression of the great powers, the change of the Beiyang regime, the rise and fall of the Republic of China government, the disaster of the Japanese invasion... Lishunde can be seen as a condensed symbol of China's early globalization process; if tianjin, where multiple cultures coexist, provides a miniature map of the world, then Lishunde is an indispensable illustration of it.
The Victorian Garden outside Lishunde has been renamed, and the Victorian Garden inside the hotel has become the "legend" in the hotel. Under the huge English glass dome, the afternoon sun has long since swept away the traces of last night's wedding, leaving a dappled light and shadow on the greenery, flowers and corridors on both sides, the noise is also cleaned by the melody played by the flowing water, and the waiter has served a three-stacked tea tray with sandwiches, scones and desserts, accompanied by Earl's tea or Darjeeling tea – good food.
Haihe Present and Present (Visual China/Photo)
Passing through Victoria Gardens and coming out of the new lobby, the northernmost part of Lee Soon, the Hai River is just around the corner. This tianjin people's mother river is also the only way for Puyi, who loves Li Shunde, to board an airboat loaded with explosive barrels in 1931 and change to "Awaji Pills" to the northeast. It's a pity that I can't hear his coffee knowledge, and I don't know if he misses Tianjin's pot vegetables and pancake fruits in Changchun. The celebrities like him who left their slush claws in Lishunde are gone, only the Anligan Church, which is still so lonely, short, and gray-headed, only the abandoned small western-style buildings of the Fifth Avenue and the Yifeng District, the overgrown weeds and the broken stairs, witnessing the past years.
Under the strong sun, the Haihe River drifted with a fishy smell, but the middle-aged men who could form a circle on the shore to kick the shuttlecock ignored it, and they laughed intently and shouted "Beautiful!" "—I can't hear the smell. The appearance of the city along the Haihe River changes rapidly, only the Wanghailou Church, still maintains the old appearance, even if it appears many times due to the cutting and straightening of the Haihe River and the "visual left and right shift" of the river, its round "big eyes" of more than 150 years old still gaze at the Haihe River, and also "gaze" at the ghosts that swim in Lishunde - that ghost may be history.
Zhang Yameng