Most Shanghailanders, at least after they have been here a while, know the location of the most famous and spectacular of the old buildings in Shanghai, and after they have read A LAST LOOK usually know most of the ones illustrated therein. Old buildings? -- You've been there, done that, so what's left to see?

For architecture aficionados who don't mind getting off the beaten track, the old French Concession is the place to find the hidden jewels. (In fact, we are so entranced with the area that Deke and I are doing a whole books on it, Frenchtown - Shanghai, due out next year.) That is the area south of Yan An Lu (ex-Avenue Edward VI) and east of Hua Shan Lu (ex-Avenue Haig). I would also add in the stretch of Xin Hua Lu (ex-Amherst Avenue) that runs between Huai Hai Zhong Lu (ex-Avenue Joffre) and the elevated highway (ex-Nothing You Have Ever Seen Before).

Let's start with that area. Xin Hua Lu features not only a row of lovely old houses on the right, but also my favorite lane (after the one I am now living in, called "Shanghai Xin Cun" or Shanghai New Village). Heading out Xin Hua Lu you pass the Holiday Inn on the right, on the corner of what was once Columbia Road, and what you are looking for is something called Columbia Circle. Try turning into the third lane on the left, or if you miss that, the fourth. Columbia Circle is not really a circle at all, it is a square, and those two lanes form the top and bottom boundaries, Xin Hua Lu the front one, and with one more lane shooting off the back side of it, rather like a lollipop stem.

You will be delighted by the lane's myriad styles of old houses, some in the Spanish Revival style, even a round Art Deco one (with pie-shaped rooms, I discovered, when I found I had a friend living there!). The better ones are hidden behind walls -- you can always peek through the gates -- but many houses have their front doors right on that small street. All these houses are especially fine because they were designed by one of Shanghai's best: the Hungarian architect Ladislaus Hudec. (We like him so much we profiled him in A LAST LOOK, where we also give you a listing of his most famous buildings.) In the early 1930's he designed ten of the houses on the Circle; look for his "signature" chimney, ones usually featuring Gothic-arched openings at the top, as in the picture here.

When I first started prowling Columbia Circle the houses were all rundown multi-family dwellings, attested to by the numerous mailboxes around each front door. How I longed to see them restored. Right? Wrong! -- or at least in most cases, based on what I now see. In fact, those readers who have heard my lectures on Shanghai architecture may recall how I relate that my partner Deke and I used to bewail the fact that the houses were now in such bad shape and pray that they would be renovated -- and that, having seen the end result of most of these renovations, we now plead that they not be renovated, please! Shanghai, alas, does not yet have the expertise and materials to do a proper job. (We feel blue glass and fake chrome do not constitute a proper job.)

Columbia Circle is still a joy to walk, although it is slowly sinking into a morass of mindless renovation. You need only study the beauty and grace of the old dwellings, how the architects managed to maintain the integrity of the whole (no mixed styles there!), to realize that most of the renovated ones have now lost much of the fine detailing and even the unity that make the others so charming.

All over Frenchtown there are lanes like this, the more fortunate ones untouched by progress and Big Money. So many of the dwelling were built in the Thirties that the whole scene takes me back to my early years, when as a lonely only child I would spend hours leafing through magazines of house plans and house interiors and gardens and furniture and fittings. Those 1930's dwellings and accouterments are still here in Shanghai, intact and encapsulated like bugs in amber.

If you could only peer into some of these houses, as I am fortunately able to do on occasion, you would find living rooms with beamed ceilings and hooded fireplaces, stairwells with carved newel posts and railings curving upward from lofty hallways, archways and arched doors with brass fittings and hinges, light fixtures -- all of a quality to be found in no store in China today. French windows and doors open onto wide terraces and look out on gardens with remnants of fountains and winding flagstone paths among the flowers and weeds.

In the old Shanghai magazines that I collect I find photos of families sitting in their libraries or before their fireplaces, these same fireplaces in the same rooms I find today. And they sit amidst the same 1930's furniture that you today can still find in antique furniture warehouses here. Sunlight streams in, there are fresh flowers in vases everywhere (gardeners were cheap), sometimes a dog sits by the doorway leading to the garden.

People ask me how I can bear to see these lovely old houses as they now stand. When I go into one of course I see its current shabby state and it hurts, but I can quickly move on past that. I am blessed with a vivid imagination and a sense of history -- or perhaps not really history, as I was born in the thirties and was alive when most of these houses were built. Within a minute or two of entering I can already see myself coming down that stairway, moving through the lovely rooms, not the horrors you see now but as they must have looked then. In my mind's eye I am busy selecting their furnishings, arranging the flowers, ordering the servants about (I am, of course, to the manor born). I am living there -- not now but then.

I realize not everyone is so fortunate, either in having the gift of a romanticized and unbridled imagination, or even in being able to get into these old houses. But everyone is free to explore the lanes and public ways of Shanghai, to seek out their stained glass windows, look at carved door frames, or gaze up at Tudor half-timbering, at the little dormers with garrets behind them, at ornate brickwork and chimneys. Sometimes I actually find the houses that I first saw in old magazines, I look up who lived there, and occasionally recognize a name from Shanghai's expatriate history. Or sometimes it is my old Chinese friends who once lived there.

True, I have better-stocked archives than most -- but even before I had them I still found endless fascination is prowling the streets of the old French Concession. I would try to picture in my mind (and later in our books) how the old Shanghailanders lived their privileged lives of leisure and ease in these small houses with their gardens, and with the money and the servants to keep everything in perfect order, to keep the ugly world at bay.

As I captured their lives in my imagination, I began to understand why they missed it so, the old Shanghailanders with whom I often chat or correspond. They talk of such a great loss, the old Shanghai they knew. They speak of it so longingly and lovingly, describing their houses or their flats, their servants, their long lost lives here. We can not turn back the clock for them, but at least in Shanghai the shells in which those lives were lived are still here. They are the charming, often modest, houses of old Frenchtown and they still survive here in all their shabby glory for those who wish to seek them out.