Astor House: The German Corner

The Astor House anchors Whangpoo Road, but it was by no means the most important tenant along this relatively short road that parallels the mouth of Soochow Creek as it enters the Huangpu River. Across the street of the hotel was - and still is - the Russian consulate, which we will examine in a future post. And next to that along the waterfront were the German, Japanese and U.S. Consulates. All of them were large buildings representing the significant interests of their respective countries in Shanghai and China.

In the photo above, taken from onboard a boat on the Huangpu in 1905, we see the old pre-reconstruction Astor House on the very left, Astor Road leading away from the shore, and then the two light-colored buildings of the German consulate. The darker building on the right is the Japanese consulate. Behind the German consulte we can see the spire of the German church which we see more of in a moment.

In this lively photo we are back on Whangpoo Road just before 1910, with the old Astor House still in place on the very left. We are looking down the street with the German church and school on the left, the German and Japanese consulates on the right and the T-intersection with Tsingpoo Road at the end of the street. We can see the Japanese flag high up above their consulate.

There are not many photos of Tsingpoo Road as it is only one block long, connecting Broadway to the wharfs along the river. The buildings on that block are mostly the offices of large international trading houses like Arnhold, Asiatic and Sassoon, and large local produce merchants.

The photo has a handwritten legend in German: "Europäischer Stadtteil in Shanghai" - European district of Shanghai. Before 1910, this corner of the city must have felt very modern as nearly everything here had just recently been built or was about to be rebuilt, like the Astor House.

Moving a few steps forward and a decade back in time, we are now in 1901, facing this very German corner of Shanghai. At the very left is the entrance of Astor Road that connects with Broadway one block away. Directly at the corner is the German Protestant Church of Shanghai, which disappears sometime in the 1920s

As reported in the extremely thorough Pipe Organs of China site, this church was built in 1899 and was for a brief period one of the tallest buildings in Shanghai.

We are now turning the corner into Astor Road, looking at the German School - the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Schule - which was part of the church compound. This is a very rare glimpse into Astor Road. Here is a comprehensive history of the school (in German) at the Internet Archive.

Next to the school were several garages and businesses that took care of Shanghai's small but growing car population, but I don't know of any surviving photos of these buildings.

At the other end of the block on the corner with Broadway is the Thomas Hanbury Coffee House that we visited several posts ago.

Here we have a photo of the students of the German School, taken in 1902 in the small garden that stretched in front of the Astor House along the waterfront in the years before this area became the grounds of the Russian consulate.

It's intriguing to see the faces of these children, born sometime in the 1890s, growing up in Shanghai in the 1900s. They were coming of age during the First World War and would still be in their mid-adulthood during the Second World War. What turbulent lifes were in front of them!