It's hard to live in Shanghai without developing a certain
affection for the place, without falling in love with it a
bit. That love can often lead, as such things do, to a
compelling curiosity about her checkered past. Like a
glamorous but reticent woman approaching middle age, Shanghai
can't hide all the lines in her well-painted face, and these
lines belie an irresistibly mysterious and colorful history.
As with the Shanghainese themselves, most of Shanghai's ghosts
can trace their origins to Zhejiang Province. And there is a
particular concentration of said ghosts on the mountain of
Moganshan.
The 2000-meter
high mountain of Mogan is renowned as the favored nearby
retreat of bankers, gangsters and generals in the Republican
era. Its most notorious frequenters were gangster and
king-maker Du Yuesheng and the king he made, Chiang Kai-shek.
In fact, the dubious heroes of the Republic were late-comers
to Moganshan, which was a vacation spot for missionary
families as early as 1890. By the early 1930s, there were
about 160 Western-style stone mansions, as well as seven
tennis courts, a stream-fed swimming pool, and two churches --
one Catholic and one Protestant. Chiang Kai-shek and his
cronies began assembling on Moganshan in 1927, when Chiang
first came with Soong May-ling on their honeymoon. The
Kuomintang crowd set up their mansions on the other side of
the mountain, which was soon named Wuling after Chiang's home
village in Xikou.
Throughout the 1930s, Moganshan's Wuling was the site of work
and pleasure for China's political elite.
Traveling to
Moganshan from Shanghai is a trip back in time. From the
gleaming post-modernity of Shanghai in 2000, one passes
through the mid-'90s "grungy but working on it" of the
Hangzhou bus station. The bus from Hangzhou is a rickety
mianbaoche minivan affair crammed with migrant labors
headed home with their month's earnings crumpled carefully
into a bulging pocket. As you rattle into bamboo country,
furniture workshops line the highway, churning out wicker
furniture destined for Pier 1 import stores across America.
The small urban hole of Wukang takes you back yet another
decade to the early 1980s, when Gaige Kaifang --
"Reform and Opening" -- was just lurching to a wary start.
Here a few sparsely-stocked shelves, there a woman paying a
cobbler to repair her worn plastic flip-flops, with the
backdrop of peeling, long-forgotten ads. Don't look for the
city center: there is none. Tell the bus driver you're headed
to Moganshan and they'll take you to the lot from which the
relevant buses leave. Settle the fare in advance: it should be
¥8 up the mountain, but they'll try to charge ¥20 if you
aren't careful.
Once you've swapped buses, the time-travel continues,
through pastel-green rice paddies interspersed with clusters
of 1950s Soviet-inspired boxes of buildings that still somehow
manage to seem quaint. At the very base of the mountain is
what appears to have once been the bus station: It is now a
combination noodle shop, auto repair station, and pool hall.
This little brick structure just screams Nanjing Decade, and
from here it's all uphill, past three-story French-Spanish
houses that look like they somehow wandered out of Shanghai's
old French Concession and ended up here. The windy road up the
mountain is of the old style, concrete mixed with rocks, and
is grooved to prevent slippage. It's not too hard to envision
shiny black Buicks parading up this stretch, 
complete with shifty-eyed bodyguards perched
precariously on the runners. Your bus, however, will whiz
along with utter disregard for the blind turns, narrow roads,
and dropping cliffs. We nearly collided with a bus headed down
at an equally breakneck speed, and rapid application of brakes
sent an infant on his mother's lap hurling through the air,
barely missing the driver's open window, and landing with a
startled thump at the front. As good an argument as I've ever
seen for child car seats. The parents were not amused.
I arrived in Moganshan on a misty autumn afternoon with the
smell and threat of impending rain. The map provided with the
¥40 fee to "enter" the mountain proving totally useless, I
picked a random stone path into the bamboo thickets and began
to climb. The stone steps confusingly criss-crossing the
entire mountain are the original slabs, pounded into the dirt
with such masterly precision that they have survived some
eighty years of rain, mud, and the pounding of countless feet.
Most of the
winding paths of Moganshan are unused during the daytime,
except by a resident on his way too or from the once glorious
mansion that he now share half a dozen other families. Meander
up to any of these houses to be greeted by a host of
free-range chickens, clucking their disapproval at your
intrusion, along with a few disoriented ducks and a guard
puppy a little too happy to have company. That, plus the
mosquitoes, which are bigger than wasps and as poisonous as
scorpions: the bites on my ankles required medical treatment
and left me hobbling for a month. The buildings are
constructed of roughly-hewn blue-gray stone like so many
medieval castles, and many feature rounded turrets, expansive
balconies, and sloping red-tiled roofs. The buildings
abandoned to crowded residential purposes are in the most
original shape; the villas requisitioned by hotels have had
their stonework plastered over into more geometric shape and
their roofs replaced by green or pink corrugated tin sheets.
Like other old resort mountains, Moganshan was once the
exclusive domain of the Chinese political elite, and for the
most part it remains that way. Although most Chinese have
never heard of Moganshan, carloads of cadres arrive every
weekend with squealing Little Emperors in tow. They bounce up
and down the rock paths in traditional sedan chairs carried by
grunting-chanting coolies between Moganshan's "tourist spots"
-- a house Mao slept in in the '60s, a minor waterfall with
Chinese calligraphy carved and painted red all over the rock
face. Or there's the Moganshan Museum, an old mansion
converted into a plastic pagoda highlighting all the odd arts
and crafts that can, but probably shouldn't, be made from
bamboo.
A half-hour
trip over the top of the mountain to the Wuling side winds
past a stone marker declaring in Chinese that this was where
the first foreign house on Moganshan was built. The Song Yue
Mansion, built in 1933, was home to the Generalissimo and the
Madame during their jaunts in Moganshan. Now the Wuling Hotel,
the interior has been slathered with glossy yellow paint, with
the Art Deco doorhandles the only testament to its former
style. One wing preserves Chiang's old bedroom and study,
complete with command phone and ostentatiously expensive
mahogany furniture. An adjacent room is dedicated to detailing
with photographs and letters Chiang and Soong's activities in
Moganshan, from their 1927 honeymoon to their final visit in
1948.
Du Yuesheng's villa is a few houses down, but is marked by
no memorials or plaques. The sprawling cluster of one-story
buildings, connected by covered paths, is the most Chinese
construction on the mountain, and was built by Du as an
ancestral shrine. There also is a Western stone mansion, more
typical of Moganshan, in which Du actually resided and which
is now a guesthouse.
The damp night began to close in, and cadres belting the
Carpenters gave the crickets competition. Budgetary concerns
prompted me to opt for a less infamous inn on the old
foreigners' side. The old villa had been renovated beyond
recognition in the 1950s, and abandoned to disrepair ever
since. Its age could only be ascertained from the layout of
the room, the height of the ceiling, and the creak of the
floor. Three rooms per floor share a huge balcony overlooking
the valley, but one room was empty and the residents of the
other were not inclined towards outdoor lounging, so it was
just me, the view, the mosquitoes, and drying off-white
underwear. Come morning, after a stubborn rainfall that
hammered, I curled up with book and tea and watched glimmers
of sunlight trickle through the mist, doing little to dry off
the skivvies.
I wandered the quieter of the paths for a morning before a
lunch of chicken and young bamboo and embarking on the return
time warp to the present day. I listened hard, but the
reticent ghosts only teased me with the rustle of bamboo
thickets and the gurgle of a forgotten stream. Yet one
Moganshan woman wisely advised, "Return in the off season,
when the tourist groups and bossy hotel managers have left.
You can hear better then."
Getting there:
Air-conditioned buses to Wukang leave every morning at
10:10am from the New North Bus Station (258 Hengfeng Lu, at
Gonghe Lu, 5663-0230), costing ¥31 and taking four hours.
Alternatively, take the bus or train to Hangzhou
(approximately an hour and a half) and then catch a bus to
Wukang, which takes an hour and costs ¥6. Buses from Wukang up
the mountain leave every few minutes and cost ¥8.
Lodging:
Hotels abound in Moganshan, but many will be full come peak
season. The Wuling Hotel (052-8033132), Chiang Kai-shek's old
villa, charges ¥260-¥680 a night during the peak seasons of
July and August, ¥200-¥480 for the medium seasons of April to
June and September to October, and ¥160-¥380 in the off season
running from November to March. Better deals can be found at
smaller hotels not listed on the travel guides.
Lisa Movius is Shanghai City Editor for ChinaNow.com
