The opening ceremony of the Shanghai World Expo April 30, 2010

Related Link: Museums Gear up for Shanghai World Expo

In many ways development in this city has followed a pattern common to much of urban China since the economic reforms of the 1980s. After decades of neglect following the Communist revolution, the old fabric of Shanghai began to give way, first in a ripple and then a frenzy of demolition and new construction. Particularly since 2002, when plans were announced for the 2010 World Expo — an international trade fair that opened here on Saturday and is expected to draw 70 million visitors — the city has been in a state of perpetual reconstruction.

Amid the clang of jackhammers, swarms of migrant workers have been erecting glass-walled hotels and office towers, digging subway lines and building elevated highways — and in the process demolishing whole swaths of traditional lanes known as lilongs and venerable Western-style buildings from the days of the American and European settlements here. The government of Shanghai spent $45 billion on urban and Expo-related development in the last eight years, more than Beijing spent in advance of the Olympics.

But although this construction has radically changed the character of the city, which like Beijing has seen thousands of residents forcibly relocated in the name of instant progress, preservationists both in and outside China take some comfort that the demolition has not been as indiscriminate here as in other cities, including Beijing.

“Shanghai is much better than Beijing at issuing and implementing preservation regulations on historic architecture,” said Ruan Yisan, a former professor of urban planning at Tongji University of Shanghai and director of the National Research Center for Historic Cities.

In 2004 the Shanghai government created 12 preservation zones, giving historic neighborhoods at least some protection. The government’s motive for such moves is often profit; it has recognized that the city’s extraordinary mix of architecture contributes to its tourist appeal. But there has also been pressure from the citizens of Shanghai, who have grown increasingly proud of their city’s landscape, including the Western-style architecture, once a symbol of China’s subjugation.

Sometimes what officials claim is conservation is anything but. Old buildings are rebuilt with new materials, while developers have torn down protected structures in the dead of night, often with official support. And even in protected zones old architecture has been displaced by new roads and hotels. Conservationists here are on constant alert, and protests among residents have become increasingly frequent. “It’s an arduous war,” said Mr. Ruan, who four years ago founded the Ruan Yisan Heritage Foundation, a preservation group.

Not all Shanghainese, of course, agree that it’s a war worth fighting. Some residents who have seen friends receive the equivalent of thousands of dollars to relocate from crumbling homes to new apartments dismiss preservation efforts, and officials stress the importance of improving the city’s living conditions.

Still, preservation advocates in the city generally applaud the government’s efforts. “For a city which has developed as rapidly as Shanghai, the number of historic properties that have managed to survive is a miracle,” said Anne Warr, an Australian architect based in Shanghai and the author of the guidebook “Shanghai Architecture.”

Here are a few of the old neighborhoods and buildings that have been spared the wrecking ball in the prelude to the Expo.

Wujiang Road

Modernization has reshaped Shanghai before. In the mid-19th century, the British, Americans and French forced China to sign treaties ceding control of the city and its valuable port, and their settlements, known as concessions, drew the Western businessmen who built the Bund, a grand riverfront promenade, as well as stately homes, churches and schools. Over the next century these concessions would expand to more than four times the size of the old Chinese walled city, as gangsters, traders and refugees from the West flocked to this open port, where no passport was required. European architects joined their Chinese counterparts in blending western and eastern design, and by the 1930’s, the city was full of buildings ranging in style from French Renaissance to Art Deco, but generally with a Chinese twist.

In the area once known as Love Lane — infamous in the 30s for its brothels and ballrooms — there is one last trace of that bygone era amid the gleaming new hotel towers, apartment blocks and mall. According to the Shanghai Daily newspaper, the developers who have turned a vast tract of the neighborhood into a field of rubble that will soon be covered by more hotels and offices agreed to save one old mansion, which was built in 1920 by the Qiu brothers, two paint industry tycoons.

The mansion, which later became a school, was recently moved half the length of a football field by synchronized jacks moving on rails, leaving its arched colonnades, stain glass and stone railings intact. It’s doubtful that most modern Chinese buildings would survive that journey: The average life of recent constructions here is 30 years, according to Chinese media reports, while colonial buildings — those that can still be found — have weathered close to or more than a century, and still exude much of their romantic glory.

The Former Jewish Ghetto

During World War II about 20,000 Jewish refugees settled in Shanghai, which as an open port required no visa, despite the Japanese occupation. When the Third Reich demanded its Japanese allies constrain the Jews, the occupiers forced all “stateless refugees” to live among 100,000 Chinese within a few blocks in the northern part of the city around what is now Zhoushan Road. This ghetto became Little Vienna, filled with Yiddish theaters, cafes, synagogues and schools, until the Communists expelled the Jewish residents in the early 1950s.

The Romanesque Revival town house that contained the offices of the Joint Distribution Committee, a Jewish social-service organization, still stands. Recently Zhang Yuying, 86, who has lived in a row house in a nearby alley since 1945, pointed to a Star of David window in a house across the way. “This whole neighborhood was filled with Jews,” she said. “We need to protect this history so the world remembers the friendship between Shanghai and the Jews.”

Preservationists, including Mr. Ruan, have pressured the city to salvage the remnants of the White Horse Inn, a popular Jewish nightclub, which the government says will be rebuilt across the street. And the government has assigned protected status to 70 acres within the area, hoping to draw tourists seeking their Jewish roots. But there has been a downside to the move, which has left much of the neighborhood poor and its row houses crumbling, since developers refuse to finance renovations more expensive than just razing and starting from scratch.

The Former Residence of Zhang Shuhe

Despite Communist propaganda, many Chinese benefited enormously from Shanghai’s roaring mercantilist economy. In 1882, Zhang Shuhe, a prominent businessman, bought a British-designed estate here, to which developers in the 1920s added Shikumen, a hybrids of British row and Chinese courtyard houses, often with artdeco facades. Today, one villa remains, packed with ten households, whose members take great pride in their home. “Nothing has changed here for decades,” said Fang Meizhen, 54, who moved in with her husband’s family in 1983. “I feel like I’m connected to the past here, it’s like stepping back in time.”

Though dilapidated, the neoclassical villa is still elegant with its stone oval windows framed with stone rosettes, a grand staircase, and stained glass windows covered in dust, and the original paint clings to the ceiling’s delicate plaster ornamentation on the ceiling. But time has taken its toll: clutter fills the second-floor landing, bamboo polls are strewn across the balcony to hang laundry and the ballroom has been subdivided into tiny bedrooms.

That has not stopped Chinese film crews from using the house as a film set, and recently the government began hanging historical information signs on itthe building’s exterior walls to draw tourists. Ms. Fang believes these signs point to a shift in the government’s mindset, said Ms. Fang, a sentiment echoed as does Wang Anshi, former director of the housing repair department at the Shanghai Housing, Land and Resource Administration. “The preservation situation is definitely improving,” he said.

Zhexhingli

In 2008 the Ruan Yisan Heritage Foundation and the Shanghai Heritage Discovery and Documentation Society joined the government to carry out a survey of what remained of the city’s old lilongs. In the process they discovered the Zhexingli neighborhood in the northeastern part of the city, where more than 300 buildings from the 1920s and ‘30s have survived. Residents exercise and chat under cypress and bamboo trees in these lanes (one is at left), which are lined with a mix of Art Deco and British-style (i.e., brick suburban) shikumen row houses and Tudorbethan villas. “Here I can talk to my neighbors, unlike my son who lives in a modern apartment and doesn’t know anyone,” said Shen Yanfeng, 67.

Today some Shanghainese are investing in the area. Pei Jianguo, 54, a retired construction engineer, is renovating a brick row house he bought after selling his previous home, a highrise apartment — a move that raised eyebrows among some acquaintances. “I’m different than most Chinese,” Mr. Pei said with a chuckle. Gesturing to the apartment buildings looming over his new house, he added, “Those high rises are just prisons in the sky. It’s these old neighborhoods that are so special.”

The Holy Trinity Cathedral

For decades, the Holy Trinity Cathedral near the Bund was left to rot, the victim of Communist antipathy toward religion. Built in 1869 by Sir George Gilbert Scott, one of Britain’s most prominent architects, the Gothic revival church was gutted and turned into an auditorium and government offices after 1949, and its steeple was torn down during the Cultural Revolution. Today, the restored cathedral is being reopened in conjunction with the Expo and will be used by the Three-Self Patriotic Movement, a government-controlled Protestant church. The church is once again equipped with an organ, pews and stained glass windows, while gargoyles glare from beneath the new spire. “It’s an outstanding example of restoration,” said Peter Hibbard, president of the Royal Asiatic Society China in Shanghai.