We remember Tess Johnston, U.S. diplomat-turned-chronicler of old Shanghai’s colonial architecture, who died at the age of 93.
AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
Tess Johnston arrived in Shanghai as an American foreign service officer in 1981. She left 35 years later as an author and expert on the city’s vanishing colonial architecture. Johnston died earlier this month in Washington. She was 93. Frank Langfitt, NPR’s former Shanghai correspondent, has this remembrance.
FRANK LANGFITT, BYLINE: When Johnston first saw Shanghai, she marveled at the Western architecture. Everything from columned neoclassical banks along the river to villas with wrought-iron balconies and terracotta roofs.
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TESS JOHNSTON: I’ve always been an architecture buff, and I thought, oh, I’ve got to read about, you know, who built these things and, you know, who the architects were. And nothing had been written since really basically 1945.
LANGFITT: Johnston changed that. Dressed in a blazer, scarf and khakis, she roamed Shanghai, documenting the buildings and Westerners who once lived there. It was a race against the wrecking ball as the colonial buildings were demolished for modern high-rises. With Chinese photographer Erh Dongqiang, Johnston published more than two dozen books.
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JOHNSTON: We never dreamed that some of the beautiful villas that we were passing would be gone or would be modified beyond comprehension.
LANGFITT: Western powers had rebuilt Shanghai in their image after defeating China in the Opium War. Qiu Xiaolong grew up in Shanghai and writes detective novels set there. He says the Communist Party saw Shanghai’s European face as a loss of its own, and expats like Johnston filled the void and illuminated the city’s rich and complicated past.
QIU XIAOLONG: Past work is very important in a sense that it let people understand that part of history.
LANGFITT: Tina Kanagaratnam is a Singaporean businesswoman and local preservationist. She says Johnston was a walking encyclopedia of Shanghai’s cosmopolitan 1920s and 1930s.
TINA KANAGARATNAM: You know, there’s an incredible sense of loss because Tess was one of these people who you felt was sort of eternal, that she would always be there. You could always turn to her and say, now, what was that building? What was that street? And she’d have the answer or the anecdote for you.
LANGFITT: In 2016, Johnston told NPR she was proudest of her first coffee table book, which introduced the city’s Western architectural heritage to a new generation of readers. She said, quote, “I’m grateful I could be here and see it as it was.”
Frank Langfitt, NPR News, Washington.
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