“I had never seen anything like Shanghai in 1981,” said Tess Johnston, describing her impression of the city when she first arrived. “I had never been to a foreign country that looked so utterly and completely Western. It was perfectly preserved, a cross between Warsaw in 1938 and Calcutta, a totally Western city with an Asian population. It was a scruffy showcase of Western architecture—and it was absolutely wonderful.”
Tess, who died this week at 93, had arrived in September 1981 with the U.S. Foreign Service to work at the U.S. Consulate. That wonderful Western architecture would captivate her for the rest of her long life and keep her in Shanghai for 35 years, pioneering the study of Old Shanghai and becoming the expert on the pre-1949 Western presence.
A native of Charlottesville, Virginia—who, despite living all over the world for half a century, never lost her charming Southern drawl, in English and Chinese—Tess joined the Foreign Service in 1953. She spent 33 years with the Foreign Service, in places as diverse as East Berlin, New Delhi, Tehran, Paris, and Shanghai, but it would be Shanghai that captured her curious mind and her heart.
Tess wanted to know all about the marvelous buildings all around her, but in 1981 Shanghai, pre-1949 Western architecture was little more than an embarrassing reminder of the “Century of Shame,” a physical reminder of a hundred years of forced foreign domination. No one wanted to talk about the history of these buildings, owned by imperialists and blacklisted capitalists, let alone research and write about it.
She quickly realized that her curiosity about this “Western city improbably perched on the shores of China,” was not going to be easily satisfied, and she was going to have to be the one to do it. “I was in the right place at the right time, so why not?”
So Tess got down to the business of getting to know the city, photographing, documenting, and discovering in every minute of her spare time. She unearthed invaluable research aids: a treasure trove of Old Shanghai books and maps in the street markets, and another sort of treasure trove in the people who had grown up here in the years before 1949, both Shanghainese and foreign, who shared with her the tales of their past lives. It was Tess who encouraged them to write their memoirs, share their photographs, and tell their stories, stories that have helped us piece together the story of Old Shanghai.
But even in the 1980s, the wheels of change had begun, albeit slowly, and Tess was all too aware that this museum of pre-1949 architecture could not last. There was a book in this once-great city, but superb photographs were essential. It would take her take her several more years—with a posting in Paris in between—before she found that photographer, Deke Erh (Erh Dongqiang).
Deke, who is Shanghainese, had first picked up a camera as a teenager during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), and traveled the countryside. Saddled with a “bad family background,” he just wanted to get away from Shanghai, where all his associations were negative. When he returned in the 1980s, he looked at the city with new eyes, and saw a wealth of historic architecture. “Nobody was interested back then,” he says, “not even the professors at Tongji University [now noted for its historic architecture expertise].”
Tess and Deke’s first book together, A Last Look: Western Architecture in Old Shanghai, published in 1993, was the first to highlight the city’s built heritage, the very first visual record of its incredible architecture legacy. Before that, there were no historic plaques on the buildings, no hint of what these buildings had been. In some ways, she gave Shanghai back its history.
Tess Johnston and Deke Erh, in Shanghai.
Tess and Deke would go on to collaborate on 25 books, including a glorious tome on Shanghai Art Deco, 15 volumes on Western architecture and the Western presence in treaty ports throughout China, as well as a series of walking guides through the history of different Shanghai neighborhoods—a priceless contribution to the story of Shanghai.
Tess retired from the Foreign Service in October 1996, but “I could not see myself leaving China, especially with so many books incubating, such a rich field to explore, and most of all, my abiding love for the country and its people,” she says in her memoir, Permanently Temporary: From Berlin to Shanghai in Half a Century. By November of that year, she was back as a private citizen and finally able to focus full-time on her grand passion, the architecture and history of Old Shanghai.
In those years, writers, researchers, and the simply Shanghai history-curious always found their way to Tess (if you shared her passion for Old Shanghai, she always had time for you), and so did we. In 1998, Patrick Cranley and I first met Tess in her apartment lined with Old Shanghai books, maps, and wonderful Old Shanghai ephemera. We had sought Tess out because we were curious about Shanghai’s old buildings, and we all agreed that maybe there were others like us, who wanted to know more: and thus, Historic Shanghai was born.
Tess remained in Shanghai for the next 20 years, conducting lively walking tours, delivering talks (her classic: “A Hundred Years of Shanghai’s Expat History in 50 Minutes”), and never tiring of exploring old buildings, researching and writing books, and encouraging scores of others to do the same.
Her last Shanghai walking guide was published in 2016, the year she repatriated: Final Five Shanghai Walks: The Where’s Where of the Who’s Who of Old Shanghai. In 2018, she published a memoir about her time in Vietnam, A War Away: An American Woman in Vietnam, 1967-1974, and in 2019, edited her dear friend Daisy Kwok’s memoir, Shanghai Daisy.
Until COVID scuttled her travel plans, Tess returned to Shanghai each spring—twice with new books to promote—eager to see her friends, her buildings, and to continue to infiltrate and explore.
In the introduction to A Last Look, Tess and Deke say that their goal is “to preserve these Western monuments for future generations through our photographs, our research, and the collective memories of the buildings’ former architects, builders and tenants.” Tess often says that she was grateful that she was here to do just that, arriving “at the right time and in the right place” to document Shanghai as it was. So are we, Tess, so are we.
Tess was never sure, she told me, if there was an afterlife. If there is one, Tess, we hope it’s packed with historic Shanghai buildings—Lord knows, enough have been demolished—and your beloved dachshunds. Bon voyage, Tess, and thank you with all our heart.
In Permanently Temporary, Tess wrote that she’d like this on her epitaph:
She never read all the books she wanted to read
Nor owned all the dogs she wanted to own
Nor lived in all the houses she wanted to live in.