White Russian émigré Nicolai Plotnikoff, formerly the bodyguard of a Chinese restaurateur in Harbin, opened the Arcadia in April 1937. They pooled 200 dollars each to buy a failing Russian establishment, located in a villa on former Route Doumer (by then renamed Donghu Lu), and went about converting it into a “clean” dancehall.īefore the war, that villa housed the Arcadia, the largest Russian cabaret in Shanghai. The men found the existing nightclubs sleazy, purveying “poisonous booze” and charging exorbitant prices. The Airline Club was created around 1946 by a group of Americans who worked for commercial airlines in Shanghai. In another photo from Claire Chao’s collection, Isabel is posing with a Filipino swing orchestra, on a carpet-covered stage, with wicker music stands and a parachute of silvery fabric suspended above. She is posing in front of a mural of Hawaiian dancers above a course of bamboo paneling. KATYA: One of the first images in Remembering Shanghai is a snapshot of Isabel Chao in the Airline Club in 1949. Isabel at eighteen, posing with the Airline Club’s jazz ensemble Moro and his band This article, researched and written by Katya at our request, is close to our hearts because it’s all about my Mom Isabel’s favorite late-1940s watering hole, the Airline Club, and its earlier incarnation through Katya’s Russian lens. Katya received her second Master’s degree from Bologna University and is currently a Research Fellow at the University of Eastern Piedmont, Italy. She also manages Building Russian Shanghai , a site dedicated to the diaspora’s built legacy, and Necropolis of Russian Shanghai. Her articles on history and architecture appear in international media and her blog. She is the author of the two-volume history and photographic atlas Shanghai Old Town: Topography of a Phantom City (Suzhou Creek Press, 20).

CLAIRE: Katya Knyazeva, from Novosibirsk, Russia, is a historian and a journalist with a focus on urban form, heritage preservation and the Russian diaspora in Shanghai.

Remembering shanghai