[Only in SH] The Rooms That Ran Old Shanghai – Tea, Trade, and the City's First Movie Screens

Shanghai has more cafés than any other city on Earth – nearly 9,000 of them. A century ago, though, its true public living room was the teahouse: loud, communal, and the beating heart of how the city actually worked.

A city in a cup

The history of Shanghai's teahouses dates back to even before the city opened as a treaty port in 1843. They began flourishing after that. The novelist Lao She wrote that "a big teahouse is a small society." Inside old Shanghai, you could find that society in miniature – silk merchants haggled over deals, craftsmen and clerks gossiped over cups, while street vendors, fortune-tellers, and beggars scraped by on the fringes – and all the while, storytellers and opera singers performed to tea-sipping crowds. A whole cross-section of the city, united by a wooden seat and a refillable cup.

Shanghai's teahouses sat on a spectrum of class. At the top stood grand houses – Huxinting, "Mid-Lake Pavilion," in the old town, and Qingliange, the "Green Lotus," on Fuzhou Road – serving the city's elite: officials, tycoons, scholars, and underworld bosses. With lavish parlors and private chambers, they charged many times the price of a common cup. In these rarefied rooms, you paid not just for the tea, but for the seat and the company.

Those teahouses were more than a place to drink – it was a way to watch the city. The grand houses turned their upper floors into vantage points over the busiest streets; out on Nanjing Road, Wuyun Risheng Lou – "Five Clouds, Rising Sun" – earned its fame in 1908, when Shanghai's first tram clattered beneath its windows, and on opening day every seat was packed with onlookers.

Far more numerous were the working-class haunts: the Laohu zao (tiger-stove) lane boilers, whose furnaces gaped like tigers' mouths, and the humbler "by-request" houses, which only lit their stoves when a customer walked in. A popular couplet captured the spirit: Find joy in hardship – brew a bowl of tea.

Most homes had no gas, so the tiger-stove boiled water for the whole lane. You hauled your thermos over, paid a few coppers, and walked home with it steaming. A worker's breakfast was a baked pancake dunked in green tea – Shanghai's gritty answer to bread and coffee.

Then there was the New Year cup. On the first morning of the lunar year, the lucky Yuanbao Tea – literally "ingot tea" – arrived with two green olives floating on top, a pun on wealth. In the Shanghai dialect, "green olive" sounds like "do come in" – a welcome that needed no translation. To be served one was to be showered with gongxi facai – "may you grow rich".

Old regulars treasured one detail most. During the Spring Festival, a waiter too ill to leave his bed would drag himself to work – those were the only days he could serve the Yuanbao Tea, and he knew the regulars would answer with a generous red packet. As he set the cup down, he'd call out: "An ingot for you – fortune on your head!"

Tea here wasn't a beverage. It was a membership card to public life.

Where business got done

Long before WeChat and stock exchanges, Shanghai's deals were struck over tea. And they happened in three very different ways – each with its own cast of characters and unwritten rules.

Downstairs, near the workshops, the morning teahouse was a labor exchange. Carpenters and masons showed up for breakfast and left with a day's work – bargaining over wages between sips, then following the foreman out the door.

The grand teahouses were hubs of high finance. A 1906 doggerel summed it up: "Every trade needs its prices sounded out – gather at the teahouse." At their peak, 16 such houses hosted 52 industries and thousands of traders daily. Qingliange, for instance, functioned as a spot exchange long before the term was coined – cloth, sugar, beans, silk, tea, each had its own corner, its regulars, its unwritten code. Deals were struck over a single cup and sealed with a handshake. There were also the "white ants" – lease-brokers who took a cut on every room let, turning Chunfeng Deyi Lou ("Spring Wind and Pride") into a shadow property market.

Yet commerce was only part of the story. The teahouse was also the city's unofficial community service center – and its most theatrical ritual was chi jiang cha, or "settling disputes over tea". When gangs, traders, or neighbours clashed, rivals gathered around an octagonal table and put their case to a go-between who knew both the underworld and the law. If no handshake came before the tea cooled, cups could fly; some teahouses banned the practice to save their crockery.

But the same table also mended personal rifts – eloping couples used it as a rendezvous, divorcing spouses settled terms. In old Shanghai, you went to a teahouse not just to strike a deal, but to stitch a life back together – a civic amenity more approachable than any police station.

Old Shanghai's teahouses doubled as newsrooms in disguise. Reporters, settlement constables and plainclothes detectives slipped in for a crowd that was a goldmine of talk. A reporter who caught a tidbit would scribble it right at the table, rush the copy to the newsroom, and by morning the city woke to a fresh batch of juicy gossip dressed up as news. The court beat played the same game: reporters covering the International Settlement Mixed Court parked at a teahouse across from the courthouse; a defendant who wanted a name kept out of the papers – or a story softened – knew where to find them, red envelope in hand. The police worked the room too – fishing for leads, sometimes grilling a suspect over the teacups, until Shanghai coined baodating cha hui, the informants' teahouse gathering. They never paid for their tea; the owner didn't dare bill them, needing their muscle to keep the doors open.

The teahouse that birthed Chinese cinema

Here is the historical footnote your textbook likely skipped: the first place Shanghai ever watched a movie was not a cinema. It was a teahouse.

Cinema was born in a Parisian café – the Grand Café, where the Lumière brothers screened in 1895. One year later, the new medium reached Shanghai. And its first fixed venue was Qingliange.

In 1903, the Spanish showman Ramos rented a room there, hung a white sheet, and charged 30 copper cash per seat when 20 viewers pooled in. The "Western shadow-play" packed the house daily – until the concessions banned screenings in 1906. Ramos used his profits to build Shanghai's first proper cinema, the Hongkew Theater, in 1908.

At both ends of cinema's cradle stood rooms where you ordered a drink – coffee in Paris, tea in Shanghai.

The Tea Flower Girls

Shanghai was built by migrants, and the Cantonese were among the largest groups to arrive. Cantonese-style teahouses – often run by restaurants and serving coffee and soda alongside tea – sprang up across the city. The most popular were Sunya Teahouse, operated by Sunya Cantonese Restaurant, and Dadong Teahouse, run by the department store Wing On's Dadong Restaurant. These teahouses offered an array of delicate dim sum and other Cantonese favorites.

They also hired young waitresses in crisp uniforms, nicknamed "Tea Flower Girls" – a playful nod to Dumas's Camille. Dressed in lake-blue robes with white aprons, they glided between tables pushing carts laden with snacks and fruit.

But the Cantonese morning ritual never quite took with the locals. Mornings in Shanghai were for errands, not lingering. So Shanghainese gravitated toward afternoon tea instead – a rhythm that suited a city built on commerce, not leisure.

Afternoon Tea, Western Style

By the 1930s, afternoon tea had arrived – though "tea" was a polite fiction. The real draw was coffee, and the places to be were the Western-style cafés. The most famous was Sullivan's, which drew a steady stream of writers, artists, and white-collar women with fine pastries and soft music. The waitresses were half the attraction – young White Russian and Jewish women in crisp green-and-white uniforms, "all courteous and well-trained."

The other great name was DD'S, also with two locations – one on Nanjing Road W., the other on Huaihai Road – prized for its train-style cushioned seats where you could linger for hours. For those who wanted a bit more swing, some teahouses introduced "tea dances" – hiring ballroom dancers for afternoon sessions where tea and pastries were thrown in with the price of a spin on the floor.

In traditional Chinese teahouses, women were rarely seen – either as customers or as staff. Cantonese-style teahouses hired female waitresses and occasionally drew professional women on business. But it was the Western-style cafés that truly attracted a steady flow of white-collar women. Eileen Chang, the famed Shanghai writer, was known to end her shopping sprees with an afternoon coffee at one of these cafés.

Whether you came for the coffee, the company, or just a quiet corner to read, these Western-style cafés offered a different kind of ritual – less about the brew, more about the mood.

Two gazes: the world meets Shanghai

Westerners often arrived with the picture already painted. In the 1700s, British potters had turned imported blue-and-white into the "willow-pattern" – China, prettified into porcelain. So when they reached Huxinting, with its nine-curve bridge and willows weeping into the water, the fairytale seemed to have stepped right off the porcelain. Travellers promptly christened the teahouse "The Willow Pattern Teahouse".

The British writer Mrs Archibald Little felt the likeness in 1902: "The great thing to visit in Shanghai is the tea gardens with a certain far-off resemblance to the picture on the famous willow-pattern plate." The plate came first; the teahouse just happened to fit.

Not every foreigner filed the teahouse under "curio". In 1899 the Scottish traveler Isabella Bird wrote that "restaurants and tea houses of all grades abound," singling out the "picturesque building on the Zigzag Bridge" – her name for Huxinting. And, Mary Ninde Gamewell's 1916 "The Gateway to China" described the Fuzhou Road houses near Qingliange: "Its mark of distinction is the number and character of its tea-houses."

Decades later, the Mexican consul Mauricio Fresco – writing as GE Miller in "Shanghai: The Paradise of Adventurers" (1937) – recalled an afternoon in a Nantao teahouse, within the old walled city. He and his companion ordered a special flower-infused drink called "The Flower of Happiness," prepared with extracted flower essences. The cups themselves were filigree marvels, inscribed with the sort of auspicious phrases Chinese artists loved: "Grand and Good Luck" on one, "Honor, Long Life, Wisdom as High as the Mountains and as Bright as the Stars" on another. In that famous old café, Fresco wrote, one was always sure to meet a cultured Chinese gentleman sipping tea and meditating on the past splendors of the Celestial Empire.

Even royalty came: when Queen Elizabeth II visited the lake pavilion in 1986, she joined nearly 20 other heads of state who had made the City God Temple teahouse their standard "must-see".

The cup that still runs the city

Most of those rooms are gone. The tiger stoves fell silent around 2013. Yet the habit of tea outlived the buildings.

It tasted of green olives bobbing in a porcelain cup. It smelled of jasmine rising with steam from a neighbor's pot. It sounded of lids tapping against cups, and of bamboo chairs creaking on a summer evening.

Huxinting still stands in Yuyuan Garden; take the seat once held by Queen Elizabeth II and gaze over its ancient pavilions. The Yuanbao Tea custom lives on – named Jing'an District intangible cultural heritage in 2023 – while Sunya, revived its Cantonese morning tea in 2018.

Shanghai's teahouses never really left. They only made room for everything else that came after.