Derring Apartments

Text by John Meckley

Chongming Lu and Jiangxi Bei Lu. Derring Apartments were built in 1935 by a British construction firm. The building was meant to be the first in the line of white collar housing projects. In its short life as an apartment building it had two famous residents, both writers: Zhang Henshui and Liu Baiyu. After 1947, a pharmaceutical company Xin Yi purchased the building and adapted it to its production purposes, basically turned it into a factory. In 1956, the factory went into the joint state private ownership and by 1958 the building housed over ten glass-making factories and pharmaceutical productions, becoming Shanghai’s largest concentration of pharmaceutical processes.