Located in the former French Concession on Dongping Lu, formerly Route Garnier is the middle school attached to the Shanghai Conservatory of Music. These are the former residences of Chiang Kai-shek and his brother-in-law T.V. Soong.
On December 1st 1927, Chiang Kai-shek and Soong Mei-ling married. They held their private Christian wedding at the Soong residence on Seymour Road (Shaanxi Beilu). In the afternoon they moved to the Majestic Hotel (on the site of today's Majestic Theater), then the most luxurious hotel in Shanghai, for their formal wedding ceremony attended by more than 1,000 guests, including senior Kuomintang ministers and celebrities and their relatives.
After the wedding they went to their interim new apartment for the night, and the next day they went to Hangzhou and Mogan Mountain for their honeymoon.
After the marriage, Chiang shuttled between Nanjing, then the capital of China, and Shanghai. But the couple had no decent home to themselves. Finally T.V. Soong, the Finance Minister, bought the house from a foreigner and gave it to Chiang as the dowry of Mei-ling.
Shanghainese called the house Chiang's Imperial Resort Palace or the Chiang-Soong villa. But Chiang himself called it Ai Lu, literally the House of Love, as compared to his two other houses in Lushan and Hangzhou, the Mei Lu and Cheng Lu.
The ground floor sitting room is very large and could hold 40 to 50 people. Quite often, the Wesleyan-educated Mei-ling and her nephews and nieces would watch American films shown there. The second floor bedroom is as large as 100 square meters.
The French-style house has its outside wall inlaid with black, white and yellow pebbles. It is said Chiang liked the house very much. For one thing it was the dowry of Mei-ling, and for another it looked like the Sun Yat-sen residence, a symbol that Chiang was the successor of Sun.
In front of house was a large lawn, with a large snow pine tree in the east and a pond in the south. Today only a small part of the lawn remains, for the music school has built houses on it.
In the following 20 years until he fled to Taiwan Province, Chiang did not spend much time in the House of Love. During his short stay he would receive Shanghai celebrities or government officials. Soong Mei-ling followed Chiang quite often, but she stayed in the house longer than her husband. And quite often when she was in Shanghai, her mother would come along and stay with her in the house for several days.
(Shanghai Star July 3, 2002)
