Excerpt from Street of Eternal Happiness by Rob Schmitz, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

When the Communist Party took over in 1949, it vilified the foreign concessions, regarding them as humiliating symbols of foreign aggression. Missing from Party propaganda, though, was that in 1921, the twenty-eight-year-old Mao Zedong secretly met with other young radical thinkers of the time at a girls' boarding school deep within the French Concession, convening the first congress of the Chinese Communist Party there. Mao and his comrades chose the site precisely for the type of refuge it provided others. It was less likely that authorities in control of the Chinese-run part of the city would find them, arrest them, and put them on trial, a fate that would have prevented the communists from gaining ground, forever altering the course of China's history.

The French had built their neighborhood with a layout typical of an arrondissement in Paris: narrow, winding boulevards lined with trees that locals still call Faguo Wutong, "French Phoenix Trees," though they are neither French nor Phoenix Trees. Like the muddled history of Shanghai, they were much more cosmopolitan: London Plane trees, a hybrid of the Oriental Plane – native to central Asia – and the American Sycamore. The first London Plane tree was discovered in Spain.

Baron George-Eugene Haussmann had made the London Plane famous. The urban planner loved the leafy look of the tree, and he had them planted throughout Paris in the 19th century when he transformed the city from a chaotic mess of tiny streets into neighborhoods connected by wide, tree-lined avenues. Soon after, London Plane trees appeared in cities throughout the world. They still dominate the streets of Rome and Sydney, and they make up nearly a third of New York City's canopy. The London Plane's leaf, similar to a maple, is the official symbol of New York City's Parks Department.

Two out of every three trees in Shanghai is a London Plane. City planners call it "the Supertree" because of its shallow root systems and its high tolerance to smog, extreme temperatures, and pests. They're planted between 18 to 24 feet apart and are pruned with a technique known as pollarding, which stunts their growth and promotes a dense canopy of leaves between two and three stories high, forcing the branches from opposite sides of the street to grow towards each other, intertwining to form dark green tunnels. The arched canopy offers pedestrians shade from the sweltering sun and cover from the fierce storms that frequently come rumbling off the East China Sea.

By 2010, when I moved to the neighborhood, the Parisian layout and its Plane trees remained, but the Chinese had reclaimed the street names. Rue Chevalier and Route Garnier had become Jianguo Lu and Dongping Lu - Build the Nation and Eastern Peace Roads. Other streets once commemorating notable dead Frenchmen had transformed into Rich People Road, Famous People Road, and Lucky Gold Road. On walks through my new neighborhood, I practiced my Chinese by reading their auspicious sounding names. There was Peaceful Happiness Road, Eternally Fortunate Road, and Winding Peace Road. I lived on what was perhaps the most auspiciously named one of all: Literally "Long Happiness Road," which I took to calling the more eloquent-sounding "Street of Eternal Happiness."

When locals read the names of these streets, though, eloquence and auspiciousness aren't the first things that come to mind. The street south of my apartment, Anfu (Peaceful Happiness), is a small city in Jiangxi province famous for processing pig parts for ham. Maoming Lu, Famous People Road, is a thriving Cantonese port city. And Changle Lu, my own Street of Eternal Happiness, is the name of a coastal town in Fujian province from which Ming Dynasty explorer Zheng He had set sail to explore much of Asia. When the Chinese renamed these French streets, those running south to north had been named after Chinese provinces or provincial capitals, while streets running east to west were named after prominent Chinese cities of the time, which themselves had been named for countless forms of auspiciousness so many dynasties ago.

Excerpted from Street of Eternal Happiness by Rob Schmitz. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.