Shanghai Daily news

This well-preserved mansion on Huaihai Road was first built by Frenchman Lucien Basset more than 80 years ago. The house was later sold to an American businessman. Today it still has close connection with France-it is the residence of the French consul general in Shanghai.-Wm Patrick Cranley

A pretty whitewashed mansion on Huaihai Road was the home of a high society French family, and an American rascal, writes Tina Kanagaratnam.
In old Shanghai, it was said that the British in the International Settlement would teach you how to do business, but in the French Concession, you would be taught how to live.
Lucien Bodard describes it in "Les Francais de Shanghai": "A charming residential area dotted with imposing villas and large avenues with their venerated names - sidewalk cafes, boutiques with the latest styles, nightclubs ..."
One of those imposing villas (yes, on a large avenue with a venerated name) still survives: then, it was the family home of Frenchman Lucien Basset. Today, it is the family home of the French consul general. A high wall now surrounds the house, but passers-by can still catch a glimpse of the cheery sunflower tiles that bob just under the red-tiled roofline.
Basset, an exchange broker, commissioned the architects of Credit Foncier Co to build this beauty at 955 Avenue Joffre, today's Huaihai Road. Like all beauties, its proportions are perfection itself: a pair of stout wings, their heaviness lightened with pillared balconies, flank the petite central portion of the house - a small covered porch in the front; a grand curved porch, boned with neoclassical pillars, in the rear.
Built by French architects for a Frenchman in the former French Concession, it is, like Shanghai itself, eclectic: neoclassical pillars, a Dutch-style roof, an antebellum feel in the balconies, and a garden, parts of which were once landscaped in the Chinese style.
In the late teens, when Basset first began thinking of building his house on Avenue Joffre, the street had only recently been renamed. Prior to 1915, the road was called Avenue Paul Brunat, after an active member of the French Conseil Municipal (Municipal Council). But the French of that period honored their patriots by naming roads in far-flung colonies for them, and so it was that in 1915, Avenue Paul Brunat became Avenue Joffre.
Joseph Jacques Cesar Joffre was credited with winning the Battle of Marne in 1914, a World War I tussle that saved Paris from German invasion. For this, he was named "the savior of France." (Joffre himself visited Shanghai, and his avenue, in 1922.) A photograph of the house in the 1920s shows Avenue Joffre as it was then: a wide street, surprisingly empty of people and traffic - save a rickshaw - with tram lines running right up and down in front of the house.
At the time that the house was built, though, things would have been bustling elsewhere on Avenue Joffre. By 1918, the White Russians were fleeing the Bolshevik Revolution, and many ended up in the French Concession. French, after all, was the second language of the Russian Court, and many opened shops and elegant boutiques on Avenue Joffre. By the middle of the 1920s, there were more Russians than French in the concession.
The Basset house is beautifully preserved: the wood-paneled entranceway still glows, there are still tiles in the sunroom, and the carved paneling and decorative details within and without are remain. The sunroom opens out into the lovely green garden, restored by the previous consul-general's wife.
When the Bassets lived there, the steps out to the garden were edged with overgrown rosebushes. Tess Johnston, author of "Frenchtown Shanghai," features original photographs of the interior from the Basset family in her book. They show Arts and Crafts style furniture, which went beautifully with the Art Nouveau-style banisters. Johnston also heard from Georgette Basset McCann, Lucien Basset's daughter, who explained that quite a few servants were needed for the upkeep of the house: "There were 12 (servants) and they all lived above the garage: boys, cooks, coolies, chauffeur-gardeners, amahs and a laundress," she explained.
Although Georgette was a little girl when the family lived there, her memories offer a slice of the good life in old Shanghai: she remembers the dances in the salon attended by her older sister Edna (a debutante) and her friends; the costume parties; Edna's morning rides. But in 1931, just a decade after moving in, the family moved. The reason? "The area had become noisy from trams."
It was an American who bought the house from Lucien Basset, for a reported US$150,000 - an incredible sum in those days. But Frank Raven, a civil engineer from Alamo California, had money to burn. He had arrived in Shanghai in 1904, without much money or contacts, and landed a job at the Municipal Land Survey Office. Soon afterwards - still without money or contacts - he became a silent partner in a real estate firm. His cachet was his knowledge from the Land Survey office: knowing where roads were going to be built at a time when Shanghai was in a road-building frenzy (second only to the current road-building frenzy) enabled him and his partners to successfully speculate.
Raven married Elsie Stiles, the daughter of a wealthy missionary, sold his share of the real estate partnership, and started his own businesses, Asia Realty Trust and the Raven Trust Company. He became a pillar of the community: He sat in the front pew of the Community Church (on Hengshan Road); he was president of the board at the Shanghai American School. A reserved man and a teetotaler, he won the trust of the missionaries, the Chinese Christians and the foreign residents, who eagerly banked with him when he opened the American Oriental Banking Corp in the offices of the Raven Trust Company. (The bank was incorporated under the laws of the US state of Connecticut, but contemporary accounts say it was subject to no banking laws.)
"Deposit your money in this bank and become a partner in the company," went the motto, and many did.
In May 1935, Raven applied to the US court in Shanghai for a liquidation. The companies had failed; Raven had been embezzling from them for years. Reported the North-China Daily News in February 1936, "It virtually pauperized thousands of people in China."
"There was much wailing in Shanghai," said Ernest Hauser in "Shanghai - City for Sale." "Hundreds of missionaries and refugee Russians, who were not rich anyway, had lost all they had ever owned. Raven had gambled it away."
Raven spent five years at a federal penitentiary on McNeil Island, Washington, never return to Shanghai, but the "Raven Scandal" lived on.
Today, the house is once again the residence of a French family, this time the family of the French consul general. Prior to this, it served as the French Consulate General, one of six that France has had in Shanghai over the years.