Eight grand stories and many more tales

The Normandie Apartments, also known as the Wukang Building, have stood since 1924.[Photo by Gao Erqiang/ China Daily]

Witnesses to history and those who care about preserving it are ensuring that one corner of a city, and many others like it, are not lost forever

Like the bow of a great ship, it sits there at the corner of two city streets that form a 30 degree apex where they meet, and it rises eight stories.

We are standing outside a building that some say is named after a French World War I era battleship, fitting enough given that the Normandie Apartments in Shanghai could not be more anchored to their past.

An inkling of that past is there for all to see in the French Renaissance architecture of the edifice, at the intersection of Wukang Road and Middle Huaihai Road in the former French Concession. But hidden within its walls are myriad stories - tales not just of those who lived there, but of Shanghai, its people and its changing face over more than 90 years.

In an effort to ensure those stories are not lost forever, a group led by the Shanghai writer Chen Danyan is racing to chronicle them, digging them up, sifting through them and recording them in word, picture and sound.

The building, also known as the Wukang Building since the 1950s, was designed by the Hungarian-Slovak architect Laszlo Hudec, who bequeathed us two other great Shanghai edifices, the Park Hotel, once the tallest building in Asia, and the Grand Theater, and a few more.

The work on this oral history account has so far yielded a 40-minute documentary and a colossal heap of manuscripts and photos.

It is all part of the latest effort of a group of writers and professors intent on preserving Shanghai's historical buildings and recording the city's past in detail, and who know they must act quickly if they are to succeed.