Shanghai Concert Hall

Built in 1930 as the Nanking Theatre, a cinema in the European manner designed by Fan Wenzhao, the building was converted to concert use and renamed in the 1950s, keeping its columns, its plasterwork and its close scale — a little over eleven hundred seats on two levels. Its most extraordinary episode was structural rather than musical: to clear the way for an elevated motorway, the whole 5,800-tonne hall was jacked up and moved some sixty-six metres eastward, then restored inside and out before reopening. It remains among the oldest concert rooms in a city that has been listening to Western orchestral music since the days of the Shanghai Municipal Orchestra.