The locals walked back and forth under the laundry as if nothing were amiss

People walking under laundries — Laundry hanging in the alley

Walking through the back alleys of Shanghai, I have developed the habit of watching the space above my head. The reason is simple: when you look up, you are far more likely to see laundry than clouds. In the urban logic of China, clothes appear to have been assigned a destiny in midair. In the alley from the photograph, ropes are stretched from building to building, and shirts, trousers, and unidentified strips of fabric hang densely overhead. It feels less like drying laundry and more like a public exhibition.

At first, I assumed I had merely wandered into a particularly domestic corner of the city. But the more I walked through Shanghai, the clearer it became that this was no exception. Here, the alley is an extension of the living room, and the boundary between inside and outside is far looser than in Japan. In a city packed with apartment blocks, sunlight is a scarce resource. Laundry, pushed by necessity rather than poetry, is expelled upward, where light still reaches. It is the result of a thoroughly unromantic compromise between urban planning and household logistics.

Walking beneath the damp clothes, an occasional drop of water lands without warning. In Japan, this might provoke a complaint or at least a frown. Here, no one reacts. People neither dodge nor protest; they simply pass through. Laundry, it seems, is as ordinary as the weather itself. In old Shanghai, wells and communal washing areas were often located in these very alleys, and laundry was once a shared neighborhood task. The drying spaces were shared too. What remains today is that memory, suspended quietly above the street, swaying in the air.

Shanghai on Google Map

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