Why Shanghai’s oldest neighbourhood has to shiver each year through the winter cold

Amid the skyscrapers of Shanghai, the city’s oldest neighbourhood shivers through the winter thanks to an old rule forbidding central heating.

In Laoximen, not far from Shanghai’s swanky riverfront Bund, locals and migrant workers bundle up in thick coats inside houses built decades ago.

To save energy, the Chinese government decided in the 1950s that areas of the country south of the Qinling mountains and Huai River in north-central China would not have state-provided central heating.

Shanghai lies in the designated southern zone even though average temperatures in winter are around four degrees at night and 12 degrees during the day.

And in the city’s lower-income neighbourhoods such as Laoximen, people are too poor to pay for electric heaters.