Romeo Balcony

The name “Romeo Balcony” was born from a childhood mistake. The future Shanghai writer Chen Danyan attended primary school nearby and played here with her friends. They knew Shakespeare’s play in broad outline: Romeo Montague, a young man from one feuding Veronese family, climbs over a garden wall to reach Juliet, from the other. What remained in the children’s retelling was the essential point: a lover had to climb somewhere.

Above the rounded entrance of house number two hundred ten, there was a small semicircular balcony with an openwork metal railing. One of Chen’s friends pointed to it and said that this was exactly where Romeo would climb. The children took up the name. Later, Chen admitted that they had confused the host and the guest: the balcony should have been named after Juliet. But the slip had already stuck.

When Chen became a writer, she included this childhood phrase in her book Shanghai: Wind, Flowers, Snow, and Moon. People who had never known her school friends also began calling the private balcony the Romeo Balcony. The house acquired no connection to a Shakespeare production or to a real love story: the name was created by children playing on this street.

Later, a new owner cut down the ivy on the facade and built a high wall that hid the house from the street. Wukang Road residents wrote to a newspaper: they wanted the familiar balcony returned to the streetscape. Chen pressed for the same thing. After negotiations, the wall was lowered, and the balcony became visible again; the cut-down ivy was not restored.

Now the official city route repeats the name invented by the children and immediately adds: the house is closed to the public. Above the lowered wall remain the yellow facade, the metal railing, and Juliet’s balcony, which all Shanghai calls the Romeo Balcony.