IT was an average Monday morning on Wukang Road. A robust expatriate man was jogging along the street flanked with historical buildings. A slim Chinese woman was dropping her son off at the World Primary School, which was founded in 1936. Five young women in summer dresses in a rainbow of colors walked into a popular French bakery. Across the road, a uniformed middle-aged man was enjoying his dim sum while sitting on his old moped under the shade of a tree.

Everyone seemed to be passing through an ocean of history — a vivid past I want to reveal in this series about Wukang Road.

When I moved into a flat hidden down a lane on Wukang Road in 2009, a government project for regenerating this historical road was just coming to an end.