It seems as if after World War II, between 1949 and 1980—a period that includes the birth of communism, the tragedy of the Cultural Revolution, and the modernizing reforms of Deng Xiao Ping—the once Westernized city lay dormant. Closed to the West for forty years, Shanghai was like Miss Havisham's place, its Deco buildings and Tudor mansions covered with cobwebs, rust, and coal dust but otherwise exactly as they had been.

Now the city is coming back to life, and as a foreigner living here in 2008, I can glide between the graceful, measured life of ancient China, the Art Deco quirkiness of the 1930s, and the hectic super-drive of the twenty-first century. Sometimes these worlds merge in a most unexpected way, such as with a sanctuary I found in my travels, the Gu Yuan Antique Tea House.

I was traversing the back lanes behind Fuxing Road, trying to find a passage going west, when I happened upon it. I had driven by the entrance many times, and always I was drawn to its massive wooden gate topped by two fat, faded red lanterns. I thought someone lived there. The house sits on a corner behind a timeworn stone wall entangled in wisteria vine. I fantasized an old mandarin with a long beard, in a dark-blue scholar's robe, strolling in the garden.

When I came to it on foot, I saw for the first time that on the building was a sign that read TEAHOUSE. Thrilled, I hurried through the wooden gateway into a small but traditional garden of feathery Asian pine trees and great granite, peaceful Buddhas. To my left was the teahouse—a long, low, brick-and-wood structure of two floors fronted by banks of large windows. I pulled open the door, and there languished an exact replica of a nineteenth-century Chinese teahouse with thick, antique teak tables separated by carved sandalwood screens and made private by long, narrow rattan shades. Bonsai trees squatted here and there in aqua porcelain bowls. Square yellow lanterns dangled from the bamboo ceiling, and the atonal whine of the erhu (Chinese violin) trembled in the air. Above each table hung a brass bell to call the server.

I sat down and rang the bell, and, at that evocative ting, a man in his late fifties appeared at my table. He handed me an open paper fan on which was written in ink a menu of teas. The man introduced himself as Shanxi Kuo, the proprietor. His head was bald and his ears long like Buddha's. When I asked him how he came to have acquired so many fine antique furnishings and to have built such a teahouse, he told me an amazing story.

"I am descended," he began, "from a general in the Tang dynasty. I am the fifty-third generation of Kuos in Shanxi." He lowered his eyes, and I took a moment to absorb this. The Tang dynasty flourished from A.D. 618 to 907. It was hard to comprehend that his family could be so old and that he'd still know all about it.

"When I turned seventeen, in 1966," he went on, "the Cultural Revolution exploded and I became a commander of the Red Guards in Beijing. Our mission was to destroy the old culture and old things that went with it. It was then that I fell in love with antiques."