The map of Shanghai these five young people are preparing is different. For many it shows the progress and modernization of the city. For many others, however, the map is a portrayal of treasures lost, of history ignored, of mindless destruction. The five friends get together in Yangpu district, rain or shine, practically every weekend.

Unlike tourists or young people looking for cafés, shops or glamorous new entertainment venues, these young people make it their business to find the old, the rickety and the rundown.

The local residents occasionally give the group strange looks. "We get weird looks from people working and living here, but they don't know how rich they are living among these treasures," said Ding Feng, one of the five young enthusiasts who launched the project.

In 2009 the group began visiting streets in Yangpu district along the Huangpu River, and drafting their map, the first of its kind in Shanghai, listing 46 old houses and buildings that are historically precious. Their personal, unofficial project is intended to tell ordinary people more about the intriguing past of the district and raise public awareness and interest.

Immensely prosperous

"The usual impression people have of this area is that there are just piles of shabby small houses and narrow alleys crowded with old people. But around 1949 many Chinese and Western businessmen lived here close to their factories. The area was immensely prosperous," Ding Feng explained.

The history map covers an area along the Huangpu River in the south bordered by Dalian Road in the west , the Inner Ring Road in the east and Kunming Road in the north. It marks the locations of 46 major old buildings, docks, clubs, apartments and factories, which were built from the late 19th century to the early 20th century. The map comes with bilingual introductions and sketches of the fronts of the buildings.

"Almost one quarter of the area on the map was taken up with community housing projects long before we began our search. We have no idea how many historical buildings have already been knocked down," Ding told the Global Times.

For the five enthusiasts some of the old buildings on their map will be lost forever. Seven have now been listed for protection as historically important sites by the municipal and district government. But another 10 have been recently demolished or are about to be.

When Ding and her friends found the old fish market at 10 Jiangpu Road in 2010, it had already been marked for demolition. The Jiangpu Road fish market was an important gathering place in the district. A three-story Japanese-style building near the Huangpu River, it was built in 1938 during the Japanese occupation. Fishing boats from neighboring Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces used to crowd around here to sell live fish to the locals.

Even though the group put all their energies into collecting information, taking photographs and gathering the history of the building, there was little they could do to stop it being knocked down. The building was destroyed at the end of 2011. "The only thing we could do after that was change the color of the mark for the building on the map. We changed it from red to black. Black indicates that the building has been lost forever," group member Lin Yiliang said.

Their map shows five buildings in black already. There are also a number of question marks indicating that information about these buildings is incomplete at this stage.

The friends triumph

Ding and her friends are not always helpless spectators watching bits of history being knocked down. They have had their triumphs.

Like the Nies' Garden. The garden, on 51 Liaoyang Road, was built in the early 1920s by the family of Nie Jigui, a vice mayor of Shanghai in the late Qing Dynasty (1644-1911). The garden covers 8,000 square meters and features a Western-style villa and four three-story red brick buildings. Locals who had lived there said the garden was in pristine condition during the 1950s, with great care being taken of the rock formations, pavilions, ponds and bamboo-shaded paths in the garden.

When the group discovered the garden in May 2009, there was a notice of intention to demolish already pasted on the wall and 20 of the 69 families who had been living there had moved away. They had signed agreements for compensation with the government. "When we found it, some of the windows and doors were missing and walls had been damaged. It was in a pretty awful state," Ding said.

She knew that five young people with enthusiasm but no experience or authority would not be heard. She called her teacher, Ruan Yisan, the director of Tongji University's National Research Center for Historic Cities, who then wrote a letter to the head of Yangpu district, advising of the importance and worth of the building and asking that the demolition plans be cancelled. Other members of the group talked to local media and helped publicize the situation.

"We tried our best, but we had butterflies in our stomachs while we waited for a decision," Lin said.

Six months later, their efforts paid off. The cultural affairs authority in Yangpu district announced that Nies' Garden would be listed as an immovable cultural relic, the lowest protection level for such a building, and said it would draw up detailed plans for protection.

"The areas with historical cultural features in Shanghai cover 70,000 square meters and include 1,474 protected buildings, the most in the country," said director Ruan. "The city's 2003 regulations on the protection of areas with historical cultural features and major historical buildings also prevent some unlisted old buildings from being demolished. Nies' Garden is a case in point."    

But these regulations by themselves are not enough to save a great many unlisted buildings. Li Kongsan, the deputy director of the Shanghai Cultural Relics Bureau, said that more than half of the 4,400 historic buildings they have found in the last five years are not on the protected list. "They can be torn down at any time and we do not have the ability to save all of them," he said. "Only when more people know about the value of these buildings will they be protected properly."

That is exactly what Lin and his friends believe. "We want more people to know about the worth and the future of these buildings," he said.

Pushing their cause, the group - Zhang Haijun, Lin Yiliang, Ding Feng, Cao Lin and Zhou Yang - have been working tirelessly in their spare time for the past three years.

As undergraduates in 2008 they took part in a research program led by Ruan Yisan cataloguing lanes and alleys in the city. Along with another 200 volunteers and more than 10 academics and experts, they completed a report on the status of Shanghai's shikumen (one of the city's trademark pieces of architecture, mostly built from the late Qing Dynasty to the 1950s), after visiting almost 1,000 lanes and thousands of buildings downtown.

The result showed that the distinctive shikumen buildings urgently needed protection as a large proportion were disappearing and being replaced by commercial developments.

Unprotected and neglected

"It was not until then I realized there were so many buildings, full of history and culture, unprotected and neglected," said group member Zhang Haijun.

Lin began to feel the need for action even earlier. "As a high school student I spent an hour and a half every day cycling between Huangpu, Xuhui and Changning districts. Over the years I felt that the old streets were vanishing so I started photographing them to record the way they looked, maybe to record them for the last time."

These days they work hard at their new careers from Monday to Friday. Zhang is now a human resources officer, Lin an interior designer; Ding is completing a postdoctoral degree on the conservation of historical buildings, Cao is an architect and Zhou a photographer with ELLE magazine.

But on the weekends they work just as hard on their map, checking out old buildings on foot or bike in all weathers. Finding the buildings is just a first step. Discovering the stories of the buildings is the hard part of their quest.

To be able to write just an introductory or two lines of caption for each building, listing a building's name, age, purpose, age and owners, takes several visits and a great deal of research for the group.

The stories they gather from local residents and neighbors are often inaccurate, incomplete and contradictory for none of them actually owned these properties - most moved there after the 1960s. The group meet regularly to sift the information they glean from interviews and tries to decide which are the best sources for their material.

And not everyone who lives in these historical buildings cooperates. Lin said sometimes they have been mistaken for government officials and told to leave or been physically thrown out of the places they have been trying to protect. "The demolition and relocation issues are very sensitive. Some residents were unsatisfied with the amount of money they were offered and we found ourselves caught in the middle," Lin said.

They have backup at home though. "My mom supports me a lot. She gave me a lot of ideas," Zhang said. Her mother, surnamed Zhou, retired several years ago, and became passionate about the old buildings around her, finding out about them and visting historic sites nearby. "Because of her age and because she spoke the Shanghai dialect she was trusted by the elderly people she talked to."

Another source of information is government departments but Lin and the others often find this frustrating. "I used to search for old city maps to compare with the streets we have today but could find very little at local libraries and archives," he said. When they tried searching the city's construction file archives they were asked for letters of authority.

Moments of joy

Despite bleak and sad days the group have had moments of joy. Three years ago on a winter's day Lin and Zhou Yang, the photographer, visited an old compound in Jinshu Alley in Hongkou district. They found an elderly man sitting alone in front of his building. "At first, we dared not photograph him - we were afraid he would be angry. Suddenly he waved to us." He led the two young men into his bedroom, pulled out a large box from underneath his bed and revealed a huge collection of American jazz CDs. The man had worked in Shanghai as a motor mechanic since the 1930s. He was an interesting man and asked the young men to sit down and enjoy some music with him. "We had a wonderful afternoon," Lin said.

Another time they received a large box of chocolates from an elderly man who had asked that they took some photographs of him and send them to him. "He was lonely as his children were all living overseas, so he was very happy to see us," Lin said.

The map has been modified several times but has recently been updated. It would have been published recently in leaflet form but the group could not raise the money to pay for the printing. In the meantime they plan to turn the map into an application for smart phones so that people can download it for free.

When the map is eventually published the group have plans to repeat the project in other areas of the city. "As long as we share this ambition we will be happy and never bored," said Ding.