City Weekend is celebrating its ten year anniversary this month. In preparation of the celebration we asked long-time Shanghai resident and Shanghai expert Lisa Movius to take a look back at the history of City Weekend. For ten years we have watched Shanghai transform and City Weekend has transformed along with it.

City Weekend debuted in Shanghai, serendipitously, in 2000, and like no other publication here it has born witness to the city’s numerous and often contradictory trajectories and transformations over the decade.

2000 was a year of hope, promise and uncertainty. China’s economy was still wincing from the Asian Financial Crisis. Shanghai’s was still recovering from the late-’90s popping of a mid-’90s property bubble.

The city was strewn with abandoned, half-constructed “ghost buildings.” Yet, 2000 was also the year of critical mass, when the city’s independent cultural scenes began to take off and break out after decades of ignominy.

City Weekend’s origins were in Beijing’s City Edition, created in April 1998 by Anne Stevenson Yang. It was one of the first independent English-language publications in China. Its name had changed by the time it arrived in Shanghai.

It first appeared here in the form of a smaller Shanghai Entertainment Guide, a broadsheet inserted into the national edition, explains founding Shanghai editor Katherine Sima, who now works for a multinational in Shenzhen. It began with only local listings supplementing the Beijing articles, but quickly fleshed out.

City Weekend changed from a newspaper to an A4 magazine format in 2000, and the Shanghai edition became a separate magazine in April 2008.

Ringier acquired the magazine from 66 Cities in 2001. From its inception, City Weekend sought to differentiate itself as a very locally involved and culturally oriented magazine.

Community outreach was part of the new magazine’s identity.

“City Weekend staff were always very proud of what we were doing,” says Cecilia Wan, who worked at the magazine from 2000 until 2005, and took over as city editor after Marth. She currently runs the Black Dragon Café in Dali.

Sima says that when she started, City Weekend could list every single bar and Western restaurant in Shanghai, but their ranks quickly outgrew available pages.

The winning bid for the 2010 Expo, announced in December 2002, was just a small part of those heady years; what it would mean for the city only became apparent much later.

We look back at a decade of covering Shanghai with joy and look forward to the next decade to come.