Courcelles Street! A street in Monopoly, you will tell me and you are right, but at 48 of this street, we are no longer in Paris, it is Shanghai, Canton, Beijing. Listen in our podcast the description of “The Red Pagoda” of the novelist Catherine Teissier.
Paris 100 years ago Ching Tsai Loo, a wealthy Chinese collectoran Asian antiques dealer, buys a Haussmann mansion in the purest Parisian tradition and customizes it, transforms it into a pagoda painted red to recall the forbidden city with beijing roofs to hunt and raise the dragons to the sky. In the TV show “Des Racines des Ailes”, Louis Laforge received Monsieur Loo’s grandson.
Monsieur Loo buys furniture, trinkets, paintings in China for next to nothing and resells them at a very high price in Paris, a combination of a guaranteed fortune. First installed rue Taitbout in the 9th, he sets its sights on this private mansion from rue Courcelles. The architect François Bloch transforms the building into a fake 4-storey pagoda.
Miraculously preserved, the Red Pagoda celebrates its 100th anniversary, the interior is of great refinement, large red and black salons, 18th century lacquer panels, rare objects and books from the Ming dynasty and on the occasion of the 5th edition of Asian Spring in Paris , the pagoda of Monsieur Loo is open to the public, this weekend and all the week to come. Where ? Not in Beijing, in Paris, 48, rue de Courcelles in the 8th arrondissement.