For decades after the Communist victory, in 1949, Shanghai remained largely intact, preserved by benign neglect, its architecture a rich legacy of the polyglot collision of Asian and Western cultures that formed the city. Since the nineties, however, Shanghai’s metamorphosis into a towering mega-city has been an ineluctable and pitiless process of paving over nearly all previous traces—a phenomenon stunningly documented in Greg Girard’s garish, poetic, infinitely sad photographs. In an indignant introduction, William Gibson calls them “Documents of the Gone World.” Seeming to have arrived in each case minutes before the bulldozers, Girard shows us here a pair of stone lions sitting amid the rubble of a condemned factory, there a gorgeous mansion in the old French concession, long ago subdivided for worker housing, and last occupied by members of the very crew charged with knocking it down.