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Shanghai
Basic Information:
Area: 6,185 sq. km
Capital: Shanghai
Population: Approximately 16 Million
Language: Shanghainese, Mandarin local dialect. Outside large hotels, very little English is spoken.
Religion:
If one simply counts heads, Shanghai is the biggest city in the biggest country on Earth. If one simply scans statistics, this is China's capital of commerce, industry, and finance. But numbers don't tell the whole Shanghai story. Shanghai has a colonial past more intense than that of any other city in China, save Hong Kong, and this legacy gives it a dramatic character, visible in the very facades of its buildings. But the city is not only a museum of East meeting West on Chinese soil. Overnight Shanghai has become one of the world's great modern capitals, the one city that best shows what the whole nation is becoming at the dawn of the 21st century. The pulse of Shanghai is the pulse of Asia's future.
Shanghai was not always much of a delight to tour, but it is now. During the 1990s, Shanghai was torn apart and rebuilt, headlining the economic boom that shook China to its foundations. One in five of the world's high-lift cranes was at work in the streets of Shanghai then, raising tower after glass-and-steel tower in the ruins. Shanghai resembled the largest construction site ever conceived, and it was not always a pretty sight for tourists. But this first great phase of modern reconstruction has passed, and a new, more vital Shanghai has emerged. It is a city that a visitor can comfortably enjoy and explore for the first time since those romantic days of the 1930s, when old Shanghai was a notorious playground for foreign adventurers and a free-trade show for overseas taipans and exploiters. The landmarks of Shanghai's colonial period shine through for the first time since the communists came to power over 50 years ago and worked their own duller magic on the cityscape.
Today there are large neighborhoods of foreign architecture, wonderful for a stroll, where Europeans, especially the French, once resided. Shanghai's great river of commerce, the Huangpu, a tributary of the mighty Yangzi River, is lined with a gallery of colonial architecture, known as the Bund, grander than any other in the East, much of it recently refurbished and open to the curious visitor. The mansions, garden estates, country clubs, and cathedrals of the Westerners who made their fortunes here a century ago are scattered throughout the city, and there is even a synagogue, dating from the days of an unparalleled Jewish immigration to China. Shanghai's foreign legacy is epitomized by the Peace Hotel on the Bund, the 1929 creation of a Jewish millionaire, today a masterpiece of Art Deco--a relic of the Jazz Age. These are not the typical monuments of China, but they are typical of Shanghai.
The East has a Western flavor in Shanghai, but at the same time the creations of a strictly Chinese culture have not been erased. A walk through downtown turns up astounding traditional treasures: a teahouse that epitomizes all that was old China; a classical garden as superb as any in Beijing or Suzhou; an "Old Town" as quaint and chaotic as any in China; active temples and ancient pagodas; and a museum of Chinese art and artifacts that is universally acclaimed as China's best. If the pace of new Shanghai rivals that of New York City and its nightlife and its cafes now echo the sophistication of Paris, if the architecture and avenues recall 19th-century Europe rather than old Cathay, this is still a Chinese city to the core.
Shanghai is also a city for shoppers (Nanjing Rd. is the number one shopping street in all of China), but especially it is the place for those who want to see the future of China. Across the mighty Huangpu River, which served as old Shanghai's eastern border, a truly new Shanghai is taking shape. Known as Pudong, this Shanghai East boasts its own modern attractions: the tallest hotel in the world, China's largest stock exchange, and one of the highest observation decks in Asia, the Oriental Pearl TV Tower. Not to be outdone, old Shanghai has its own legions of new skyscrapers, too, and a booming collection of fine international restaurants, several of them taking over the rooftops of the colonial gems lining the Bund and the mansions that had gone to seed in Shanghai's French Quarter.
Incredibly crowded, densely packed, Shanghai is the raw center of China's commerce and industry. It has energy and confidence, and it has new dreams. Its polluted rivers are being cleaned up. Greenways and new parks are emerging. Historic neighborhoods, both Chinese and colonial, are being spared the bulldozer and transformed into avenues of shops and cafes. New theaters and cultural centers are attracting top performers from China and abroad.
Shanghai still has a long way to go to become the New York or the Paris of China. It is not yet as prosperous as Hong Kong (its nearest rival), nor as international. But the raw complexity of Shanghai is its charm. Sipping a cocktail in a new French restaurant positioned high on the rooftops over the Bund, one can look across the river into the future of China, at the burgeoning Manhattan of skyscrapers in Pudong where a decade ago there was nothing but mud flats, rice fields, and village huts. Only in Shanghai are so many worlds, East and West, past and present, this elevated and pinched together, shoulder to shoulder, like a Picasso mural. This is present-day China on a grand scale, where you can breathe in the exhilaration of a new century for Asia.
Major Attractions in Shanghai
| yuyuan | the bund | otv tower | jinmao tower |
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