Introduction:
“Shanghai isn’t China”

At some inevitable point, and with few exceptions, people in contact with China’s largest city will pause, mid-conversation, and say “Ah, but Shanghai isn’t China.” It’s an illogical statement, but it’s said by residents and tourists, if they have stopped elsewhere in China, alike.

The meaning of these few words depends, largely, on the speaker’s background. Locals are often smug. To them “Shanghai isn’t China” because Shanghai is better than China. It is wealthier and more cosmopolitan, and so, by extension, are they.

The city’s immigrants, both Chinese and foreign, are usually more wistful. To them, “Shanghai isn’t China” because its essence is somehow different. Yes, it is cosmopolitan and, yes, the city is wealthy – otherwise most wouldn’t be here – but so many differences are bundled up in its past that Shanghai often feels like a place apart, an island, which you need to leave to experience the ‘real’ China – wherever that might be.

Perhaps the locals are right. Perhaps, rather than isolating Shanghai, the city’s heterogeneous past places it ahead of the mainland, at the forefront of an economic miracle less quickly shaking the hinterland.

Shanghai is arguably the world’s most modern city. Pudong, on the east bank of the Huangpu River, which neatly cuts the city into two, was little more than factories and farmland until 1993, when it was designated a Special Economic Zone. Today, it is the postcard image of a new China. Pudong bristles with tall, shiny buildings; two, the World Financial Centre and the Jinmao Tower, are China’s tallest, and among the ten tallest in the world.

The city’s importance, and its wealth, could be described as the result of simple geography: Shanghai is where China’s ancient water-highway, the Yangzi River, spreads out to meet the ocean. But its global past must surely have something to do with its global present, and it is here that the future of China, a nation fast shaping the future of our world, can best be witnessed. Perhaps Shanghai is, in fact, China.

A Very Brief History

For a large part of its history, Shanghai was small: a fishing village that slowly grew into a market town. It was, for a time, administered from Songjiang, a city now so completely enveloped by its younger, but much bigger sister, that most people consider it a suburb of Shanghai.

During the early years of the Qing Dynasty (1644 to 1912), two important policy changes made Shanghai the most important sea port on the Yangzi Delta. In 1684, Emperor Kangxi reversed the Ming Dynasty prohibition of ocean going vessels – a ban that had been in force since 1525 – and in 1732, Emperor Yongzheng moved the customs office for Jiangsu province from Songjiang to Shanghai.

The Yangzi is Asia’s longest river. Even before the Three Gorges Project, it was navigable for well over a thousand kilometres – but Europe’s early trade with China was restricted by the Canton system to a single port, Guangzhou, a city without access to this important waterway. The British, unhappy that they could not offload goods on the Chinese market more easily – including opium from India – initiated the First Opium War in 1839.

The war ended in 1842 with the signing of the Treaty of Nanking, which opened five ports to foreign trade, including Shanghai. Two later treaties – the Treaty of the Bogue, signed between Britain and the Qing Empire a year later, and the Sino-American Treaty of Wansia, signed in 1844 – made foreign concessions possible. Foreigners from Europe and the USA were granted extraterritoriality, allowing them to live in China beyond Chinese law, and the right to own property in the five treaty ports.

For Shanghai, this was decisive. The city boomed. In 1930, it was populated by over three million people from 48 countries, making it the sixth largest and perhaps the most cosmopolitan city in the world. The city was governed by three distinct entities, responsible for different parts of the city: the International Settlement, the French Concession and the City Government of Greater Shanghai.

Shanghai had become the financial centre of the East, a epithet it is trying to re-earn, and the “Whore of the Orient.” In the words of a travel guide of the time, Shanghai was a place of “high hats and low necks; long tails and short knickers; inebriates and slumming puritans.” It was a city of opportunists, opium dens and brothels – but also grand buildings, big banks, trading houses and enormous wealth. The Bund, a hodgepodge of grand architecture on the west bank of the Huangpu River, took shape during this period. It remains the most impressive monument to old Shanghai.

Just a few years later, during WWII, China was in turmoil: three groups, the Kuomintang, the Communist Party and the Japanese, fought for control of the country. In 1941, the Japanese took control the International Settlement, having already captured Chinese controlled parts of the city after the Battle of Shanghai in 1937. By 1949, when the People’s Liberation Army marched into Shanghai, most of the city’s foreign population had long since left. Those who hadn’t were deported.

Shanghai then entered a period of relative obscurity. The Communist government eradicated slavery, still practised despite being officially abolished in 1910, and opium dens, but Maoist isolationism didn’t suit a city built on global trade. The city slumbered until a Special Economic Zone was established in Pudong, as part of the policy of Reform and Opening initiated by Deng Xiaoping. Economic growth since then has been jaw-dropping, and the city is now preparing to host the World Expo in 2010.

This summary has borrowed heavily from the Wikipedia entries on Shanghai and its history, and from Tales of Old Shanghai, a guidebook published in 1934, made available online by Earnshaw Books.

Climate

Weather Forecast

time: 6:16 am
	current temperature: 12°C

humidity: 93%
wind speed: 11 km/h SSE
sunrise: 6:40
sunset: 17:36

Forecast February 9, 2010

day	17°C wind speed: 14 km/h SW

Shanghai’s climate is best described as damp. The city is surrounded by water: the East China Sea is to its south and east, the Yangzi to its north; Lake Taihu is not far to its west, and the Huangpu dissects its middle.

Summer is hot and sticky. Temperatures rise as high as 40^oC (104^oF) and humidity occasionally reaches 100%. Winter temperatures don’t drop much below freezing, but people from the north of China, where winter temperatures are much lower, say that the damp Shanghai air sometimes feels colder.

Spring and Autumn are the best times to visit, unfortunately they’re both quite short. In April, May, September and October, daytime temperatures are comfortable and evenings are cool. It rains throughout the year. When it does, ladies waving cheap umbrellas, shouting “yusan ba, yusan ba” (“Need an umbrella? Need an umbrella?”), instantly appear at metro stations.

Getting Around

Shanghai’s public transport system is excellent, and it’s generally an easy city to move around in.

Metro System

Although Shanghai’s first metro line was only opened in 1995, the city now has nine lines and a tenth is under construction. Stations are regularly added, occasionally move, and sometimes change names, so maps are often out of date. Explore Shanghai has interactive maps of the metro network as well as a metropedia, which lists businesses and places of interest close to every station.

Taxis

Shanghai has about 50 000 taxis. All are Volkswagen Santanas, painted blue, red, orange, green or white, depending on the company that owns them. Unless it’s raining, it doesn’t often take long to hail a cab. Telling the driver where to go is more difficult; although there are a few exceptions, taxi drivers do not speak English. There are a few ways of working around this:

Busses

Shanghai has a vast bus network. Unfortunately it’s difficult to use. The signage is almost entirely in Chinese and even people familiar with the city find the route maps difficult to understand. You can find a list of bus routes translated into English here.

The Maglev

Shanghai’s maglev (short for magnetic levitation) is the world’s fastest commercially operated train. It connects Pudong International Airport, on the city’s eastern outskirts, to Longyang Rd. Metro Station, a few stops from the city centre. Although locals often say that the money could have been better spent –– the maglev cost ¥10 billion to build and only covers 30.5km – arriving in town at over 400km an hour is a unique experience.

The line operates daily between 06:45 and 21:30. A one-way ticket cost ¥50, or ¥40 for those passengers holding a receipt or proof of an airline ticket purchase. A round-trip return ticket cost ¥80 and VIP tickets cost double the standard fare.

Explore

The Beaten Track

The Bund (外滩)

Like the architecture on the west bank of the Huangpu that it describes, the word ‘bund’ was imported. Along with opium, it came to Shanghai from India with the British. The word means embankment, and the Bund was, at first, a place where people and products could be loaded and offloaded. Later, it was here that the business of empire in China took shape.

The Bund is a long line of historic buildings, constructed in a long list of architectural styles (Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque, Neo-Classical, Beaux-Arts and Art Deco), which are, again, the premises of big banks, insurance companies and trading houses. Big brands, small boutiques, exclusive restaurants and some of the city’s liveliest nightclubs have also moved in.

The buildings are now a little further from the water than they used to be. The river was pushed back in the 1990s, by erecting a long flood barrier, when Zhongshan road, which runs between the buildings and the Huangpu, was widened. Tunnels and bridges at quite short intervals along the road allow you to cross – to catch a ferry to Pudong (or elsewhere), a sightseeing boat, or to turn your back on Shanghai’s past and look across the river at its future, Lujiazui.

Also on Holiday Fu:

On City Weekend:

Lujiazui (陆家嘴)

Just before the it joins the Yangzi, the Huangpu River bends slowly west, turns east, and bends slowly back, wrapping itself around an area of about 30 kilometres – a peninsula, almost, that juts out towards the Bund. In this neatly defined space, called Lujiazui, on land occupied by factories, warehouses and soggy farmland twenty years ago, China has built its loudest and largest modern buildings.

The Oriental Pearl Tower was completed first, in 1995. Next, in 1998, came the Jinmao Tower, which was followed, in 2008, by the Shanghai World Financial Centre. All are among the tallest structures on earth.

The construction of a new, even taller building, will soon be underway. Some fear these enormous enormous towers, constructed using thousands of tons of steel, are slowly pushing Shanghai’s ground level down. The city has sunk by two metres over the past 40 years, while global warming pushes sea levels up.

Museums

Shanghai Museum

The Shanghai Museum is often said to be China’s best, though the recently opened Capital Museum in Beijing now competes for the title. The well organised museum contains over 120 000 artefacts from China’s past. Highlights include a collection of bronzes on the ground floor, some dating from as far back 1800 BCE, and a collection of coins from the Silk Road, minted under the likes of Alexander the Great and Genghis Kahn, on the top floor. The museum also has a good shop, where you can buy English books about China for much less than at Shanghai’s foreign bookstores.

Urban Planning Exhibition Hall

Follow the signs toward the Shanghai Urban Planning Exhibition Hall, from inside People’s Square metro station, and you will pass Chinese fast food stands, stalls selling glitzy plastic jewellery, and milk tea kiosks. Turning a corner, and you’re transported back to a cobbled street in 1930’s Shanghai, complete with the bluest sky that has ever graced the roof of a metro station. Frescoed shop fronts, advertising French coffee and Italian Gelato, are dotted between a few real cafés, where you can sit and have a decent cup of coffee.

The main entrance to the museum is at street level. The first floor houses a scale model of the Lujiazui skyline. Photographic, multimedia and interactive exhibits about past and present Shanghai give you a sense of the transformation that this city is perpetually undergoing.

The third floor is undeniably the highlight. As visitors recover from the shock of an escalator that accelerates when you step onto it – presumably to save energy while it’s not being used – and arrive on the third floor, they inevitably gasp. Almost the entire floor is taken up by a scale model of Shanghai’s inner ring area, as it will appear in 2020.

Already, much of the Shanghai Municipal City Planning Administration’s vision has been realised. Models of the Jinmao Tower and the World Financial Centre stand beside a clear plastic model of what may become the world’s tallest building. All structures not yet built are indicated by this clear plastic. An encouraging number of green patches are dotted along virtually every street. Either these are purely decorative, or Shanghai is set to become a lot greener.

Also on Holiday Fu:

Shanghai Museums on the Cheap (or Free!)

On City Weekend:

Offbeat

Duolun Lu Cultural Street (多伦路)

Duolun Lu is a well restored, pedestrianised street, lined with curio shops, art galleries, teahouses and cafés. Although it’s in most guidebooks, very few tourists visit Duolun Lu, probably because it’s outside the city’s dead centre, and is served by two of the Shanghai’s less used metro lines. It’s a good place to buy genuine relics of concession era Shanghai, as well as Cultural Revolution posters, badges and pamphlets. Dashanghai, at number 181, is the best of the curio shops.

The road was laid in 1911, under the administration of the International Settlement. In the early 20th century, some of China’s most famous modern authors lived on the street, including Lu Xun; together they established the League of Left-Wing Writers. Statues of the writers are now dotted now along the street, and the house where the league used to meet, down lane 201, is a political museum (RMB5).

Hongde Tang (pictured), near the middle of the street, was the first church built in a Chinese style. It has the curling eaves typical of Chinese architecture, above stained glass windows and a large red cross, and is a popular place for newlyweds to have their pictures taken. The Old Film Café, at number 123, has a large patio and is a good place to stop for coffee. The tea house directly opposite it has balconies on both sides and is an equally good place to stop.

On City Weekend:

Xinchang: Nanhui’s Old Town (新场古镇)

Xinchang is a reasonably well preserved water town in Nanhui, which became a part of Shanghai in May 2009, when Pudong’s boundaries were extended. The old town centres on a market street, about a kilometre and a half long, intersected by canalised rivers and crumbling alleyways. A Taoist temple marks its northernmost point, and a Buddhist temple its southernmost. Although domestic tourists come here on festival days, foreign tourists hardly ever visit Xinchang, and most locals will be surprised to see you.

Xinchang is about an hour and a half from the centre of Shanghai on public transport and about an hour away by car. For more on the old town, including how to get there, read Holiday Fu’s article about spending a day in Xinchang.

Do

Massage

Massages are one of Shanghai’s great pleasures, and the city has a long, long list of outlets. As you’d expect, the big hotels all have luxury spas, but you’ll also find Korean bathhouses, cheap, grubby foot massage joints, pricey massage parlours run solely for the expat market and parlours run solely by blind men. Prices vary wildly, from RMB20 for the cheapest foot massage to thousands for a spa treatment. City Weekend lists over 150 different outlets.

A word of warning: Shanghai also has a long long list of brothels, and many are disguised a massage parlours. It’s often difficult to tell the two apart. You can ask, or try to extricate yourself if you’re being sold more than you want to buy.

Fabric Market (南外滩轻纺面料市场)

Shanghai is a cheap place to get clothes tailor made. All three floors of the Fabric Market, in the city’s old town, are filled with big bolts of fabric. Expats, whose figures are less diminutive than is normal in China, do a lot of their clothes shopping here. You can get a three piece suit, a qipao or a pair of jeans made in a few days.

On City Weekend:

Eat and Drink

City Weekend lists almost 2000 restaurants, organised by cuisine and location, and almost 500 bars and nightclubs. All listings have Chinese addresses and reviews.

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