Sky’s the Limit in Shanghai

In Beijing, where I’ve made my home for the last few years, there is a fixation on the question of whether Shanghai is better than the capital city. The answer was settled for me before I was hardly out of Shanghai’s airport. The “second city” impressed me immediately with, of all things, a tollbooth. It wasn’t roofed with a flat piece of concrete but with a sweep of metal fashioned in a sine curve.

My taxi driver thought I was making too much out of it, but he slowed so I could snap a photo. I explained to him that this was the first piece of Chinese public works I’d seen that flowed. “Yes, Shanghai is pretty,” the cabby said.

It’s not pretty. It is the most beautiful city in China.

It’s rare to find a place in China that retains its design from before 1949, when Mao Tse-tung ordered city walls razed and Soviet-style “matchbox” buildings put up across the nation. Beijing, with its stolid, square buildings and wide, straight roads, feels like the plan of a first-year engineering student, while Shanghai’s decorative architecture and snaking, narrow roads feel like the plan of an aesthete.

Shanghai’s good looks are influenced by its colonial past of French and British occupation, but also by its geography. The city is the embodiment of the philosophy of yin and yang, with the winding Huangpu River dividing it into two parts, each complementary and necessary to the other.

On the east side is Pudong, farmland until 1990, now home to an immense international development zone marked by skyscrapers up to 88 stories tall. Topping it all is the rocket-shaped Oriental Pearl Television Tower, at 1,500 feet a bold and glittery statement of the district’s plan to be the center of Asia for the 21st century.

This expression of economic muscle faces the Bund, a line of European-style buildings fronting the river, where Shanghai’s fortunes were made in the first part of this century.

Behind the Bund is the Old City, dubbed “Chinatown” by the foreigners who seized the prime riverfront real estate and pushed the Chinese into a ghetto where the original walled city of Shanghai began 1,000 years ago. To the north of the Old City is the French Concession (former trade zone); to the west, Shanghai’s cultural heart, the widely applauded new history museum in People’s Square.

Where to begin? With only four days to cover a city as famed for vice, gangsters and war as for churches, architecture and art, I asked a taxi driver’s advice. He took me to Waitan, as the Bund is known in Chinese. A new elevated park borders the river, and it was thronged with Chinese tourists and brides lining up to have their pictures snapped with either the TV tower or the Bund’s Euro-classic facades behind them. Ice cream vendors did a bustling trade (although it was November, the temperature was around 70). The park walkway was bordered with plenty of benches, a rare amenity in China, where public congregation is frowned on.

The Bund History Museum, housed in what used to be the city’s weather observation tower, is excellent for its view of the curving row of buildings and river. It also shows in its photo collection how little the street has changed since it was the jewel of the International Settlement.

Today, as in the years before Shanghai was divided into areas of European (and later Japanese) trade zones, the city is thoroughly Chinese, but with that yin-yang twist that makes it unlike any other in China. Advertisements along the Bund pitch products from around the world; during my visit, the most prominent was for the French cosmetics company L’Oreal, featuring Chinese film star Gong Li. The majestic buildings constructed by foreign capitalists now house Chinese government offices and banks. Mansions once owned by gangsters such as “Big-Eared” Du are now upscale restaurants.

Once again, money talks, especially in the great shopping emporiums on Nanjing and Huaihai roads. (The illegal is for sale again, too. Shanghai is the only city in China where I’ve been approached by prostitutes on the street.)

At the north end of the Bund is the Peace Hotel and another emblem of Shanghai’s hybrid culture, the house jazz band. The night I dropped in, they opened with “Take the ‘A’ Train” and “In the Mood.” Then a hyperkinetic Japanese tourist hopped up to play maracas to “Slow Boat to China.” He looked about 70, making him the youngest man onstage. The musicians claim they have been playing together for more than 50 years, with time out when China’s political climate was cool to Western music. Now the group performs nightly, taking tourists back to Shanghai’s glamorous past via overpriced drinks.

The next morning I opened the day with a river cruise, which gave a wonderful view of both halves of the city, linked by a tunnel and two of the largest suspension bridges in the world.

Then it was time for the Old City. Its tangle of narrow streets took me under lines of upper-story laundry and past markets selling the seasonal specialty, hairy crabs. The maze led to Yuyuan (Yu Garden), a public sanctuary dating from the 16th century. The adjacent bazaar area has been razed and rebuilt several times, most recently in the early 1990s, but Yu Garden is surviving the tumult of modernization, just as it survived the Cultural Revolution. The reason is political. While much of old Shanghai’s architecture was deemed worthless to the new China, Yu Garden is sacred as the plotting ground of the Taiping Uprising against foreign settlers in the 1850s.

Just outside the garden is Huxinting (Heart of the Lake Pavillion) teahouse, where foreign dignitaries come for the mandatory cup of Chinese tea. The tea ceremony was not being performed that day, so I wandered the sprawling market area around it.

My attention was drawn to a courtyard where a KFC outlet was advertising chicken made extra-hot (spicy) to local taste. Nearby was a queue, which I joined out of curiosity. It led to a woman overseeing a tower of bamboo steamers. Three yuan (about 40 cents) got me a bag of 10 baozi (meat-filled dumplings) that stung my fingers with their wet heat. As I gingerly shifted the first dumpling from one side of my mouth to the other, I looked up to the second-floor windows of the KFC to see a row of Chinese faces doing the same with drumsticks. (Gone is the taboo of eating with one’s fingers.)

Stuffed, and tired of walking, I took a motorcycle taxi to Renmin Gongyuan (People’s Square), less than a mile away. This is a large open area that in no way resembles Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, and in my mind it settled the argument about which city is better. Tiananmen is a wide, barren expanse of concrete with, at its center, the blocky sarcophagus exhibiting the corpse of Mao. People’s Square is a wide, green expanse with lots of seating and sunken shopping areas, centered by the new Shanghai Museum, the finest in China.

Captions in Chinese and English smooth the way through exhibits tracing 5,000 years of creativity in bronze, sculpture, ceramics and painting. This was the first place I’d seen wherein you weren’t simply told that China was old and great, but rather were shown precisely just how old and just how great. For instance, models of ceramic kilns explained how the Chinese developed the technology to create “china,” an export so prized that it and the nation became synonymous.

For China visitors short on shopping time or temperament, the museum is an excellent place to buy crafts and art reproductions.

The new subway took me from the museum into the French Concession, a walled warren of houses and churches built by French interests in the 19th century. Later it was home to the city’s gangsters, White Russian emigres and Chinese dissidents. The first meeting of the Communist Party was held here in 1921. Now “Frenchtown” is known for upscale eating and shopping. The district’s Huaihai Road, arched by sparkling lights, features boutiques open until 10 p.m., a rarity in China.

Nearby is Dongtai Road’s antique market, one of several in the city, selling everything from 1930s Shanghai advertising posters to Buddhist knickknacks.

If you continue west along Huaihai Road toward the library, you’ll come upon Huting Market, where big-name clothes and shoes made in China but bound for the West can be had for a song.

The French Concession also houses the city’s best bars, most of which sit in fancy old mansions. O’Malley’s Irish Pub was the first bar I’d been to in China with its own lawn. A draught Guinness never tasted better.

A bit farther down the road is Shanghai Sally’s, where the resident reggae band of Africans sang Cantonese pop songs in Mandarin Chinese, much to the delight of the dancing crowd.

For dinner, a friend and I went to the 1931 Restaurant, a jazz bistro that wouldn’t look out of place in North Beach or SoHo. “I don’t want to go in. It’s too touristy,” I said as the hostess approached; she persuaded us to stay. An hour later, the place was packed with “Shanghailanders” enjoying Chinese menu items that were popular in the 1930s. I was the only “big nose” (foreigner) in the bunch.

Shanghai is great for aimless wandering, an exercise that felt like walking through a black-and-white photo that had been colorized.

By Day 3, I’d decided that the most attractive corner was the park called Fuxing, with the hot restaurant, Park 97, and its fusion menu of (what else?) Chinese and California cooking. While early-rising nouveau-riche Chinese and foreigners filled the place for Western-style breakfast, elderly locals gathered in front of the plate-glass windows for their daily tai chi exercises. A statue of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels stood behind them. Nearby, a Japanese noodle restaurant opened its doors for brunch. At the edge of the park, two kids played badminton. Behind them, the arching Rainbow Bridge was visible through plane trees whose seeds came from France.

It was Sunday morning in Shanghai, a city where “modern” does not mean “Western,” where diversity is ordinary in this mostly homogenized nation. It is a city where opposites not only attract, but support a whole that makes a person feel right at home, no matter where he or she is from.

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GUIDEBOOK

Surveying Shanghai

Getting there: There’s nonstop service from Los Angeles to Shanghai on China Eastern Airlines, direct service (one stop) on Air China International and connecting service on United. Lowest round-trip fare is $1,350.

Where to stay: Shanghai has no shortage of upscale hotels. Two of the best known are:

The Peace Hotel, 20 Nanjing Road, on the Bund, telephone 011-86-21-6321-6888, fax 011- 86-21-6329-0300, Internet https://www.shanghaipeacehotel.com. Historic; awesome views. Doubles from $120.

Pudong Shangri-La, 33 Fucheng Road, Pudong New Area, tel. 011-86-21-6882-8888, fax 011-86-21-6882-0160. Next to the TV tower and the free ferry. Brand new. The night views of the Bund are stunning. Doubles start at $240, but ask about discounted rates.

I stayed at the Telecommunications Hotel, 357 Songlin Road, Pudong New Area; tel. 011-86-21-5830-0000, fax 011- 86-21-5835-4007. New; every room has a phone jack for Internet access. Area has no night life save for construction workers welding together yet another high-rise. Doubles from $100.

Where to eat: Park 97, 2 Gaolan Road, inside Fuxing Park. Asian/California cuisine. Dinner for two with drinks, $50.

Henry’s, 8 Kinle Road in the French Concession. Inexpensive traditional Chinese/ Shanghai food in a setting that suggests elsewhere--high arched windows, wood floors and Cartier-Bresson photos on the wall. Dinner for two with drinks, $15.

1931 Restaurant, 112 Maoming Nan Road. Small, elegant; menu and decor recall the 1930s. Dinner for two, $25.

O’Malley’s Irish Pub, 42 Taojiang Road, in the French Concession near U.S. Consulate. Guinness on tap, a beautiful garden, frequent live Irish bands.

Shanghai Sally’s, corner of Sinan and Xiangshan roads, across from Sun Yat-sen house. Bar with billiards, darts, live music, dancing and big-time renao (heat and noise).

For more information: China National Tourist Office, 600 W. Broadway, Suite 320, Glendale, CA 91204; tel. (818) 545-7507, fax (818) 545-7506, Internet https://www.cnta.com.