The Shanghai Monorail
The Silk Road starts in Xi’an not Shanghai, but we had to arrive in China somewhere, and there are no direct flights to Xi’an.
Shanghai is a gargantuan
city. Until the 1980s it was largely confined to a corner of land
between the western bank of the Huangpu River and the broad mouth of the
Yangzi. In those days it was merely huge. Then it jumped the river and tower
blocks played leapfrog with ring roads until they reached the East China Sea
and what is now the site of Pudong International Airport.
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| We arrived in shanghai on the East China sea, at the start of journey that would take us as far west as China goes |
The maglev is one
of the several wonders of modern Shanghai, but at first sight we could have just
entered any metro system in the world. The carriage was new and clean and the
seats seemed very blue. An LCD on the bulkhead told us the time, and, perhaps a
little unusually, the speed. It read 0 km/hr.
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| Lynne on the maglev, bleary-eyed but ready to fly |
We moved off
soundlessly, the acceleration pushing us gently into our seats. At 100 km/hr we
were keeping pace with the cars on the urban motorway beneath. At 200 km/hr
they appeared to be dawdling. At 300 km/hr we rounded a bend, the tilt of the
train sweeping us breathlessly over the roofs of the now apparently stationary
cars. At 400 km/hr we passed a train going in the opposite direction. It was
gone before we realised it was arriving. At 430 km/hr the numbers stopped
changing and we were cruising. Shanghai may be vast, but the maglev goes only
half way to the centre so the cruise was brief and soon we were
watching the numbers fall back as the rest of Shanghai re-emerged from slow
motion.
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| The Shanghai maglev reaches cruising speed |
The terminal is
above Long Yang Lu metro station but, burdened with cases, we decided to take a
taxi. There was one taxi waiting, no queue and a policeman to marshal it. He
asked our destination, scribbled something on a pad and ushered us into the
cab. Tearing off the top sheet, he pushed it through the window. He had ringed
a section which said, in English, ‘The Bund, pay no more than 40 Yuan’. In our
experience Chinese taxi drivers are reliable and generally honest, but it was
nice to know the city government was looking after us. 37 Yuan showed on the
meter when we arrived, so 37 we paid. It is not customary to tip Chinese taxi
drivers.
A Walk Along the Bund
Once checked in and showered there is only one thing a first time visitor to Shanghai should do and that is take a walk along the Bund.
‘Bund’ is derived
from the Hindi ‘band’ meaning ‘embankment’. The Huangpu river frontage was the
site of the original British Settlement which, by the 19th century, had
developed into the International Settlement and become the financial hub of
East Asia. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries a series of fine buildings
were erected along what is still signed in English as ‘The Bund’ though it is
known as Zhongshan Lu in Chinese. These temples to commerce faced a road, some
parkland and a vast area of wharfs and jetties. The riverfront has long been
cleared and the embankment raised as a flood defence. The widening of Zhongshan
Lu to ten lanes in the 1990s, finished the parkland and the high rises of
modern Shanghai have rather diminished the Bund, despite height restrictions in
the immediate area. Plans are afoot to restore the gardens, and somehow allow
for even more traffic, but work is just starting and the area is littered with
roadworks and scaffolding. |
| Lynne on The Bund |
The Bund may have
lost its former glory, but it is still pleasant to walk along the embankment,
dodging the traders offering trinkets and cyclists peddling chilled water, and
looking at a waterfront resembling some strangely misplaced Liverpool. It
seemed important to several passers-by that we should accompany them to
purchase Rolex watches and Gucci handbags, but we preferred to stroll. On the
other side of the embankment the river sparkled in the sun and trains of
heavily laden barges slipped down or laboured up the broad Huangpu. Beyond the
river, where there was once only slums and marshland, the Oriental Pearl TV
tower and several more of Shanghai’s, indeed the world’s, tallest buildings
dominated the skyline just as the neo-classical Bund had done a century before.
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| The Oriental Pearl Tower across the Huangpo River Shanghai |
Dinner in Zhapu Street
In the evening, two blocks from our hotel, we found the neon splendour of Zhapu Street, a purple phantasmagoria of a thoroughfare, full of parked cars and even fuller of restaurants. Some were fronted by huge glass aquaria where items from the menu swam backwards and forwards, tempting the diners. Between the restaurants were several ‘hairdressers’ that seemed to have no basins or hairdryers – or any other equipment - but did have a small shoal of scantily clad girls lounging behind the plate glass windows. Like the fish, they too were items on a menu of sorts.
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| Zhapu Steet, Shanghai |
Down a side street
we found trestle tables of food laid out on the pavement. We stopped at one and
chose a couple of dishes; one of pork, one of eel. A sweating bare-chested man
took them to a wok in a lean-to shed while his side-kick set up a table rather
too far out in the road – westerners need to be prominently placed as we are
considered good advertisements. We dined well, if a little in danger from
passing motorcycles.
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| 'Trestle tables of food laid out on the pavement' Shanghai |
The Bund Tourist Tunnel
In the morning we travelled under the river. The bridges crossing the Huangpu carry multiple lanes of traffic, but those without cars must use the metro or, possibly, The Bund Tourist Tunnel. For a fee ten times that of a metro ticket you can be transported under the river in a glass carriage on a horizontal funicular railway. The ten minute trip is accompanied by a 1960s style light show and sonorous declarations in Mandarin and English as the carriage passes through various geological strata. Only in China..... |
| Inside the Bund Tourist Tunnel Shanghai |
The Oriental Pearl Tower
The Pudong new development is not built for pedestrians. Barren concrete walkways weave between, around and over building sites, high rises and multi-lane roads; the direct routes are reserved for motor vehicles. After a hot and frustrating half hour, we gave in and bought tickets for the Oriental Pearl Tower.
The long, carefully
organised, queue moved steadily – the Chinese love this sort of thing – and
soon we were barrelling upwards in a high-speed lift. The views over Shanghai
are truly impressive. We wandered round slowly, looking at the bend in the
Huangpu, the Suzhou Creek and the roof of our hotel. |
| Where the Suzhou Creek meets the Huangpo River as seen from the Oriental Pearl Tower, Shanghai |
Round the other
side, we were eyeball to eyeball with the 421 metre Jin Mao Tower. Behind it
the even taller Shanghai World Financial Centre, its top like a huge bottle
opener, is the world’s second highest building, although at 492 metres its roof
is the highest in the world (the Taipei 101 cheats by having a spire.) The 632
metre Shanghai Tower will dwarf them all, but is currently a building site
between the Financial Centre and the Oriental Pearl. The Hyatt’s Cloud 9 bar is,
we learned later, on floor 87 of the Jin Mao Tower. On the ground we had not
even spotted a Hyatt sign.
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| Jin Mao Tower, Shanghai |
At the foot of the
Oriental Pearl is a small park with a jumble of food kiosks and long wooden
tables set out in the shade of some trees. Eighty pence bought us each a bowl
of noodles topped with a few slices of meat and drowned in a thin soup. Food is
as important to the Chinese as it is to the French, and it is impressive the
way even these kiosks take such care with their spicing – you just have to be
careful not to crunch up the star anise.
Shanghai Old Town
Back through the Bund Site Seeing Tunnel, some hot, sweaty footslogging brought us to the Old Town.
Shanghai Old Town
is either a perfectly preserved Ming city or a grossly over restored Chinese
Disneyland, depending on whose opinion you seek. The cleanness of the streets,
the perfection of the buildings and the awful tat being sold inside them, inclined
us towards the second opinion. The place was heaving with tourists,
overwhelmingly Chinese, and sometimes progress could only be made by literally
pushing through the crowd whilst keeping a firm grip on your wallet and
brushing off the continual suggestions that you urgently needed a Rolex watch
or a Gucci bag.
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| The Old Town, Shanghai |
The Huxinting Teahouse
Everybody who is anybody that has visited Shanghai has supped a cuppa at the Huxinting teahouse. The anybodies include a certain Elizabeth Windsor, and if it is good enough for her Maj, then it must be good enough for us.
Clearly marked on
the street map, the teahouse was harder to find than we expected, partly
because of the crowds, but mainly because our map had misplaced it by just
enough to cause confusion. Advice from a friendly local soon pointed us in the
right direction, but before we set off she insisted on becoming the four
thousandth person that day to attempt sell us a Rolex/Gucci. Already having our
undivided attention, she was a little harder to brush off than most, but
eventually we took our leave and, weaving and occasionally heaving our way
through the multitude, headed in the direction she had indicated.
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| The Huxinting Teahouse, Shanghai |
Built as a
summerhouse in the garden of a Ming dynasty mandarin, Huxinting was renovated
and enlarged by cotton merchants in 1784 to serve as a brokerage hall. It
became a teahouse in 1855. Its name means Heart of Lake Pavilion – or Mid-Lake
Pavilion to a more prosaic translator. It is usually described as sitting in an
ornamental lake and approached by a zigzag bridge, although neither are
precisely true. The relative areas of building and water make it more a carp
filled moat than a lake and the people-packed bridge has a series of
ninety-degree corners rather than true zigzags. Demons, as everyone knows,
cannot turn through right angles, so Ming builders took this elementary
precaution as a matter of routine. The crowd crossing the bridge was apparently
demon free – despite the Western view of the Chinese back in the good old days
of the Red Guards and the Little Red Book.
We pushed open the
wooden door and entered the hushed and panelled interior. For a second it was
like an entering an old English pub, then we were accosted by a flunky, ushered
up the creaking wooden stairs, installed at a table in an alcove and equipped
with a bilingual tea list.
The quiet and calm
contrasted dramatically with the frenzy outside, and we did not have to read
far into the tea list before realising why. With cuppas starting at motorway
service station prices and heading upwards to the Château Lafitte level, it was
only the best healed of Shanghai residents who could afford to be there.
We ordered a green tea and a ‘rose scented puer’ from the cheaper end of the list. Every tea, we could see, was presented differently. Some were in small glass teapots where an appropriate flower floated, others in porcelain of greater or lesser size. Our green tea came in a cup with a lid. The ‘rose scented puer’ arrived in a tiny terracotta pot, with an even more minuscule cup for drinking out of. Along with this came a plate of tofu based nibbles.
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| Lynne in the Huxinting Teahouse, Shanghai |
The price may have
been reminiscent of a motorway service station, but nothing else was. The puer
was delicately scented and amazingly refreshing, the green required skilful use
of the lid to avoid a mouthful of leaves which floated as densely as pondweed,
though rather more fragrantly. A young man stood by with a hot kettle, ever
ready to refill our cup or pot. We watched the milling crowds through the
wooden framed window as we sat among a Ming elegance enhanced beyond the dreams
of the original owner by modern conveniences like air conditioning and
efficient plumbing. We stayed more than an hour, cool, relaxed and, like the
Mandarins of the past, detached from the struggles of the common people.
Unlike those
Mandarins we decided to leave before the proletariat staged a revolution.
Features of some Shanghai Restaurants
Nearby a restaurant
promised dumplings stuffed with ‘the ovaries and digestive organs of a crad’, a
dish which may have lost something in translation.
Around the corner a large
window revealed a bevy of white suited and white hatted chefs stuffing the very
dumplings and placing them in steamers. It looked more appetising than it read,
but it was not time to eat yet.
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| What a treat |
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| Stuff those dumplings |
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| Half-hearted jumps and some random arm waving, Shanghai |
Shanghai Hotpot
We dined that night at a ‘hotpot’ restaurant a stone’s throw from the hotel. The hotpot is a circular metal bowl divided ying and yang style and placed on a burner set into the table. One side is filled with a light stock, the other with something richer and darker with chillies floating on top and blocks of tofu lurking below the surface. They also have a few undivided bowls and as the Chinese are convinced that all Europeans hate chillies, our first task was to persuade them we actually wanted one that offered both. Then, as usual, we were sat in the window as an advertisement. The menu was long and, thankfully, bilingual. We chose slices of pork, potatoes, taro, lotus root, a dish of mushrooms and a quantity of noodles, and cooked it in the hot pot, some in the chilli, some in the mild. An over-attentive waitress stood by to ensure the idiot foreigners did not set themselves on fire either from the equipment or the unaccustomed chillies. It was a good meal, though I would have preferred to experiment rather than be continually corrected by a fourteen year old, despite her winning smile.
We dined that night at a ‘hotpot’ restaurant a stone’s throw from the hotel. The hotpot is a circular metal bowl divided ying and yang style and placed on a burner set into the table. One side is filled with a light stock, the other with something richer and darker with chillies floating on top and blocks of tofu lurking below the surface. They also have a few undivided bowls and as the Chinese are convinced that all Europeans hate chillies, our first task was to persuade them we actually wanted one that offered both. Then, as usual, we were sat in the window as an advertisement. The menu was long and, thankfully, bilingual. We chose slices of pork, potatoes, taro, lotus root, a dish of mushrooms and a quantity of noodles, and cooked it in the hot pot, some in the chilli, some in the mild. An over-attentive waitress stood by to ensure the idiot foreigners did not set themselves on fire either from the equipment or the unaccustomed chillies. It was a good meal, though I would have preferred to experiment rather than be continually corrected by a fourteen year old, despite her winning smile.
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| Hot pot, Shanghai |
After dinner, we
strolled through an area of low-rise buildings, several streets of crowded and
dilapidated dwellings that represent an old Shanghai – hardly to be confused
with the tarted up ‘Old City’ - that is fast disappearing. We did not then
realise how fast, but when we returned nearly four weeks later, the demolition
men had already moved in.
Near our hotel, we
encountered a man sitting on the pavement on one of those tiny chairs which in
England are confined to infant schools, but in China are favoured by those old
people who spend their day playing cards in the shade. He was holding a hose
that snaked back into the workshop behind and wearing nothing but his y-fronts.
Work over, he was taking a meticulous if somewhat public bath before going
home.
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| Looking across the Hunagpo River at night Shanghai |
Nanjing Street
Next morning we headed south down Suzhou Street, parallel to the Bund, until it met Nanjing Street where we turned right towards the heart of the city.
The streets here
are narrow by Chinese standards and lack the usual grid pattern so a careful
watch has to be kept for cars, push bikes and mopeds emerging from side streets
and alleys at all sorts of angles. The bikes and mopeds present the greatest
danger as they routinely ignore traffic lights and pedestrian crossing, and
use either side of the road. Most lethal are the electric mopeds; they drift
silently up behind you and can run you down before you know they are there.
On Suzhou Street we
made a mental note of a restaurant offering Shanghai’s traditional pot-sticker
dumplings and declined several offers of Rolex watches and Gucci handbags. Pot
stickers are like the ubiquitous Jiaozi (a sort of over-stuffed ravioli) but instead
of being steamed they are left to fry in – and indeed stick to - wide shallow
pans. Lynne is not a great fan of Jiaozis anyway, and I was to discover that I
prefer the steamed version. Not only are they healthier and taste better, but
you do not run the risk of carelessly biting into them and spurting hot fat up
your arm, into your eye and down your shirt.
Along Nanjing Steet
the clamour to sell us watches and bags reached fever pitch but died down a
little as we left the pedestrian shopping area and entered Renmin Park, the
green, open space, claustrophobically surrounded by tall buildings. On the far
side is the Shanghai museum.
The Shanghai Museum
There was a long queue at the museum that moved slowly, too slowly for some tastes so most early progress was made from people dropping out. It was mainly Chinese, but we found ourselves hemmed in by a group of wives and children from the British and American consulates. We learned some gossip, but regrettably few state secrets.
For the Olympics
the government had declared that all museums would be free, so the hold-up
could not involve tickets. It was, we eventually discovered, a matter of
security. Metal detectors and X-ray machines were laboriously discovering that no
terrorists wanted to see the exhibits that day. When it was our turn, they
examined our water bottles and requested we drink from them. We did so without
apparent discomfort and were waved through.
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| Outside the Shanghai Museum - the queue had gone by the time we left |
And was the museum
worth the wait? Well, the collection of money, from two thousand year old coins
shaped like miniature scimitars, through great perforated weights that could be
threaded on string, right up to the modern preference for grubby paper notes,
was fascinating; the landscape paintings were somewhat repetitive, as Chinese
landscape paintings tend to be; the textiles and pottery were similar to
articles we had seen in the Shaanxi provincial museum in Xian some year ago,
though the quality and shear antiquity of some of the exhibits could not fail
to amaze; and the calligraphy collection was vast. I am never sure if
calligraphy is better appreciated when you can or cannot read what is written.
There is some historical interest, I suppose, and I can understand the point of
Islamic calligraphers who are denied any representational art, but as far as
modern calligraphy is concerned I have only three words: buy a computer.
To the Former French Concession on the Shanghai Metro
We escaped and made our way down into the metro system. The Shanghai metro was built by the same company as Hong Kong’s excellent MTR so speed, efficiency and cleanliness were guaranteed. At mid-afternoon it was also as crowded as Hong Kong in the rush hour.
We emerged in the
former French Concession, southwest of the old British Settlement. It is
generally said that there is nothing very French about the French Concession,
and between the wars it was largely populated by impoverished White Russians.
This may be true but turning off the main drag, we wandered through streets
edged with railings and shaded by mature plane trees. The villas behind the
railings might have been substantial but it was architecture on a more human
scale than in much of Shanghai. It was almost possible to imagine we were in a
well-off residential district of a French provincial town – albeit one with a
surprisingly large Chinese community.
The House of Dr Sun Yatsen
Dr Sun Yatsen and
Zhou Enlai both had houses here. Sun Yatsen was the first post-imperial
president of China and as he died in 1925, long before the civil war between
Mao’s communists and Chiang Kaishek’s Guomintang, he is considered a hero by
both sides. Dr Sun’s French style house is modest, but comfortable and packed
with memorabilia which was studied reverentially by the Chinese visitors. [We visited the Sun Yatsen Mausoluem in Nanjing in 2016]
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| Me and Dr Sun Yatsen Shanghai |
The House of Zhou Enlai
Zhou Enlai was Mao’s number two for many years and was a calming influence during the madness of the Cultural Revolution. His personal interventions are credited with saving many historical monuments from the frenzy of the Red Guards, including the magnificent Potala Palace in Lhasa. He lived in a substantial pile on the same street as Sun Yatsen. |
| Lynne outside Zhou Enlai's house Shanghai |
Dim Sum Breakfasts
The next morning we set off for the airport and the real start of the Silk Road, but not before our third splendid breakfast. The American Breakfast Bar in the New Asia Hotel is on the eighth floor, but we long ago realised that Chinese American breakfasts should be avoided. Do not think here of maple syrup and stacks of pancakes, think rather of a skilled Chinese chef cooking unfamiliar cuts of meat and bizarre egg dishes that he neither likes nor understands. Far better to take a Chinese breakfast and let a skilled Chinese chef do what he does best.
On the ground floor
was a restaurant serving the best of all Chinese breakfasts, that Cantonese
version of all-day lunch known as Dim Sum. It was here we presented ourselves
on the first morning. ‘American breakfast eighth floor’ said the maitre d’. ‘We
want to eat here,’ we said. ‘You have to pay’, he said, but as we had booked
room only that made no difference. ‘No coffee’ he said. We shrugged. ‘Only
chopsticks’. We shrugged again, in China you learn to use chopsticks or starve.
‘No western food at all.’ he said despairingly. Seeing he could not make us go
away, he resigned himself to the situation, showed us to a seat and organised a
minion to bring a pot of tea. On day one, we were unsure whether he resented
out attitude or was quietly pleased, but by day three we were being treated
like old friends.
The trick with a
Dim Sum breakfast is to first attract ‘Congee Lady’. This is the girl who
wheels round a trolley bearing vats of Congee, as it is called in Hong Kong, or
Zhou, to give it its Mandarin name. Zhou is rice soup, which can be thin and
unpalatable, but in Dim Sum comes thickened with gobs of gelatine, strands of
green vegetable and lumps of chicken. It is a fine way to start a cold day - or
a hot day in an air-conditioned restaurant. Then there are the trolleys of
steamers containing dumplings constructed from various sorts of noodles with
equally varied fillings; beef, pork, prawn, crab, taro and many more. It is not
always possible to know what you are buying, but they are all wonderful, as are
the trays of pastries wrapped round fruit, custard, red and yellow beans or a
host of things we could not identify. Not every dish is a great success though,
the pickled squids’ heads offer remarkably little to eat, their tentacles as
edible as pipe cleaners. Lynne plays a vital moderating role. Left to myself I
would buy more and yet more until I was surrounded by a hundred plates of good
things that I was just too full to eat. I need her to stop me. She would,
however, never stop me buying chickens’ feet. Some people sneer at chickens’
feet: ‘the flavour depends on what they’ve been standing in’ as my friend Brian
would say, but slow cooked in black bean sauce with ginger, chilli and garlic
they are toe-curlingly wonderful. Just suck off the richly flavoured outer skin
to get at the unctuous chickeny-ness within, and then spit out the bits of
cartilage. There is no better way to prepare for a flight to Xian…