Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 9, 1994 TAG: 9401110242
SECTION: TRAVEL PAGE: F10 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: CHRISTOPHER REYNOLDS LOS ANGELES TIMES
DATELINE: SHANGHAI, CHINA LENGTH: Long
He wore an old Mao jacket and cap - which in itself is enough to set you apart amid the tumult of smart suits and slit skirts that is downtown Shanghai today - and a fresh-off-the-bus expression. A tiny knapsack and bag were slung over his shoulder on a cane, in the same way that generations of Chinese peasants have carried coal and produce. The yuppies and merchants shouldered past him and the neon display signs blazed above in blue and pink, and while I dawdled behind, he moved in a sort of dazed slow motion, paused at a shop window and set down his load on the curb. Then, without a backward glance, he stepped inside to inspect the leather jackets, the fur coats ... the future.
This is not a scene easily packaged and pitched by tour companies, but it's exactly what sets this city apart from most of the world. After a notorious history as a European playground in the early 20th century and a tardy entry into the Chinese economic reform movement of the last 15 years, Shanghai and its estimated population of 13 million are courting tourism and charging into the free-market world with a vengeance that makes the former Soviet states of Eastern Europe look like idle bystanders.
Shanghai is no place for the fragile. The air is so thick with coal dust that some parents outfit their children with tiny surgeon's masks, and in the continuing boom, environmental damage may get much worse before it gets better. Don't come to unwind. Come to see a world turning.
Straw-hatted laborers heave up manufacturing plants and Mercedes-Benz dealerships. A massive middle class, salaries plumped by foreign investment, labors six days a week and then floods the shops on the seventh. Erstwhile rural workers arrive daily to look for city jobs.
While teachers in Beijing pull down as little as $60 in monthly salaries, tip-taking taxi drivers here say they can easily bring in 10 times that amount. To envision the new Shanghai, picture Manhattan, and then add 5 million bicycle couriers, all running late.
A visitor can stroll along the old, European-built waterfront; step into a Buddhist shrine; watch some of Shanghai's internationally acclaimed acrobats; or look down on an old billy club (said to have been wielded by European police in the bad old days) under glass in the modest house where Mao Tse-tung and a dozen others convened the First National Congress of the Communist Party of China 72 years ago.
Shanghai bloomed late and strangely. Set on China's coast near the muddy mouth of the Yangtze River, the city endured as a fishing, shipping and textile town for centuries, but didn't develop a worldly profile until 1842, when Britain defeated the Chinese in the Opium War and pried the port open to European trade.
Within a few years, British, French and Americans established ``settlements'' immune from Chinese law. Soon they had their own architectural profile along the waterfront. The Bund, a long, picturesque row of imposing European mercantile buildings, rose on the west bank of the Huangpu River, joined elsewhere in town by gentlemen's clubs (one of which is now the city library), a horse-racing track (now People's Park), stylish nightspots, well-stocked department stores and enough brothels to house, by one estimate, 30,000 prostitutes. If God is going to let Shanghai stand, one missionary is said to have lamented, then apologies are owed to Sodom and Gomorrah.
The most obvious place to look for prerevolutionary Shanghai is on the Bund. Now as in the '30s, Europeans and Americans can gaze with vague familiarity upon the Big Ben-like clock tower of the old customs house (now a Chinese government operation) and the noble 1926 facade of the former Cathay Hotel. In that striking structure, now known as the Peace Hotel, Westerners gather downstairs nightly to pony up a $5 cover charge and hear the aged gentlemen of the house jazz band thrum and skittle through a repertoire of pre-1949 standards.
The rest of the Bund is more for walking and watching. The looming architecture on Saturday nights is bathed in showy lights, but by day the buildings are unenthrallingly occupied by government agencies and import-export enterprises.
The easiest route into the world of Shanghai commerce for a visitor is a long walk down Nanjing Road. Beginning on the Bund at the Peace Hotel, Nanjing Road runs west 26 long blocks. So busy are most of those blocks that pedestrians spill from the sidewalk into traffic lanes, and bicycles are banned.
The two certain stops on any Shanghai guide's itinerary are the Jade Buddha Temple and Yu Garden. The Jade Buddha Temple is a rarity in religion-wary China, an 80-some-year-old Buddhist retreat that somehow survived the revolution. The property, a $3 taxi ride north of Nanjing Road, is run by several dozen robed monks, who spend much of their time managing the temple's heavy tourist traffic.
The featured attraction is a 6-foot-tall Buddha carved of a single chunk of jade, set amid jewels, delivered by a monk from Burma in the late 19th century. To see it, I paid about $2, removed my shoes in an ante room, and shuffled past in woven slippers. The statue smiles like the Mona Lisa. Another Buddha presides downstairs, incense-scented, gold-skinned, 15 feet high and surrounded by smaller figures, flourishes and kneeling Buddhist visitors. Nearby, I met a middle-aged man mourning his mother, now two years dead.
Later that day, I looked for a comparable human dimension in the Yu Garden. I couldn't find it. The site - a sprawling network of ancient buildings, fish ponds and landscaped grounds - is one of the oldest structures in Shanghai; it dates to 1559. The sequence of micro-environments is interesting, but I should have been warned by the banner draped across the major street out front. ``China Tourism Shopping Festival.'' In far too many of the garden's ancient rooms, souvenir hawkers lay in waiting. Outside its gates, within about 20 paces, one steps from the Ming Dynasty into Jeans West. Anyone with the chance should step beyond this and do a little prowling past the laundry lines, porch-sitters and narrow alleys of the nearby Old Town neighborhood, where Chinese families still live in remarkably close quarters.
In many ways, Shanghai is most inviting by night. The crowds thin, the neon gleams, the pollution is less evident, and immense doings seem to be afoot. One is the nightly performance of the internationally admired Shanghai Acrobatic Theatre - the inexpensive performance runs from a trained elephant to cutlery jugglers and shouldn't be missed - but one need not have a specific agenda to step into the picture.
Simply find a pedicab after dinner. For a few dollars, a traveler can merge with the blur and flash of the place, while the man up front pumps, coasts, thumbs the ineffectual, incessantly ringing bell on his handlebars, and careens without headlights around clogged corners and through the night traffic. In fact, after covering a mile in a Shanghai pedicab, I see a problem for the legion of Western marketers on their way here: There can't be a video game on Earth as demanding, exhilarating and menacing as the standard commute of a Shanghai bicyclist.
It was on the last of my three days in town, after I'd seen most of the sights above, that I fell in step on Nanjing Road behind the young man with the cane and the knapsack. After he stepped into the fur and leather store, leaving his load behind, I stopped and waited to see his next move. Could he be looking for work? Window shopping? Or beneath his modest costume, had he already started salting away hefty savings, like so many of his neighbors? I kept waiting with an eye on the knapsack, until it finally dawned on me that I'd lost him, that he might never come back. Just about the last thing you need to make your future in the new Shanghai, I suppose, is an old country knapsack.
by CNB