Shanghai
Boom Town
Bigger and more prosperous than any other Chinese city, Shanghai is dynamic yet relaxed. Although new construction goes on at a furious pace, reminiscent of Hong Kong, there's always time to tarry at irresistible snack stalls and admire the displays in shop windows. Away from the downtown traffic-both pedestrian and on wheels-Shanghai's parks and gardens preserve the nearest possible thing to solitude, where the locals take their songbirds for some fresh air.
Before 20th-century war and revolution unravelled its social fabric, Shanghai was dominated by foreign fortune-hunters, social climbers and assorted sinners. Its very name became a transitive verb in English-"to shanghai" somebody by trick or force onto a ship, into an army or into some kind of unpleasantness. Visitors nowadays have nothing to worry about.
Shanghai's population, around 13 million, makes it one of the biggest cities in the world. But Shanghai covers a metropolitan area of around 6,000 sq km (more than 2,300 sq miles)-five times the size of Los Angeles. Administered as a separate region, the Shanghai metropolis includes rich farmland as well as big-city housing complexes and heavy industry.
China's prime port began unpromisingly a thousand years ago as a fishing village on mud flats near the Yangtse River's outlet to the East China Sea. Even while Shanghai's importance as a centre of domestic trade grew, the authorities firmly resisted foreign connections-until British gunboats won an invitation in the 19th century. The consequent influx of Europeans and Americans made this a glamorous, naughty boom town, but little of the prosperity filtered down to the ordinary Chinese. Bitterness at the injustices of Shanghai society fired the city's revolutionary movement: the Chinese Communist Party was founded here in 1921. And in Shanghai 44 years later the Cultural Revolution erupted onto the national scene.
Overcompensating for Shanghai's history of conspicuous consumption, the Communist authorities turned the city into a great industrial centre-as the smokestacks attest. But Shanghai still holds a special appeal for its visitors as a sophisticated, businesslike, but no less colourful metropolis rich in nostalgia.
