Metropolis infested with foreign adventurers

...or so says the Shanghai History Museum in a description of concession-era Shanghai.

In the last two days, I've been out and about Shanghai, the first day with a bunch of the Bulldogs here and today on my own. I probably (actually, make that definitely) won't post as often once I get to Beijing, and probably they won't be as long as this one will probably end up being, but I figure I might as well write a bunch while I can.

Impressions and neighborhoods

Shanghai's a huge city, and its neighborhoods are totally different from each other. The Bulldogs are staying at the Rayfont Hotel (上海南普瑞峰酒店) in the Old City in southern Shanghai. The neighborhood around here is fairly un-Westernized, very traditional and in parts quite poor. Depending on which streets you take, if you walk south towards the nearest metro station you walk through a neighborhood that is in part fairly dirty and squalid. It makes you think about the economic renaissance that China is going through, and at the same time how many people are left out of it. When I was looking for the metro stop on Sunday, I came across a sign in Chinese that I pieced together to say something along the lines of "Congratulations to the residents for signing the agreement to move into new homes!" In much of the literature that I've read about China, I always seem to run across something that deplores the destruction of the old architecture, whether it's the hutongs 胡同 in Beijing or the shikumen 石库门 in Shanghai and its replacement with "soulless modern architecture" or some variant thereof. But having actually walked through some of these neighborhoods, and realizing how run-down some of these buildings are, I'm not so sure that we have the right to criticize the destruction of all this architecture. It might be historic, but historic doesn't necessarily equal humane for the people living there.

But at the same time, if you walk north from this hotel, you walk through a neighborhood that, while not Westernized in architecture and still packed with people (and nothing like Pudong or the French Concession), is full of bustling shops and tons of people strolling around and generally seems like a good traditional shopping area.


This is on the way to the Yuyuan Gardens. Ignoring the modern-looking architecture in the background, the foreground is what this part of Shanghai looks like.

So that's the Old City. Then there's Pudong 浦东, which is the shiny new part of Shanghai on the west bank of the Huangpu River 黄浦江 and is totally different and Westernized and new. Rosie and I went walking along the Bund 外滩 last night and I snapped a ton of pictures. There's not that much to be said that you can't really see in the picture, except for the fact that the Oriental Pearl Tower 东方明珠塔 is one of the most distinctive buildings I've ever seen.


Pudong! This is before we walked back in the other direction and saw the upper pearl of the tower swathed in a polluted haze.

And finally there's the European-style architecture of the Bund and the French Concession 法国租界. A couple of us went to eat at a restaurant (which in itself is a whole other story) located in the French Concession last night and when we got out of the metro it was like we were in a totally different city. The street was wide, there was an actual sidewalk, all that stuff in the guidebooks about "tree-lined boulevards" actually turned out to be true and, aside from the Chinese characters of course, we could have been walking in any European or East Coast city. Which I guess is not surprising, but it was still a little jarring to see the difference. I'm going to try to go back to the French Concession tomorrow or Thursday and snap some pictures of the streets.


Yours truly in front of the Customs House, Bank of Communications building and Russo-Chinese Bank on the Bund.

Getting around

I've largely been getting around on the Shanghai Metro, with a couple of taxi rides. The metro's really nice (aka clean and cheap, unlike the New York subway, for instance), with a couple of caveats:

(1) The absurd opening hours (this is the really irritating one)
Last night, Rosie and I discovered that line 8 of the Metro closes before 10 pm. What?! Perhaps people don't really go out at night here (something that I HIGHLY doubt), but some of the lines close ridiculously early here, forcing you to take a taxi back. Luckily taxis aren't that expensive (they're like 11 RMB for the first two kilometers or something like that

(2) The incompleteness of the system
I guess this isn't really a system flaw, because the system's really new, but it's irritating.

(3) System maps portraying the future
Some guidebooks and maps have the bright idea to print maps for distribution that include the numerous lines under construction or being planned. That's great if you're interested in the system's development, but if you're trying to get somewhere it makes things a little difficult, because you don't want to plan to take a line that doesn't currently exist.

Yuyuan Gardens 豫园

This is a set of gardens that dates from the Ming dynasty in the northern part of the Old City in Shanghai. The shops around this area are super-touristy but the garden's quite pretty and the way that the stone walls are set up the whole area seems larger than it actually is.



Awesome dragon.

Shanghai Museum 上海博物馆

If you're a museum person at all, I recommend this museum -- it's got a ton of good collections of Chinese art, calligraphy, sculpture and bronzes. And there's a temporary exhibition on loan from the British Museum about the ancient Olympic Games as well, which is only going to be here until July. Plus it's free. Apparently the bronzes are supposed to be the centerpiece of the collection but I never really made it there because I started with my favorite things (calligraphy) on the third floor and I got pretty tired wandering around the seal, Ming and Qing dynasty furniture, Chinese coins and minority nationality art (really) collections.



This is probably my favorite piece of calligraphy in the entire collection.


There's a whole gallery devoted to "China's minority nationalities" that includes tons of wax figures dressed up like this.

Shanghai Urban Planning Exhibition Centre 上海城市规划展示馆

The name sounds really boring but it's actually a lot of fun. Basically it's this whole museum dedicated to the future of the city and how it's going to be this amazing environmentally-friendly transport-convenient metropolis of the future. There's a bunch of exhibits on Pudong, the airports, green Shanghai, etc., but the really cool exhibit is on the third floor where they have this huge model of Shanghai as it apparently will look in a couple of years. I think this was definitely worth the 30 RMB that I paid to get in.


Wow. Just wow.


This is in the lobby of the museum. It's kind of Star Wars-esque if you ask me. It's like the "Greatest Hits" of Pudong. Also, you can see part of the sign that says 城市，让生活更美好 or "Better City, Better Life."

Shanghai Municipal History Museum 上海市历史陈列馆

This museum is in the bottom of the Oriental Pearl Tower. The admission for the museum is 35 RMB (if you go up to the top of the tower the admission is different, there's like seven different fares depending on how high you want to go and what you want to see.)


It's somewhere in here. Also, it's amazing how low the clouds/smog/fog were.

This museum was excellent, except for the part in which my camera ran out of batteries halfway through. It takes you through Shanghai's history through use of a ton of wax figures and model streetscapes from the early Ming dynasty era to the end of the concession era in the 1940s. There isn't much on the history of the city from say 1949 to until about 1990 (when suddenly economic reforms emerge), which isn't surprising given this government's preference for rewriting history. Anyway, I really liked the museum, even if wax figures are kind of corny, because the way it's set up, particularly in the concession-era portions, is like a mock streetscape, so you sort of get a feeling for what walking Shanghai during that time must have been like. (This is also where there's a plaque that describes the concession era as one in which Shanghai was a "metropolis infested with foreign adventurers." All in all, though, the propagandistic level of the explanations in the museum is actually pretty low, lower than I was expecting.)


The dastardly British arrive and begin Shanghai's "semi-colonial and semi-feudal" era!


An opium den.


So far as I can tell, an actual boundary stone from the French Concession from the early Republican period.


A miniature of an early-1900s streetscape.

...

If it looks like I have a particular love for museums, it's because it's been raining all day today, and a walk along the Bund and strolling the French Concession didn't really seem like good ideas today.

All in all, though, these last two days have been pretty amazing. I've been able to see a ton of the city, and with two days left before I head north to Beijing on Friday, hopefully I'll be able to explore the French Concession a bit and get a bird's-eye view of Shanghai from the Jinmao Tower 金茂大厦 in Pudong. But in any case, I'm having a ton of fun, stretching my legs and making the most of these last few days of vacation before the grind of HBA begins. :)