Part 9 of our June 2009 trip to China with the Speizmans.
Thursday, June 18 – Arrival in Shanghai
We reluctantly checked out of the Four Seasons Hong Kong and made our way back to the airport for our flight to Shanghai. This was my first time back in Shanghai since 1988 for one day on our tour with Kate Garrett. Before that, in 1982, I had spent nearly a month in Shanghai on several work trips with Bei Jing-Washington and gotten to know the city pretty well. Not very much had changed between 1982 and 1988, but in two decades to 2009 Shanghai had been radically altered with a skyline of futuristic skyscrapers. I was eager to see what had changed and what remained from what I remembered.
The trip from Hong Kong was uneventful until we arrived in Shanghai. Our plane was held on the tarmac while a medical team outfitted in hazmat garb and masks worked their way through the plane checking our temperatures with a kind of sensor gun. It was the first time we’d ever encountered such treatment or concern. There was no particular worry while we were in Hong Kong but it turns out there had been reports of swine flu in Hong Kong and elsewhere in Asia. China’s awareness and vigilance against an outbreak was a surprise to us. It was a harbinger of things to come in the worldwide pandemic in 2020. Fortunately, no one on the plane exhibited symptoms and we were not held in quarantine.
We eventually disembarked in Shanghai’s new Pudong International airport, a far cry from Shanghai’s old Hongqiao Airport which had a history dating back to the 1920s and still looked like it in the 1980s. The Pudong airport had a high-speed mag-lev train that could have got us into town in 25 minutes but we opted for a less expensive and more convenient car that took us directly to our hotel in about 45 minutes over a series of new elevated highways.
Our hotel was the Four Seasons Shanghai, again thanks to arrangements made by Amy and Chris Hunsberger, located in the old French Concession a few miles from the Bund waterfront. The view from our windows on the first day was hazy with Shanghai’s frequent combination of smog and low humid clouds. The hotel was adjacent to the Want Want Plaza, an office complex the name and logo of which gave me a giggle each time I passed. Turns out Want Want is a Taiwan-based food and media conglomerate that allegedly has close ties to the Chinese Communist Party. Just another everyday contradiction in China.
We reconnected with the Speizmans who had arrived from their travels in the Guilin region while we went to Hong Kong. I think we kept things simple and had dinner in the hotel to compare notes on our respective journeys.
Friday, June 19 – Shanghai River Cruise, Nanjing Road
We set out to explore Shanghai, starting with a tourist cruise on the Huangpu River. This offered our first real view of the classic old Bund waterfront and the new forest of futuristic skyscrapers across the river in Pudong (more specifically, Lujuazui, the proper name for the development zone of these mainly financial skyscrapers — I never heard it referred to by this name, only as Pudong). Pudong had been an area of grimy industrial wharves and warehouses in the 1980s; there had never been a reason or even a convenient way to cross the river in those earlier days. Old Shanghai and the foreign concessions were entirely built on the west side of the Huangpu. It was astonishing to see this futurescape overshadowing the old colonial buildings of the Bund, a visible metaphor of the new powerhouse of China rising: a true 21st century city. Imagine building a new midtown Manhattan in 20 years. Actually, China replicated this feat in dozens of cities over these same decades — we had seen evidence in Beijing and Xian — catapulting the nation forward and raising the living standards of hundreds of millions of people, but Shanghai was the most visible and leading example.
The Huangpu looked mighty different back in 1982 when I last took a boat tour.
As our tour got started, a barge with a large billboard came floating into view. When the billboard shifted into a Budweiser advertisement it dawned on me that this was a floating video screen, as large as anything I’d seen in a baseball stadium in the states. Our tour boat had to maneuver around this advertising display, bringing us right alongside the barge. The whole sequence was an odd juxtaposition of commerce, technology and nobody quite knowing what was going on that accentuated the mixed messages I was already getting from Shanghai.
My attention alternated from trying to identify recognizable buildings along the Bund that I’d explored in 1982 to craning my neck at the new Pudong skyscrapers. The skyscrapers screamed loudest for attention, especially the Oriental Pearl Tower, a TV tower with observation decks that looked like pearl onions skewered on a set of toothpicks. Behind the Pearl Tower rose the new Shanghai World Financial Center, about to open as China’s tallest building; it looked rather like a sleek oversize bottle opener. Further downstream, we passed under the impressive Yangpu Bridge built in 1993 and by the crenelated Yangshupu Waterworks built in 1883.
was nearing completion as China’s tallest building
The tour boat took us past some buildings they said were for the upcoming Expo 2010, a world’s fair of sorts that would draw more than 70 million visitors to Shanghai in the coming year. They may have been, but it was not the main site for the Expo which was further upstream and included a whole set of impressive new exhibition halls (but we didn’t actually see them). Further investigation leads me to believe this is the Yifang Building complex, part of the International Cruise Terminal which opened in 2011, one of three cruise ports for Shanghai.
It turned out that lots of construction all over the city was underway getting Shanghai ready for the Expo, including a major renovation of the public waterfront park along the Bund. It was unfortunate the waterside park was closed because it was one of the most popular places for strolling and people watching in the city.
As we came back upstream toward the dock, it was easier to pay attention to the older buildings on the Bund. On my few days off in 1982 I enjoyed trying to identify which building belonged to whom in Shanghai’s pre-revolutionary heyday. Now it’s easy to find complete listings on the internet but at that time it took a bit of detective work to identify the pre-war owners and purpose of the buildings. I was working mostly from memory while we were there in 2009, but I immediately recognized the Peace Hotel (under a shroud of scaffolding), the Bank of China building and the original Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation (HSBC) building.
After the boat tour we walked down the Bund as best we could, though there was virtually no sidewalk since the riverside promenade was closed for renovation. We made our way to the Peace Hotel. I was eager to see what had become of one of my favorite haunts in Shanghai in 1982. This hotel housed the famous Old Jazz Band, one of the delights of my time there, and several good restaurants. Sadly, the hotel was also closed for extensive renovations, so we had no luck reliving those memories.
We turned our attention toward Nanjing Road, the Main Street of Shanghai that had once again become a vibrant shopping street, the 5th Avenue of China. We plunged down the road which had been transformed since my time there in the 1980s. What had been a drab, utilitarian shopping area of Communist Party approved goods was now a bustling, neon lit celebration of Chinese and Western brand names and advertising. Western consumerism and commercialism had won the war for Chinese hearts and minds, at least in this corner of Shanghai.
We kept seeing the blue Expo 2010 mascot on signs and eventually came across a full statue so it was time for a photo op.
As we walked past the Shisheido store, Allie and Sydney were roped into getting a free makeup session. We thought it might be a cute diversion for a few minutes. As it turned out, the sessions took the better part of 30 minutes with both girls getting a full treatment of foundation, rouge, eyeliners, eye shadow and more stuff than I knew about. When they were finally finished, both girls looked nice but we are of the opinion that Allie looks better with less makeup.
While we were waiting for the girls and their makeup session, a TV reporter and cameraman came by to cover the breaking story of the waste of air conditioning by stores that kept their front door open. We watched as they interviewed various tourists and then asked Miss Faith for her opinion. The next morning, her interview popped up on the local English channel TV news. Instant celebrity!
By the late afternoon we’d had our fill of Nanjing Road window shopping so we made our way over to the Shanghai Museum, dedicated to ancient Chinese arts. The girls liked the set of modern animal sculptures out front. Another photo op! Inside, we enjoyed the exhibits and especially the air conditioning for an hour or two. I was pleased to stumble across the Kadoorie Gallery of Chinese Minority Nationalities Art focusing on the art of China’s more than 50 non-Han minorities.
We headed back to the hotel for a little rest before the evening’s activities. I took these photos of the street scene near the hotel to show the elevated highways that have been build over much of Shanghai. It was an interesting way to reduce the number of automobiles at street level and mostly successful. It was certainly better than Beijing’s nest of concentric ring roads.
That evening, Rick procured tickets to a performance of the Shanghai Acrobatic Troupe. As always, the performers put on a amazing show of skills. At the end, they invited a few audience members up to participate, including our budding star, Sydney. She was born for the limelight.
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