Nothing so vividly symbolises modern China than a night out on the Bund – the sparkling Shanghai waterfront where the imperialist, British-built hotels, banks and Custom House look out at the soaring skyscrapers of Pudong across the Huangpu river.
At 10.59pm, the night sky still dances to a spectacular 360-degree neon light show across 100 buildings, celebrating the startling technical and financial power of the new China. In opulent rooftop bars the trendily dressed entrepreneurial glitterati – prime beneficiaries of socialism with Chinese characteristics – sip expensive cocktails.
On the dot of 11pm the lights go off, as if a single switch has been pulled. And the Metro – the world’s largest, naturally – closes. The authorities have decided that it is bedtime.
Anyone who questions the notion that the 21st Century will be the century of China must first visit this powder-keg city of vibrant, rampant free enterprise.
Shanghai, China’s New York (with Beijing its Washington DC), is the youthful business capital of a 5,000-year-old culture, built to be the place where East meets West.
During what the Chinese now describe as ‘the years of humiliation’, opium-touting British merchants from Jardine Matheson developed Shanghai as an interface with the ailing Qing dynasty. There, after two opium wars in the mid-1800s, they consolidated Western power by creating the International Settlement and French Concession districts, where local Chinese were treated as second-class citizens.
Today, after being the world’s most severe Covid lockdown, the city is opening up again to tourism. Our Virgin Atlantic flight was filled to the gills and the airline is now operating a daily service at near capacity.
Our small group was knocked sideways by what we found. It began with the understated luxury of the Puli Hotel, a sophisticated, designer sanctuary away from the bustle on the streets, populated by executives and Chinese digital natives in unstructured linen suits. A hotel to rival, if not surpass, anything New York, Paris or Milan can offer.
Outside, the crowded avenues were spotless, the pavements and even some motorways decorated with borders of blooming flowers, lawn verges or stands of well-ordered bamboo woods. In four days, the most litter I saw was a single cigarette butt.
Everything seemed as prinked, clean and safe as a Volvo advert. Even in the low-rise French Concession district – boulevards shaded with the sycamores one might find in a French Provencal town, planted by the old colonialists – redevelopment was tasteful and respectful of the past. The old Art Deco French club is now a Japanese-owned hotel. And in Tianzifang, a labyrinth of 1930s brick workshops has been charmingly refurbished as specialist boutiques, selling everything from razor-sharp kitchen knives to silk scarves and high-end teas. On our second day, we went to Zhujiajiao, once a 400-year-old ‘water-town’, built on a network of canals that feed off the tributaries to the Yangtze river.
This was the old China of our imaginations – a maze of willow-pattern streets, merchants’ palaces, magical temples and tranquil water gardens; full of Zen sculptures, bonzai trees and languid carp. Its narrow alleys were thronged by Chinese tourists, browsing shops selling exotic herbal remedies, unspeakable-looking meats and, sadly, still chirruping crickets, trapped in tiny bamboo cages.
We found the same in Shanghai’s Old Town, where 17th Century tea houses – with dragons on their roofs to ward off demons – hosted crowds of gawping onlookers.
History was also nearby in the spectacular Yu Gardens, spoiled only by posing Instagrammers and that plinky-plonky music pumped out over speakers. So what’s not to like?
Well, that’s where it becomes complicated. In a curious way, it is not the presence of things, it’s the absence of them that at first is a pleasure but then becomes a source of mild anxiety. For modern China perhaps mostly differs – on the surface, at least – from its pre-war past in its deep affluence and profound, almost unnatural, sense of order.
The louche bar girl for which Shanghai was known in the 1930s is now a remote, untouchable Chanel model. There is more begging in London.