City of sin and decadent exoticism in the 1920s and 30s, theatre of vicious conflict during wartime and Japanese invasions, cradle of Chinese Communism but neglected during the Cultural Revolution, flag bearer of modern China’s market reforms, inspiration for lurid novels, films and cocktails – Shanghai is probably the most evocative city for an outsider in the whole of China. Beijing may be more mysterious but Shanghai offers a headier brew of half-digested, semi-mythical images and preconceptions.
For the second city of the world’s oldest surviving ancient civilisation, Shanghai is surprisingly new. Literally ‘Above the Sea’, Shanghai is a port city on the Huangpu River, where the Yangtze River empties into the East China Sea.
The area was marshland until the Song Dynasty (AD 960-1126), when refugees from the Mongols and other northern nomad invaders settled the area. By 1291, Shanghai had become a county capital. The growing city got its wall in 1553 (prophetically, against Japanese pirates) and a customs house in 1685. Shanghai was only thrust into the spotlight in June 1842, when a British seaborne force captured it during the First Opium War.
One of five cities pried open to Western colonial trade by the Treaty of Nanjing, Shanghai gained foreign districts controlled by the colonial powers – the British and American Concessions (soon combined as the International Settlement) and the French Concession. This hybrid city boomed as the focus of Chinese colonial trade and Qing Dynasty China uneasily coexisted with Western power for almost a century.
Today, the Yu Gardens in Shanghai’s Old Town is all that remains of the city’s pre-colonial past. Colonialism is visible in the period architecture of the former French Concession, as well as the grand old buildings along the river-front Bund and dotted around People’s Square.
Across the river from the original settlement of Puxi is Shanghai’s future, the Pudong New Area, with its emblematic Orient Pearl Tower, soaring modern art-deco JinMao Tower and, topping the lot from 2008, the 101-floor World Financial Centre, featuring a new Park Hyatt hotel.
By 1937, Shanghai was the world’s fifth largest city and China’s most advanced, home to a rich ethnic mix of East and West and protected by its colonial status from the political storms ravaging the rest of China. In August that year, bombs (actually Chinese) fell on the foreign concessions for the first time.
The Westerners began pulling out and by the start of the Pacific War in 1941, there were few Western nationals left for the Japanese to intern. The British and Americans gave up their colonial rights in 1943, to their new allies, the Nationalist Chinese, who took over Shanghai after the Japanese surrender in 1945. However, four years later, the city again fell to the Red Army.
Under the Communists, Shanghai’s businesses were nationalised and the city fell out of favour with the political elite until the Cultural Revolution, when Mao Zedong made it the new power base for his ‘Gang of Four’ and his campaign against the Beijing leadership. Shanghai remained a centre for Cultural Revolution excesses until Mao’s death in 1976. Reconstruction proceeded slowly afterwards.
But, once Deng Xiaoping unleashed the forces of capitalism in the late 1980s, Shanghai took its chance. Supported by the government as the ‘dragon’s head’ of China’s economic development, Shanghai has expanded at breakneck speed, experiencing massive-scale investment and urban regeneration and an economic renaissance assisted by China’s accession to the World Trade Organisation in 2001.
In 2004, Shanghai hosted the inaugural Chinese Grand Prix and later that year Time magazine called it the ‘world’s most happening city.’ In October 2007, it will host the first Special Olympic Games held in Asia and centre-stage status will follow, in 2010, when Shanghai hosts World Expo.
Easily China’s richest city, Shanghai is now a blueprint for the country, one that developing cities across the country seek enviously to emulate - replete with hundreds of futuristic skyscrapers, glitzy restaurants, bars, hotels and levels of urban affluence, brand awareness and shopping savvy that compete with rival Asian cities such as Hong Kong, Singapore and Bangkok.
Shanghai experiences climatic extremes, with bitter winters and hot and humid summers. The best time for visitors to plan a trip to the city would be during the autumn or spring months.