Reproduced with permission from China 11th Edition © Lonely Planet 2009” www.LonelyPlanet.com

As anyone who wanders along the Bund or through the backstreets of the former French Concession can see, Shànghǎi (the name means ‘by the sea’) is a Western invention. As the gateway to the Yangzi River (Cháng Jiāng), it was an ideal trading port. When the British opened their first concession in 1842,after the First Opium War, it was little more than a small town supported by fishing and weaving. The British changed all that.

The French followed in 1847, an International Settlement was established in 1863 and the Japanese arrived in 1895 – the city was parcelled up into autonomous settlements, immune from Chinese law. By 1853 Shànghǎi had overtaken all other Chinese ports. By the 1930s the city had 60,000 foreign residents and was the busiest international port in Asia.

Built on the trade of opium, silk and tea, the city also lured the world’s great houses of finance, which erected grand palaces of plenty. One of the most famous traders was Jardine Matheson & Company. In 1848 Jardine’s purchased the first land offered for sale to foreigners in Shànghǎi and grew into one of the great hongs (literally a business firm).

Shànghǎi also became a byword for exploitation and vice; its countless opium dens, gambling joints and brothels managed by gangs were at the heart of Shànghǎi life. Guarding it all were the American, French and Italian marines, British Tommies and Japanese bluejackets.

After Chiang Kaishek’s coup against the communists in 1927, the Kuomintang cooperated with the foreign police and the Shànghǎi gangs, and with Chinese and foreign factory owners, to suppress labour unrest. Exploited in workhouse conditions, crippled by hunger and poverty, sold into slavery, excluded from the high life and the parks created by the foreigners, the poor of Shànghǎi had a voracious appetite for radical opinion. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was formed here in 1921 and, after numerous setbacks, ‘liberated’ the city in 1949.

The communists eradicated the slums, rehabilitated the city’s hundreds of thousands of opium addicts, and eliminated child and slave labour. These were staggering achievements. Later, during the Cultural Revolution, the city was the power base of the so-called Gang of Four.

Shànghǎi’s long malaise came to an abrupt end in 1990, with the announcement of plans to develop Pǔdōng, on the eastern side of the Huangpu River. Lùjiāzuǐ, the area facing the Bund on the Pǔdōng side of the Huangpu, is a dazzlingly modern high-rise counterpoint to the austere, old-world structures on the Bund.

Shànghǎi’s burgeoning economy, its leadership and its intrinsic self-confidence have put it miles ahead of other cities in China. But perhaps alarmed by Shànghǎi’s economic supremacy, Běijīng has made attempts to curb the city’s influence. In March 2007, Xi Jinping was chosen as the new Shànghǎi Communist Party secretary after Chen Liangyu was dismissed from his post on corruption charges the previous year. The choice of Shaanxi-born Xi Jinping is seen by many as a victory for President Hu Jintao in replacing members of the Shanghai clique of ex-president Jiang Zemin with officials loyal to his tenure.

Despite the fanfare and its modernity, Shànghǎi is only nominally an international city; it simply cannot compare with the effortless cosmopolitanism of cities such as Kuala Lumpur. A recurring sense – deriving from China’s constant ambivalence regarding the outside world – pervades that the city’s internationalism is both awkward and affected, while a marked absence of creative energy can make this fast-changing city seem oddly parochial and inward-looking.

CLIMATE

“Reproduced with permission from China 11th Edition © Lonely Planet 2009” www.LonelyPlanet.com

Shànghǎi starts the year shivering in midwinter, when temperatures can drop below freezing, vistas are grey and misty, and the damp chill soaks into the bones. April to mid-May is probably one of the best times to visit weatherwise, along with autumn (late September to mid-November). Summer is the peak travel season but the hot and humid weather makes conditions outside uncomfortable, with temperatures sometimes as high as 40°C (104°F) in July and August. Watch out for sudden stingingly hot days at the tail end of summer, affectionately known as the Autumnal Tiger (Qiūlǎohǔ). In short, you’ll need silk long johns and down jackets
for winter, an ice block for each armpit in summer, and an umbrella wouldn’t go astray in either of these seasons.

LANGUAGE

Spoken by 13 million people, the Shanghainese dialect belongs to the Wu dialect, named after the kingdom of Wu in present-day Jiāngsū province. To Mandarin or Cantonese speakers, Shanghainese sounds odd, perhaps because it is a more archaic branch of Chinese.  Furthermore, the tonal system of Shànghǎihuà drastically differs from Mandarin and Cantonese and outsiders also detect a marked Japanese sound to the Shànghǎi dialect. Due to the increasing prevalence of Mandarin and the absence of a standard form of Shanghainese, the dialect is constantly changing and is quite different to how it was spoken a few generations ago.