I’m enchanted by Shanghai. I knew I would be impressed by the city, but it is truly mesmerizing. The skyline is like nothing I’ve ever seen. The towering skyscrapers are beyond compare. The word Shanghai brings to mind a lot of images – an exotic city, full of vice and somewhat dangerous. The Shanghai of today is a bustling metropolis like so many of China’s cities, but it has an unmistakable charm. It is geographically smaller than Beijing, but its population is around 25 million if you include the migrants who move to Shanghai from the countryside for work.
You can experience the last few hundred years of Chinese history by exploring Shanghai. There is the old section of the city, which reveals what Shanghai was like before the arrivals of the European merchants – a small fishing town near the Huang Pu River and not far from the Yangzi.
After the Opium Wars, the West rolled into area. As part of the Treaty of Nanjing, which ended the war, the British established their own “concessions” throughout China where they lived free of Chinese law. With the doors of China thrown open, the French and Americans established their own concessions. Seemingly overnight, the little town turned into a major trading port as the westerners made their forturns by trading in opium, silk, and tea. You see the mark the foreigners left in the posh European-style buildings that line the river, remnants of the days of neo-imperialism.
Shanghai also played a critical role in WWII. Even after the rest of the world closed its doors to Jewish refugees fleeing Europe, Shanghai accepted them. Refugees flooded into the city by boat and tried to start a new life in a country so completely different than what they knew back home. You can still visit their synagogue. However, they may have escaped the Germans, but not the Japanese. The Japanese had their eyes on China even before the start of the war, and they invaded Shanghai in 1937. Like those in Europe, the occupiers pushed the Jewish refugees of Shanghai into ghettos. The people knew they could lose their lives at any moment, but the Japanese ignored the wishes of Germany and did not establish concentration camps for the Jews.
By the late 1940s, WWII was over and the Communist Party held control. The party’s new economic policies transformed the area across from the Bund. Just in the past 10 years, the region now known as Pudong was demolished and transformed into a bustling district of business and commerce with the most elaborate skyline I have ever seen. We took a late night cruise along the Huang Pu and were hypnotized by the dazzling lights of the elaborate buildings.
Shanghai seems to have everything. It’s a bit of Paris, a bit of Manhattan, and a bit of China all in one city. I could even imagine myself living here, though I could never actually afford life in Shanghai.
