Red hot Shanghai

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This was published 13 years ago

Red hot Shanghai

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From a department-store liaison to a rooftop martini, the World Expo 2010 city has it all, writes Robert Upe.

I met her in Shanghai. It was a chance encounter in a department store in a megalopolis of 20 million people. She had long black hair, a straight-cut fringe and long legs with pink drainpipe slacks. I paid 249 yuan ($39) to take her home, perhaps a week's pay for a Shanghainese labourer. Shanghai Barbie is a fad item at the $44 million, six-storey Barbie emporium on Huai-hai Road and, like so many others, I had to have her.

This superstore is the biggest in the world dedicated to the all-American doll and her handsome companion, Ken. The store is glitzy and modern and a symbol that Shanghai has well and truly embraced Western ways, right down to the Ken burgers that sizzle in the cafe.

On the waterfront ... Shanghai's new financial district skyline along the Huang Pu river.

On the waterfront ... Shanghai's new financial district skyline along the Huang Pu river.Credit: AFP

Just as rosy cheeks and big smiles greet you at the Barbie store, Shanghai is putting on its best face for World Expo 2010, which starts in the city today and is expected to draw 70 million people by the time it closes on October 31.

Conde Nast Traveller calls the expo a ''coming out'' party and Australian restaurateur and Shanghai identity, Michelle Garnaut, says the city has its mojo back.

''I feel Shanghai has been in the doldrums for years but people are coming out again and there is a real buzz after all the construction,'' says Garnaut, who opened the now-lauded M on the Bund restaurant a decade ago.

Lonely Planet says Shanghai has ''projects and ideas exploding like oil in a hot wok''.

The filling of Shanghai's skyline with modern skyscrapers has been rapid and relentless, with some estimates that more than 4000 buildings have gone up in the past two decades.

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World Expo 2010 has fuelled further construction, with Shanghai spending $US45 billion ($48.5 billion) on the event and associated city improvements on parks, gardens, street upgrades and new bridges and train lines.

One local whispers that buildings on the main roads, which expo visitors will use, also have been spruced up and painted but only on the street front. At the sides and at the back, they are said to be as shabby as ever.

Despite such allegations of slapdash patch-ups, the city is probably in the best shape ever and the expo site is impressive.

Expo will take place in a 5.28-square-kilometre precinct, with more than 180 countries exhibiting in elaborate architect-designed pavilions. A lot of the energy of expo is directed at corporate clientele, with countries trying to entice business visitors, but there's also a lot for everyday travellers, with daily shows, parades, food samplings and musical and dance events.

The Danish are throwing everything into the event, including the Little Mermaid, a bronze statue that has stood at the entrance to Copenhagen Harbour since 1913.

Australia's $54 million curved three-storey pavilion has been built of steel and copper and will change colour as it weathers during expo to reflect the hues of the outback. The pavilion is expected to host 40,000 people a day.

But, naturally, it is the host country's red pavilion - which looks a little like a rice bowl - that has attracted most attention. The 1.5 billion-yuan structure is 63 metres high, three times the height of any other.

Even the Bund, the city's most famous streetscape, has not escaped the jackhammers in preparation for the event. It has just reopened in time for expo with an elevated pedestrian promenade next to the mighty Huangpu River, which provides a daily and fascinating parade of barges, cargo ships, tourist boats and cruise ships visiting during round-the-world voyages.

Look east from the promenade and across the river and you see Shanghai's Pudong commercial zone with gleaming high-rises, including the iconic Oriental Pearl Tower, with several observation levels, and the 492-metre Shanghai World Financial Centre, which looks like a bottle opener and is the tallest building in China. Twenty years ago most of Pudong was a fishing village.

Look west from the promenade and you see a line-up of glorious lower-rise European buildings in a mishmash of styles from art deco to gothic, Romanesque and baroque. Many of these buildings along the Bund are from the 1920s and '30s when foreign financial firms and banks built their headquarters there. That was a time when gangsters roamed the streets and vice was rife.

Today the Bund is a busy strip of trendy restaurants, bars and apartments in these rejuvenated buildings and rooftops, where you can drink lychee martinis or lunch on exotics such as peppercorn frogs legs - or the best pavlova in China at M - while red Chinese flags with yellow stars flutter from rooftop poles.

The Peace Hotel, built in the 1920s, has been a centrepiece of the Bund and an art-deco masterpiece. It, too, has just reopened after a three-year renovation in time for expo but it is the hotel's history that is compelling.

Charlie Chaplin was a guest at the hotel, so too Noel Coward, who wrote Private Lives while staying there. The Gang of Four, a political faction that included Mao Zedong's last wife, used the hotel as a base during the Cultural Revolution, which choked Shanghai and the rest of China of economic, intellectual and artistic progress in the 1960s and 1970s.

Garnaut recalls the Bund before it was fashionable. She says when she first arrived in Shanghai in 1985 the Bund was a wasteland of grand and dusty European buildings, either abandoned or used by government departments that forbade public access to the rooftop views over the city and river.

Garnaut - who organises Shanghai's annual writers' festival - says Shanghai has matured in many ways, not just physically.

''There's been progress in every sense - from artistic to intellectual,'' she says. ''When I first arrived here the place was a ghost town. It had been asleep for 80 years.

''I had to ride a bike everywhere because there were few taxis and the light bulbs were 20 watts and hardly provided any light. But now we have had 100 years of progress in 20 years and I think we are in for a real revival.''

The Australian consulate general to Shanghai, Tom Connor, says the city is cosmopolitan and has been open to foreign influence for more than a century. ''It is the mixture of cultures that sets the place apart from most of the other large centres in modern China,'' he says.

But there are always reminders that this freewheeling city is under the rule of authoritarian masters.

Rio Tinto executive Stern Hu's recent trial in Shanghai was conducted partly in ''secret'', there is no Facebook access, there is a one-child policy for families and ageing rocker Bob Dylan was banned from performing in the city just weeks ago. Some newspaper reports said Dylan was banned because of a general crackdown on musicians from an incident two years ago when Bjork angered Shanghai authorities during a concert by shouting out ''Tibet, Tibet''. The cultural ministry said the outburst had ''hurt the feelings of the Chinese people''.

Despite its flirtations with the West, Shanghai maintains a Chinese charm. An early morning TV program demonstrates kung fu moves such as the ''high pat the horse'', men push carts and ride bikes laden with mysterious cargo wrapped in hessian along the busy and noisy roads, hawkers hustle everywhere and entice you down out-of-the-way laneways to sell fake watches and handbags, and we eat jellyfish in soya sauce. My preference, though, is for Shanghai ''soup'' dumplings sampled at one of the city's feted dumpling houses, the Lubolang Restaurant at the popular tourist area of Yuyuan gardens and bazaar.

Steaming hot and usually made with pork, they are served from small bamboo baskets and on first bite they squirt delicious broth into your mouth. Get it wrong and you'll have a burnt mouth and broth on your shirt but wait a moment for the heat to go and envelop the dumpling in your mouth and it is one of the simple delights of a city about to let its hair down, Barbie dolls and all.

Robert Upe travelled courtesy of Accor hotel group and Qantas.

FAST FACTS

Getting there

Qantas has a fare to Shanghai for about $1180, including tax, flying from Sydney. Melbourne passengers fly to Sydney to connect. The Maglev (magnetic levitation) train travels at more than 400km/h and gets you from airport to Pudong in less than eight minutes. A one-way ticket costs 50 yuan ($7.90).

Staying there

Qantas and the Pullman Shanghai Skyway hotel have a four-night package that includes airfare, accommodation in a superior room, daily breakfast and airport-hotel transfers from $1524 a person twin share from Sydney and $1675 from Melbourne. The 52-storey five-star hotel is handy to the expo site (eight minutes by taxi). Must be booked by May 31, valid for travel June 1-24. See www.qantas.com/holidays.

Expo 2010

From May 1 to October 31. Single-day admission is 160 yuan but many other ticket options are available. See www.expo2010.cn/expo/expoenglish; www.australianpavilion.com; www.expo.cn.

Sightseeing there

Barbie Shanghai, 550 Central Hauihai Road. Six storeys of Barbie merchandise and activities where children can design and outfit their own Barbie doll, dress up and be a supermodel on the fashion runway and eat in the Barbie cafe. See www.barbieshanghai.com.

Xintiandi, a popular tourist precinct of restored shikumen houses that are now restaurants, bars and shops. Shikumen houses were the main style of architecture in old Shanghai. A good example, complete with furnished rooms characteristic of the 1920s, can be seen at Shikumen Open House Museum No. 25, Lane 181, Taicang Road. Open 11am-11pm.

Tianzifang, Lane 210, Taikang Road. Lane factories of the 1950s have been converted into a creative zone where artists work and sell their wares. There are galleries, boutiques, cafes and shops selling authentic Chinese trinkets and collectables.

Eating there

M on the Bund, No. 5 the Bund, see www.m-restaurantgroup.com. Also try The Glamour Bar downstairs.

Reading

Life and Death in Shanghai, Nien Cheng's account of victimisation and imprisonment during the Cultural Revolution led by Mao Zedong.

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