Shanghai from street level

All roads lead to Shanghai these days, as the city just south of the mouth of the great Chang Jiang or Yangtze River (the third longest in the world) has become the destination du jour for Filipino travelers wary of trans-Pacific travel. With Philippine Airlines’ five times a week direct flight between Manila and Shanghai, it’s an easy three-hour hop to shopping paradise and the pleasures of what used to be known as the Paris of the Orient, now China’s most dynamic city.

A standard tour will take you to the YuYuan Gardens, a lovely maze if you can tear yourself away from shopping at its labyrinthine bazaar where everything from antiques (real, real-fakes and downright tacky) to champoy, deer horn and other herbal potions to clothing, bags and shoes can be had for as good a price as you can bargain. Smack in the middle of it all, on a bustling corner, is the Lu Bo Lang Restaurant, which boasts of having served Queen Elizabeth, former US President Bill Clinton and a host of other VIPs. The food is pretty good, but pricey (try shark’s fin soup in an earthen pot for 2,000 yuan).

It’s almost criminal if you’re a Pinoy tourist and you don’t go to the Xiang Yang Market, the mother of all tiangges, haggling heaven for the consumate Pinoy shopper. Designer shopping gets glitzy along Huai Hai Zhong Lu and Nanjing Xi Lu, where the world’s fashion houses have set up shop. The Jade Buddha Temple in the Pu Tuo District is also a usual stop, and if it’s any encouragement a couple we traveled with who had been childless for over seven years found themselves proud parents within a year of burning incense and kowtowing before the images at this temple. Of course, they also spent a tidy fortune on herbal medication towards the same goal.

The Shanghai Grand Theater (also called the People’s Opera House, which last year hosted six different productions of Swan Lake) and the Shanghai Museum in People’s Park are not always included in the tourist itinerary, which is a pity because these are impressive structures that give the city greater dimension. The museum houses excellent collections of Chinese art, and one local designer swears by the museum’s gift shop. The old home of Madame Sun Yat Sen, a.k.a. Soong Ching Ling (one of the famous Soong sisters, the one who married "for love of country"), is certainly worth a visit as well.

But there is a lot more to Shanghai, as I happily discovered on my recent Rajah Travel-organized tour, than these regular tourist sites. Lucky for me my friends Wesley and Sharon Pantoja, who work at the Shanghai Amercian School, managed a half-day off to take me around the city that has been their home for the last five years. With Wes’ fluent pu tong hwa and sense of adventure, I saw wonderfully more of Shanghai than clothing markets.

Shanghai’s recorded history dates from around 900 AD, but the city boomed after the Treaty of Nanjing forged after the Opium War of 1839-42 opened it to foreign trade. The many concessions granted to foreigners–such as the establishment of International Settlements (the British in 1843, the French in 1848 and the American in 1849) wherein residents enjoyed immunity from local laws–polarized the city and radicalized the local population, which organized the first major trade union (in 1919) and the first Communist Party of China (in 1921).

Today, more than a quarter of China’s foreign trade passes through Shanghai. Admin-istered directly by the central government (Chinese President Jiang Zemin used to be Shanghai’s mayor, as was Premier Zu Rongji), it is one of the world’s most crowded urban areas. Over half of metropolitan Shanghai’s popula-tion of over 13 million (3.5 million of them transient, who come in from the rural areas in search of work) live in the city proper–which occupies only two percent of its land area–along with about 70 percent of Shanghai’s industry.

It is said that a building over ten storeys tall rises in Pudong every 12 days. Pudong (or east of the Huangpu River), that miraculous 522 sq. kilometer development started in 1990, boasts of towers of steel, glass and concrete that vie for a place among the world’s tallest. Many of these are western-style condominium residences, but most locals still seem to prefer living in low-rise apartments in Puxi (or west of the Huangpu), the old and still central part of town, purchased as one of the benefits of working for the government. These elevator-less six-storey buildings (by some unwritten code, only buildings of seven or more storeys have elevators) feature standard size apartments of 50 to 60 sq. meters, with units on the third and fourth floors the most coveted (Shanghai’s heavy rainfall makes the first two floors damp, while the top two floors can be a strenuous climb). While the rage a decade or two ago was having the "Ba da dian" (eight major home appliances), today it’s computers, cellphones and VCDs–and most Shanghai homes have got them all.

What is nostalgically known as "old Shanghai" is fast becoming–literally–a thing of the past, as "new" and "development" have become the catch phrases of prosperity. The old bird and flower market on Jiang Yin Lu was recently closed , its sellers relocated to an indoor market near the Yu Yuan Gardens; regulars say it’s hardly the same. The haberdashery and fabric sellers along Renmin Lu are likewise being moved to indoor malls. The Dongtai area is thankfully still intact; there is an interesting pet market where you can buy a fighting cricket for 10 or 20 yuan. Cats are crammed six to a cage, tubs full of squirming worms are ready for scooping as fish feed and, if you look closely enough, you may find a giant rooster and pigeons as large as ducks. The nearby antique market is a collector’s dream come true, where a diligent search can yeild great finds–from Mao watches and caps to water jugs and bird cages, and all the porcelain you can ever want. Prices though are inflated beyond your wildest imagination: I paid 40 yuan for an "antique" Chinese combination lock, down from the original price of 200 yuan, and I might even have been ripped off!

"Old" and "new" together are batting for a successful mix at Xintiandi (literally, "new heaven and earth"), an area of rebuilt and renovated old houses that is now a trendy, up-market hub of pubs, clubs and boutiques. There are Jacky Chan’s take on Planet Hollywood called Star East, as pricey as it is trendy; the Shanghai Colors boutique that takes the Shanghai Tang formula a step further and the Xintiandi Club where a uniformed non-English speaking doorman will pull out a card that tells non-members, in so many polite words, that they’re not welcome.

In making our way from Dongtai to Xintiandi, we wandered through a maze of small streets, lined with old stone houses where heating seemed to come from coal or wood stoves. Old ladies in drab gray or black amah-suits sat on wooden beds with one leg up as they have for eons; chopsticks clinked on bowls as families gathered for dinner. We happened upon the Ci Xiu Temple, home to 30-odd nuns, two of whom we encountered in the temple courtyard in a spirited game of badminton. The sign outside the wooden temple door warned against exploding firecrackers in the vicinity.

Along the way we encountered sidewalk food stalls, cooking up a host of enticing dishes; a whole block of funerary stores with everything you may need or want in the afterlife; and a three-man crew loading a buddha and two life-size bronze lions onto a truck, a triumph of ingenuity and brute strength.

It is all these layers of the city–from tourist brochure pretty to downright homey–that make Shanghai such a fascinating and vibrant place. These sights may not be included in the three-day tourist’s itinerary, but it should be enough reason to plan a trip back.