Day 27 - Monday, Nov. 11 - Guilin to Shanghai

Guilin by night

Le onze novembre.  Nov. 11.  A date full of meaning for the French.  The day of Armistice, the end of World War I, which killed so many of France’s young men - almost an entire generation - turned fiancées into widows and left children stunted from hunger... and often orphans.  I’m probably the only person in this group who thinks of this today, because of all my years in France which suffered so horribly.  A whole generation of men, gone.

Puxi (foreground) on Pu River

Pudong (on right) on Pu River

       No wake-up call this morning.  A luxury.  The construction workers next door are already on the job after working until five yesterday afternoon, a Sunday.  Us?  We’re off to the airport, saying good bye to our guide Sonny.
       The road to the airport is definitely not the scenic route.  We drive past dumps, huge abandoned oil drums heaped in piles, an old car with no tires and blankets hanging out the absent windows, marks of a homeless person’s home elsewhere, but here...?  After a turn in the road, hills planted with citrus trees, except for one that’s being quarried.  Finally past the old air terminal, shut but still standing, and on to the new one made of shiny, wavy metal.
       Two hours later, we’re in Shanghai, a name which means “going to the ocean”.  And we have.  Once a fishing village, the Nanking Treaty turned it into one of the five trade centers opened for commerce with China.  The one in the middle of the coast.  Its geography meant it was perfect for shipping both north and south.  Being on the Yangtze made it perfect for shipping west.  Stanley says it was the land of fish and rice, like the land of milk and honey.  A land of cotton, seafood and mulberry trees for making silk... once upon a time.
       The Treaty created concessions within the city:  British, French, and American, where no Chinese were allowed.  Missionaries were permitted to proselytize, build churches.  The old Chinese society had been a closed one that didn’t evolve.  Change came from this rubbing shoulders with the outside world, its democracy, its equality and other foreign ideas.  Part of China welcomed change.  Most of the Chinese reformers came from these concessions.  From 1845 to 1945 Shanghai was an open city.
       If Xian was China’s glorious past, Shanghai is its future.

The Bund

The city is crisscrossed with canals.  Those canals, plus long, humid summers and the silt carried downstream, make everything grow, including the rice fields we pass.  Halfway to town are individual houses, or should I say mansions, with lots of trees.  Shanghai is a bit of the West transplanted in the East.  Even downtown there are trees.
       The Pu River (actually the Huangpu), a tributary of the Yangtze River, cuts through the city, dividing it into two districts:  modernistic Puxi ("west of Pu") and Pudong (“east of Pu”), the traditional city center where the impressive Bund avenue, the glory of the 1920's, runs and where we will be staying.
       First we stop in Pudong, a Manhattan on steroids, a breeding place of skyscrapers that didn’t exist 20 or even 10 years ago.  Here lay rice fields until 1980.  Our local guide Kelly - or Pingping (“peaceful”) - has our bus driver stop at the corner of the city’s three tallest buildings.  We’ll be going to the top of the tallest one, the Shanghai Tower, to view the sunset.  Built in five years, it’s 120 stories tall, second only worldwide to a skyscraper in Dubai.  Yet the elevator takes a mere 55 seconds to the top!  Below us spreads China’s second largest city, at 25 million, including many expats, especially from Japan and Korea.  After all, Shanghai is the financial center of China.  A real estate investment can bring you profits of five to eight times your initial stake.
       (Here Kelly tells us a story.  Parents used to give their daughters - Shanghai prefers girls - three things:  a watch, a bike and a sewing machine.  Now they give an apartment, a car with license plates and a credit card.  Side-note: a two-bedroom costs a million dollars - double in the center of town - and a Shanghai license plate costs $15,000... other plates do not allow you to drive on the city's fast roads.)
       After an only slightly slower ride back down, we go for a dinner of Cantonese cuisine - everything from hot and sour soup to glazed duck to shrimp and more, right to the announcement of dinner’s traditional end:  watermelon.  Full to the gills once again, our bus takes us to the Fairmont Peace Hotel, an Art Deco gem between the riverside Bund and the Nanjing Road, a shopping mecca.  Kathy, Becky, Lisa and I head up to the 9th floor for a drink and the view of the skyline on the opposite bank, including the pink pearl architecture of the city’s first skyscraper, the Oriental Pearl TV Tower built in 1994.
       Pondering the differentness that is Shanghai, it’s off to bed.  Tomorrow is our last full day in China.

Shanghai by night