Old Shanghai New Shanghai

Sorry for lack of postings - things are busy here, both in good ways and bad. Anyway, in the course of my busy-ness last week I finally got to visit East Nanjing Road (main shopping street) at night - THIS is what I expected Asia to look like before I arrived. Perhaps because of vague childhood memories of a holiday in Hong Kong.

Pretty street signs

 

 

 

 

Finally spotted a branch of Clio Coddle, the most hilarious of Shanghai's Lacoste ripoffs - yes, it's "crocodile" as said in a Chinese accent.. awkward.

Baby sharks in a tank. On the side of the road. Just coz.

OK, as an added bonus, since I've been so slack lately, here's a glimpse of East Nanjing Road in the 1930s, when it was Bubbling Well Road, the main street in the British concession.

Pretty cool huh? This is a scale model in the impressive Shanghai History Museum.

Let's go even further back, to the late 1800s... maybe 1860s, can't remember exactly, sorry! Shanghai's history is fascinating, and I'm glad I read up on it before I came because there are still so many historical buildings standing, it's easy to wander about and imagine the city in times past.

The whole museum was set up like old Shanghai streets.

 

Creepy waxwork prostitute!

Creepy waxwork opium den! But: modern Shanghai was built on opium. The British wanted to trade with China in the mid-1800s but the Chinese weren't bothered, didn't need anything from outside their borders. So the lovely British sent in some gunships and killed some people (the Opium wars) and forced five ports to open to British trade (Treaty of Nanking), the most important being Shanghai. And what did they sell? Opium from British India and Afghanistan. Hundreds of thousands of Chinese people were soon addicts. Ka-ching! Then other European countries went 'not fair! we want to trade with China too!' Hence Shanghai's French Concession, American Concession etc.

Understandably passive-aggressive explanatory signs, eg: "The past prosperity of Shanghai has both dazzling brilliance worth parading and bitterness difficult to tell. The reason for our looking for the past traces of Shanghai now is to know the yesterday, think today and supr [spur?] on ourselves tomorrow rather than to have a nostalgia for the past prosperity." Other signs talked a lot about foreign invasion and constant anguish and shame when European-style buildings went up - fair enough I suppose, but I'm glad they did - the European-style areas are some of Shanghai's prettiest.