外滩和陆家嘴 Wàitān hé Lùjiāzuǐ — The Bund and Lujiazui

One river, thirty years, and the argument about what a city is for

The view in this dialogue is the most photographed in China, and it is doing something specific: it puts two versions of the country on opposite banks of the same water, about five hundred metres apart, and invites you to compare them. That is why the lesson's grammar is comparison. Behind them, the Bund — 外滩 — is a row of about twenty buildings put up mostly between 1900 and 1937: banks, trading houses, a customs house with a clock, the Peace Hotel. They were built by and for the foreign concessions, in a city where British, French, American and Japanese authorities governed their own districts and Chinese residents lived under arrangements they had not chosen. The architecture is magnificent and its history is colonial, and modern Shanghai holds both of those facts at once without much visible strain — the buildings are restored, occupied by Chinese banks and luxury brands, and lit up every night. Across the water, Pudong — 浦东 — was farmland, warehouses and low housing until 1990, when it was designated a new development zone. Everything you can see from the Bund has been built since: the Oriental Pearl tower in 1994, Jin Mao in 1999, the World Financial Center in 2008, and the Shanghai Tower, 632 metres and the second tallest building in the world, in 2015. Shanghainese used to have a saying that they would rather have a bed in Puxi than a room in Pudong. Nobody says it now, and Pudong property is among the most expensive in China. What people actually argue about, if you ask, is not which side is prettier. It is whether the speed was worth what it cost: the lane housing of lesson 57 that came down to make room, the relocation of a great many households to the outer ring, and the question of whether a district of towers can ever become a neighbourhood in the way a 弄堂 was one. You will hear that put both ways with equal conviction, often by the same person on different days, and the honest answer is that Shanghai has done something that has never been done at that speed before and nobody yet knows how it ends. Two practical notes. The Bund is free, open, and at its best either at dusk, when both the old façades and the new towers are lit, or at six in the morning, when it belongs to people doing tai chi and the light is better for photographs. And the crowds are real: on a weekend or a public holiday the promenade is shoulder to shoulder, mostly with Chinese visitors from other provinces rather than foreigners — which is what 苏小雨 means by 排队拍照的大部分是外地人, and which is true of almost every famous sight in the country.