Updated Shanghai ready to welcome the world
Updated Shanghai ready to welcome the world
Updated Shanghai ready to welcome the world
Walking beneath Gordian-knot tangles of drooping overhead wires, past apartment Embroidered Fabricwindows#x draped with laundry, I enter a 1920s building and wedge myself into a tiny elevator. Seconds later, I emerge into the hidden elegance of M on the Bund restaurant and its aptly named Glamour Bar.
As I savor a Moroccan lunch,hats, big yellow construction cranes hover on the horizon. From the lip of the restaurant's terrace, I watch as workers toil on a torn-up road running along the river's edge - the famous Bund.
Until relatively recently, this city of 18 million people was - how to say this? - really dull. On my first visit in the mid-1990s, Shanghai still wore a dreary mantle of neglect from the hard-core communist years that followed the revolution of 1949.Embroidered Fabric When I ducked inside the Peace Hotel, an octogenarian jazz band was tootling along - endearing but hardly energetic or innovative. Fine particles of dust seemed to cover everything, and the famous hotel (originally the Cathay) seemed enveloped in gloom, like the city.
Since then, however, Shanghai has moved quickly to reclaim its pre-1949 role as China's financial, mercantile and fashion capital - and its capital of cool.
My most recent visit is my third to this churning, dynamic city in the past two years. I begin at the Bund, a curving riverside boulevard dating to the 1840s and lined with marble- and granite-clad buildings put up when Western powers ran semiautonomous zones, called concessions. In recent months, the Bund's usually thronged pedestrian promenade has been rebuilt and the roadway ripped up to funnel traffic#xunderEmbroidered Fabric the surface to the Shanghai World Expo 2010 grounds.
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