Smog hangs permanently over Shanghai, but as it is a police state the streets are always clean. Picture / Kenny Rodger

Smog hangs permanently over Shanghai, but as it is a police state the streets are always clean. Picture / Kenny Rodger

Lounging on a ruby nightclub sofa scattered with pillows, smoking apple-scented tobacco through a hookah, watching the girls of glossy black hair bewitching their Chinese boys; this is the perfect position to ponder the baffling metropolis of Shanghai.

In the warm midnight air of a bar called Barbarossa, the conversation is getting louder as exorbitant cocktails slide down jewelled throats. A bartender wearing a security earpiece listens quietly as someone asks for drugs, pauses a second, looks up, laughs out aloud, backs away.

Across the bar, a Belgian man with his forearm in plaster is talking about when the Armani boutique opened: "You should have seen all the rich Chinese with their pretty girlfriends buying leather jackets - but it's sad," he says, "Shanghai never used to be this hip, so hip it's starting to get annoying, you know what I mean?"

Hours later, going up in the hotel elevator, a sexy little thing in a small skirt and scuffed white heels stands beside her new businessman friend. He must be 65. They are both Chinese.

They stand silently apart, he clasping and unclasping wrinkled hands, she looking down at her handbag. When I move to step out at Level 26, she takes a half-step towards him, hesitant.

This is post-colonial, post-Mao Shanghai, elegant and filthy, open all hours, special discount, number one genuine imitation, the baffling metropolis, contradictory and thrilling.

Sometimes Shanghai is China, sometimes not. It is a police state and a shopper's paradise. In a vast subterranean restaurant, waiters in white face-masks descend trundling escalators, wheeling trollies laden with Peking Duck to be carved table-side for the salarymen.

On the Bund balconies, the after-dinner Westerners cluster, breathing an awestruck "aaah" as the city's gleaming new skyscrapers, all in choreographed in unison, switch off their neon lights at the government-decreed hour of 10pm.

Thick grey-beige smog hangs permanently over the town, but no rubbish is allowed to linger on these spotless streets. Nine million rusty bicycles whirr through streets colonnaded with French colonial buildings.

Exquisite young women save their Government pay-packets, averaging 1000 renminbi ($200) a month, for floaty dresses with Italian names.

For more than 100 years, Shanghai was the hook-up joint of East and West, the most decadent city in the Orient. In the early-19th century, China infuriated Britain, France and America by outlawing opium, the currency western merchants were busily importing, in exchange for Chinese tea and other goods, through China's only open port, Guangzhou.