KEY POINTS:
The gunfire and screams stopped as we entered Shanghai's railway station. Chinese radio is a twisted backdrop to an uncomfortable 13-hour train ride. No Bad Jelly-type morning stories, just incomprehensible, rapid-fire dialogue broken up by the occasional torture sequence or gunfight with cod James Bond orchestrations.
Even without
Radio Splatter for company, I'm no fan of the long train ride, but it was an excellent way to get an overnight sense of China's hugeness. This place is bigger than Elvis.
All the way from Xi'an to Shanghai we rattled past city after power station after city after power station after humungous, incomplete, motorway project, all lit-up and banging away through every hour Mao provided.
In Shanghai's central station, as always, the locals were flat out, loudly doing something or nothing. But even with this megapolis' indulgent embrace of uber-modernism and an overabundance of Lucy Liu doppelgangers all around them, nothing stops the locals faster than a passing tall foreigner.
China is a great place to discover your inner rockstar - the locals are going to stare anyway, so you may as well make it worth their while.
But then you start looking around at five-level motorways, beggars who look like they've been dipped in napalm, buildings that shouldn't exist outside your imagination, and a smog-ringed vista of skyscrapers, even when viewed from the 38th floor of our hotel. Shanghai contains 4000 buildings of more than 30 storeys and more are springing up all the time.
The first home to the Chinese Communist Party must be an exciting, compelling and callous place in which to live. Like the anti-pollution decrees in Beijing which forced tens of thousands of cars off the road overnight, the Government favours blunt instruments to scalpels to fulfil its wishes.
And there is a fantastic display of blunt instruments at the Shanghai Propaganda Poster Art Centre, a treasure trove of technicoloured Maoisms in the basement level of a nondescript building in Huashan Rd.
But you won't find any signs pointing to it. Owner Mr Yang is nervous about unwanted attention as the former great one is an historic bogeyman, but Yang's address and number are at www.shanghaipropagandaart.com
Those years are a difficult subject for many Chinese. Everyone's family took painful hits, and Yang often has to restrain visitors from tearing at the hyper-patriotic images he presents.
But there are fascinating distractions everywhere on the streets, from signs banning public displays of superstition to old ladies rushing to set up their roadside shops between traffic-light phases, and tiny bars that seemed to have way too many girls on duty for the number of customers. Very friendly they were too ...
If we entered the city in fairly standard 20th century style, we exited via the 22nd. The Maglev train practically threw us at the airport - the speedo in the carriage topping out at 431km/h.
The return train violently blurred by in the other direction. It's the most impractical way to get about and will apparently take 1600 years to pay itself off, but its OTT flashiness is so quintessentially nu-Chinese, it's perfect.