Few cities are as iconic as Shanghai; a place visitors won’t just want to see but deeply experience with every sense, writes Greg Bruce
There are lots of very nice cities in the world, but only four great ones: places so rich and dense with history, world-historical importance and meaning that they have assumed their own gravity; their own physics. They warp space-time. To visit them is to be changed on a molecular level.
They are, in no particular order: New York, Tokyo, London and Shanghai. For weeks before travelling to any one of these cities, you can feel the excitement of the place as a vibration in your body. But then you arrive, and you’re tired, and the airport is just an airport, and it’s crowded, and the road to the city is clogged with traffic and the smog is dense, and you’ve brought with you all your anxieties and baggage, and you’re like, now what?
In July last year, China added New Zealand to a list of countries whose citizens don’t require a visa to enter the country, so long as they’re visiting for fewer than 30 days. With Air New Zealand putting on daily direct flights (except Wednesdays) from Auckland, and the massive growth in Chinese tourist infrastructure over the past decade or two, Shanghai is now arguably the easiest to visit of the world’s four great cities from New Zealand.
The Bund is Shanghai's most prestigious stretch of real estate. Photo / Supplied
I arrived on a Wednesday morning. It was early spring and unseasonably hot and getting hotter. At this time of year, the temperature is usually in the high single or low double digits, but it was already in the 20s by 7am and would eventually top out in the 30s.
My wife texted and asked what Shanghai smelled like. I drank deeply of the steaming air. The best I could come up with was “thick”.
It was rush hour, and since Shanghai exists in a sort of perpetual rush hour, the actual rush hour was quite something.
We had a tight schedule and detailed itinerary. We had a tour guide and a driver. Our plan for the next four days was what might roughly be called a Shanghai highlights tour. It would involve a lot of driving. We would ascend the Shanghai tower, visit Zhujiajiao (the “Venice of Shanghai”), do a tea-tasting ceremony, walk around the French concession and the Bund, look at the famous Yu gardens and so on.
Traditional tourist boats on the canals of Shanghai Zhujiajiao Water Town.
The bit I was most excited about was the Shanghai Tower, mainly because my 8-year-old son had talked about it incessantly during a long spell of obsession with tall buildings a year or two ago. At roughly double the height of the Sky Tower, Shanghai Tower is the world’s third tallest building, but my son’s main point of interest – and therefore also mine – was the elevator, which is the fastest in the world.
We were 100m up before I even realised the elevator was moving. I couldn’t believe the speed. I was so shocked, I got my phone out and shot a video of the display panel. It was ridiculously fast. Had it been running alongside Usain Bolt in an average 100m race, the elevator would have finished roughly 90m ahead of him. Nevertheless, it is smoother, quieter and less discomfiting than an elevator in an average city apartment building.
I have watched the video of that display panel many times since, amazed by the numbers and the speed with which the little animated lift moves up the building, especially because I remember the ride itself as being completely noiseless and giving no impression of movement. My ears didn’t even pop.
The conjunction of the Yan'an Elevated Road and the North-South Elevated Road: an illustration of the human ingenuity behind modern Shanghai.
But miracle or not, the elevator is just an elevator. The Shanghai Tower is just a tower. The sights of a city are just sights.
I didn’t go to Shanghai because I wanted to see Shanghai. I went to Shanghai because I wanted to feel Shanghai.
When you travel to a place so deeply interwoven into every global storyline that has ever mattered, this is what you want: to have that river of history and import flow through you, to be rooted in the city’s soil, to no longer be looking through the window, but to be through the window.
The great pain of the modern, developed, corporatised tourism machine is its repeated reminders that you are not – that your experience of a place will only ever be a simulacrum; a carefully curated VR ride on which you can have fun, but not more than that.
But you push on, because you are human, and are therefore cursed with the burden of hope, and you’ve spent a lot of money on your trip. But as the end of your time there nears, your belief begins to fade, replaced by your attempts to convince yourself you’ve had a great time anyway, that the views from the top of the Shanghai Tower were amazing; the water town was a once in a lifetime experience; the rooftop dinner was bloody nice, and so on.
But then, if you’re really lucky – usually when your expectations and hopes are lowest, when you’ve got nothing planned and nowhere left to go – it happens.
It was early evening in the French Concession and we needed a drink. Em pulled out her phone and found a place just across the park. It was called Sober Company. The name didn’t sound promising, being both unfunny and uncool, but Em said it looked cool, so we shrugged and said okay, as we usually did, because Em knew a thing or two about a thing or two and anyway what did it matter? It was our last night in Shanghai and we needed a drink.
The sun was setting hard. As we walked across the park, we passed a horde of old people taking part in what appeared to be a dance class. On the road outside the bar, four people were playing street badminton without a net. I could feel something happening, something changing in the city, or in the air, or in my body, or all three.
I pushed open the door to the bar, and my jaw dropped. I literally gawped. It was like I’d opened a portal directly into a Wong Kar-wai film – not just onto the set but the place it was depicting. It was that sort of interdimensionality. I felt that at any minute, one of the beautiful customers would pull out a cigarette holder and blow fragrant smoke directly into my face.
The light was low and the wood panelling abundant. A line of lampshades perched bizarrely above the bottles behind the bar. The shiny-haired, softly-scented customers, dressed in their finely cut garments, sipped fantastic cocktails. The bar staff moved languidly in their long white bar jackets with their cropped sleeves.
The bartender was working on a drink with such care, precision and beauty I couldn’t look away. I knew I was watching a great artist produce great art and I looked forward to getting drunk on it.
A waiter approached. I asked her about the comparative appeal of the cocktails “Penicillin” and “Aviation”. Her answer was detailed and articulate but I wasn’t able to take it in because I was too distracted by the euphoric feeling of belonging; the feeling of all of Shanghai past, present and future, flooding into the bar and filling the space all around me and taking me over.
Two customers got up and walked towards a wall. It opened, and they disappeared into whatever magical kingdom was behind.
I ordered the Penicillin. It tasted of ginger and honey, but mostly it tasted of Shanghai. I was intoxicated before I’d even finished my first sip.
Checklist
Shanghai, China
GETTING THERE
Fly from Auckland to Shanghai direct with Air New Zealand with flights departing daily (except Wednesdays)
