Shanghai surprise: Exploring a great city

The Yuyuan area of Shanghai has preserved some of the old town. Photo / Brian Fallow

The best thing about the Shanghai Expo is that it's in Shanghai. The city itself is the greater attraction.

The first impression is of size. Accommodating 20 million people, give or take a few million unregistered workers, makes for a forest of high-rise buildings stretching to a murky horizon.

It also makes for traffic with a hair-raising, knuckle-whitening approach to the rules of the road.

But there are not a lot of green things growing. We were told the amount of green space per capita is roughly the size of a bed.

Shanghai is a city unreservedly given over to commerce, great and small.

Importunate hawkers offering wares whose brands are of, shall we say, dubious authenticity - "Sir, you want watch? Cartier?" - are surrounded by the evidence of the goodies successful enterprise can deliver.

But you don't have to go far from the department stores of Nanjing Rd, one of several upmarket shopping streets the city offers, to find more modest emporia, and guys repairing shoes on the pavement or hauling improbably bulky or heavy-looking loads on tricycles. A neighbourhood by no means squalid, but not affluent either.

Bargain-conscious shoppers should check out the fabric market where suits, shirts and so on can be custom-made for a fraction of the store-bought price at home.

Local knowledge helps, but it can be hired too.

One of Shanghai's iconic districts is the Bund, the stretch of riverfront lined by the sturdy and unabashedly Western commercial premises erected in the days of the International Settlement.

The preservation of those buildings is some sort of recognition, grudging perhaps, of the debt the city owes to the detested imperialists, or at least to the engineers who dredged a sandbar and opened the Huangpu River to ocean-going shipping.

The Bund is dwarfed, even mocked - but also in a way vindicated - by its modern equivalent, the gleaming skyscrapers of Pudong's financial district across the river. This has risen from land which just 15 years ago was still rural.

The city's face is turned resolutely to the future. But it has preserved something of the old town - tiny in comparison to the present metropolis - around the Yuyuan Garden.

A higgledy-piggledy warren of old (or replica) wooden shops and teahouses surround a Taoist temple and the Ming-era gardens which give the district its name.

Another drawcard is acrobatic troupe ERA, which is popular enough to have a custom-built theatre of its own. Anyone with cardiac issues should probably skip it, though. The finale, which involves motorcycles, is heart-stopping stuff.

As you would expect in a city as large and increasingly wealthy as Shanghai, there is no shortage of good restaurants.

Some of the best are to be found in Xintiandi, a fashionable redeveloped pedestrian area, right next to where Mao and a few others founded the Chinese Communist Party in 1921.

Among them is TMSK which I will remember not so much for the food, which was fine, or the decor, which is striking, but for the entertainment.

A musical ensemble was made up mainly of young musicians, in Mandarin costumes, playing traditional Chinese instruments and, I assume, melodies. But it also included a synthesiser and an electric guitar, adding depth and, I guess, some familiarity to the sound.

The result was harmonious and effective, and a kind of metaphor for the city - proudly and profoundly Chinese, but happy to select from what the rest of the world has to offer, to create something new.