With Beijing having a busy year with the coming Olympics, travellers will be looking for other destinations to visit on their trip to China. With Bangkok as the hub to China, Thai Airways has eight destinations around China. All of them are dramatic stopovers but I would imagine that none, after Beijing, has the appeal of Shanghai. So I would like to tell readers something about Shanghai. I first visited this grand old city in 1948, and in recent years I have made several trips there from Bangkok.

We hear much about Shanghai these days. It’s growing; it’s expanding; its economy is booming; it’s leaping ahead with an unprecedented growth. It’s all true. Shanghai is an incredible city. But Shanghai that we see today is totally unlike the city I knew after the war. It’s not even remotely the same. However, among all that polish and glitter there still remains an old Shanghai. What I find surprising is that many visitors I talk to who have returned from Shanghai are totally unaware of this. In part it’s due to the Chinese government which wants to bring China into the modern world and forget about some of the dreadful past when the nations of Europe all wanted a piece of China. In the 1430s China closed its doors to the West. Europe knew what a vast market China was for its goods and tried every trick they could to get in, which included introducing opium to the country. And so began the illicit Opium Trade. Before long gunboats from the West appeared on the rivers of China and, along with them, the so-called Treaty Ports, advantageous to the west.  No small wonder China wanted the West out.
I can think of one example that was a curse to the Chinese and that was the Bund, the promenade along the Huangpu River. It’s still there but no longer are there signs that read: NO DOGS AND CHINESE ALLOWED. It was here on the promenade along the riverfront that foreigners, from the “Foreign Quarters” and legations, once gathered. Now it’s tourists with cameras and guidebooks in hand.
I remember the Park Hotel on Nanking Road from earlier years. It is still there but now a bit seedy and gloomy. It is totally unlike the new luxurious and fashionable Shangri-la Hotel across the river in the Pudong area. The Shangri-la sits alongside the Space Needle and with a view. On my last visit I had a room on the 14th floor that overlooked the city. Here is splendor at it best.

In my book, Take China, I wrote about the first time I arrived in Shanghai over 50 years ago. I came by U.S. destroyer. “With pomp, pride and a display of showmanship, the helmsman brought our whaleboat—packed with sailors from the destroyer, going ashore on liberty—up the congested Huangpu River, past ships flying the ensigns of a dozen nations—United States, Britain, France, Russia, Australia, New Zealand, Panama, Nationalist China, and many more I couldn’t recognize.  Pulling at their anchors midstream were war ships and gunboats, river scows, costal steamers, oil tankers, rusted freighters, smart cruise liners, huge sea-going junks and even an African dhow.”

All that has changed, of course. No more sampans sculling back and forth, from ship to shore, carrying passengers and cargo. Stand on the Bund today and look out across the Huangpu River and the scene is different. On the Bund smart young Chinese in Nike shoes and brand-labeled clothes sauntered up and down the avenue while out in the river polished cruise boats and tourist ferries scurry up and down the river. No men-of-war, shattered junks and rusted freighters.
   
One place I wanted to see was Blood Alley. I remembered about where it was and I began walking.  Rue Chu Pao-san was the official name for Blood Alley.  In Take China I describe the street as it was when I first saw it. “Customers were in every stage of drunkenness, from ‘feeling good’ to staggering blindness. Each bar was like a time bomb, ready to explode at a slight side glance.” I even remembered the names of many of the bars— Monk’s Brass Rail, George’s Bar, Palais Cabaret, Crystal, the New Ritz and Mums.
  
Today Blood Alley is a street of posh shops and department stores. I found no one who even remembered the place, as if it never really existed. Perhaps the Old City might prove different, if it was still there. Before 1949, the Old City remained under Chinese law and administration while the rest of central Shanghai was carved up by foreign powers. Most of the residents in these old back alleys were from the Chinese underworld. The place was a notorious gangster-and-opium slum. We were warned to keep out of the Old City but that didn’t stop us.
   
I was surprised now when I returned. The tiny lanes and crowded streets are still there, minus the rickshaws—but what a difference. The vices are gone and the neighborhood looks like a Hollywood movie set with the same buildings and small houses, but what a little cleaning up and refurbishing had done. 
  
At one time the old city was enclosed by a wall and moat but in 1912 the city walls were knocked down and the moat filled in. The colonial powers thought this might eliminate the vice but of course it didn’t. At the heart of the Old City is Chenghuang Miao, Temple of the Town God and the Ming dynasty Yuyuan Garden, a classical Chinese garden. The garden was kept up.  Legend has it that the garden was built in the 16th century by an eccentric and gifted landscape architect named Zhang Nanyang. His statue is there.  The rock-and-tree garden is filled with artificial hills, carp-filled ponds, dragon-lined walls, and pavilions connected by zigzagging bridges.
  
Just west of Yuyuan at Henan Road is the Fuyou Road, a Sunday antique market which is situated inside an old factory. The tiny lane bustles with people selling their wares. Looking for an iron to press your clothes, one that you must fill with hot coals, or a pocket watch that tells the phases of the moon?  You can find them here. Other items might be old maps of Shanghai, baskets and boxes, porcelain and scattered modern goods including Mao paraphernalia. I imagine some of the same stuff that we Marines didn’t buy years ago is still there on sale.
  
I visited the Old City in the afternoon, returned again in the evening and went to the Huxinting Teahouse, the city's oldest teahouse.  It is situated in the middle of a small lake and dates from the Qing dynasty. The second floor of the teahouse serves some of the best tea in town. I remembered leaving my boozing buddies at Blood Alley one evening and finding my way to the teahouse. Sitting at postage-stamp size tables were Chinese men in long robes (the standard dress), listening to sing-song ladies in white make-up doing the entertaining to tunes played on one-string violins and gongs.  My buddies back at Blood Alley didn’t know what they were missing.  When I heard musicians congregate below, playing traditional Chinese music, I was taken back to those days and was told that the spontaneous music was a nightly affair here at the Huxinting Teahouse.
  
Next week we will take a look at Chatuchak, Bangkok’s Weekend Market.

Modern Shanghai at night

Looking up at the Needle

The Needle dominates the Pudong area across from
the city

A view of Shanghai across the Huangpu from Pudong

Traffic on the Hujangpu, no longer foreign gunboats

The Catholic cathedral in Shanghai

Proud Chinese girl in uniform

Traffic cop in downtown Shanghai

The statue of Sun Yat Sen, the founder of modern
China

The railways station in Shanghai

 Two smiling waitress in a restaurant

They are not smiling but the food is good

 Shanghai has an Old Town that many travelers fail
to see

A peaceful lake and garden in the Old Town

A Restaurant in the Old Town

The Park Hotel along the Bund

Buy a flute and hear a tune from the keeper

The Bund in the late 1800s

Sitting along the river at the Bund and enjoying
the view

QUESTIONS & ANSWERS
Q. Dear Mr. Stephens, I enjoyed your stories on China. I wrote to you once before asking if you were glossing over the facts about travel in China. There are so many conflicting stories about China that I don’t know what to believe any more. —Hazel Copenfield, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

A. Dear Ms. Copenfield, if you are looking at a political analysis of China, I don’t want to disappoint you. I will leave that up to the political pundits, politicians and economists. I write stories about travel to bring the world closer together. I like to write about the romance of travel. I want to point out to readers that we live in a very beautiful world and let’s take advantage of the world that we live in, and enjoy it. I found when I travelled though China, if I smiled, people would smile in return.  —HS

Harold Stephens
Bangkok
E-mail:  ROH Weekly Travel

Note: The article is the personal view of the writer and does not necessarily reflect the view of Thai Airways International Public Company Limited.

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Next week we visit Bangkok's incredible weekend market