Behind that door in the first photo, in a really tiny little room, the Communist Party of China was founded in 1921. While things were a touch rocky in the immediate aftermath, when the founders had to do a runner to escape the cops, they seem to have settled down pretty well since then. The room and its associated museum (which has a particularly good Last Supper-esque wax model tableau of the event, with Mao in the Christ spot) are, rather incongruously and thus rather aptly for modern China, part of an extremely swanky development called Xitiandi, all of the
China. From China. In China.
Shanghai is a funny place. Still within sight of the gleaming skyscrapers and steps from strings of luxury brand shops (Cartier! Louis Vuitton! Porsche!), you’ll find a very different, much poorer world. The Starbucks and Pizza Huts disappeared, replaced by local food stalls. We steer clear of pre-prepared shellfish lying in the noonday sun, but are generally brave enough to sample some of the other fare. These shots are all from the Old Town, which is less than a 10-minute walk from The Bund.
Yuyuan Gardens in Shanghai. In contrast with the Japanese, the Chinese go for a rather more rugged look with their “rockeries”
Other highlights from the Shanghai Museum: coins of all sorts of shapes and sizes; funky Tibetan masks; wonderfully intricate bronzewares.
On Saturdays in Shanghai’s People’s Park, the matchmakers come out. Rows and rows of people with their grown children’s vital statistics (height, weight, gender, educational levels, etc.) pinned to umbrellas. Not sure how many matches are actually consummated in this manner.
The Shanghai Museum has many interesting exhibits, but what particularly jumped out at us was the crazy sophistication of some of the older pieces - not one of the above pieces of jade and pottery is less than 4,000 years old, and some (the pottery flask in the top left, the jade dragon in the middle left) are around 6,000 years old.
I am head-over-heels for sheng jian, Shanghai’s iconic fried dumpling. Amaze-balls.
Views of the Bund and across to Pudong by day. Pudong clearly isn’t skyscrapery enough yet, so they’re working on some stupidly large ego tower to keep up in the Big Building stakes.
Lokapalas, Buddhas and Bodhisattvas from the Shanghai Museum.