Shanghai and Zhouzhuang
A visit to China’s greatest and most prosperous city and to an old canal town nearby, the ‘Venice of the East’
I ARRIVED at Shanghai’s Pudong Airport after an incredible 12-hour-plus direct flight from Auckland, New Zealand, and immediately sought to catch the famous Pudong Airport maglev train, which cruises at 300 km/h and used to go as fast as 431 km/h or 268 mph, into town.
(Unfortunately, because of SIM card and VPN hassles I’ll explain and clarify for the help of other visitors at the end, I got sidetracked and ended up catching a taxi instead. But I definitely want to catch the science-fictional and super-duper maglev sometime.)
With a population of 25 million in the city proper and 30 million in its wider urban area, Shanghai is the biggest city in China, and also the most developed and prosperous. It is right in the middle of the coast of the Chinese mainland, a fact that probably accounts for its prominence.
Plus, also, the fact that Shanghai is on the Huangpu River and the smaller Suzhou River, which feed into a network of canals collectively known as China’s Grand Canal.
The Grand Canal was built over many centuries to improve transport in northern and central China. One of the canal towns, Zhouzhuang, which lies about two-thirds of the way westward from Shanghai toward a big lake called Tai (or Taihu), is called the ‘Venice of the East’. I visited Zhouzhuang soon after arriving in Shanghai and have some photos and a video of it, further on.
Shanghai is the source of many of the glitzy images of today’s China such as this one showing the Oriental Pearl TV Tower with its two distinctive globes, and some skyscrapers to its right.
Here is a map of the inner-city area showing the location of the Oriental Pearl TV tower on the eastern bank of the Huangpu River, People’s Square (generally regarded as the dead centre of Shanghai and a common datum for measuring distances), Huangpu Park, Gucheng Park and the Yuyuan Gardens, and the Nanjing Road Pedestrian District. These were all places I visited and write up in this post.
South of Huangpu Park, there is a curving section of waterfront called the Bund, with a lot of preserved historic buildings from the 1920s or thereabouts.
Until 1941, when Shanghai was conquered by Japan, the Bund was part of a Hong Kong-like extraterritorial district where foreigners were in charge and where English was the main language, called the International Settlement.
To the southwest of the International Settlement, there was another extraterritorial zone where France was in sole charge, called the French Concession. The French Concession survived a bit longer, until the Japanese moved in in 1943, following the Nazi occupation of the whole of France in 1942.
Steven Spielberg’s 1987 film Empire of the Sun is a good introduction to the last days of the International Settlement.
The existence of these enclaves in China’s most important city and others like them, including British Hong Kong, was one of the so-called humiliations that China suffered in the century or so before the victory of the Communists in 1949, a victory sealed by the Communist conquest of Shanghai in that year.
For, Shanghai was, if anything, even more important in the past than it is today. In the 1940s, Shanghai generated a third of China’s official GDP (most of the Chinese population were still subsistence farmers outside the money economy in those days, of course).
Because of its importance and central nature on the coast, not to mention the unique maglev train, Shanghai is probably the first place a traveller to China should visit.
I stayed at the Shanghai (Xintiandi) WeFlow Hostel, in the French Concession area and not far from the Bund. I had a pod to myself and it only cost me $20 a night. The hostel was designed recently by a young architect and is quite modern and flash.
The first thing I did after getting settled in was to visit the amazing two-hectare Yuyuan Garden, also known as the Yu Garden, at the southern end of the Bund, next to Gucheng Park.
The Yu Garden is a traditional Chinese scholars’ garden created under the Ming Dynasty in the 1500s. This kind of garden has bridges, lakes, and hollowed-out limestone rocks called gongshi rocks, which are found in a small number of places in China including the Lake Tai area.
It is said that only gongshi will do for such a garden; even the new Chinese scholars’ garden in remote Dunedin, New Zealand, has proper gongshi rocks from China.
Here is a view of a person in princess-like fancy dress, which people can hire to promenade in such places and really get into the old-fashioned feel of things. Perhaps some are also paid to do so. This photo also has a closer view of the gnarled gongshi rocks.
The next photo shows a carving in nanmu wood, a prestigious form of wood used for artwork and very hard to get hold of these days (a bit like kauri in New Zealand, I suppose). It has been carved into a form resembling a gongshi rock of the most hollowed-out kind.
As evening fell, I got some night-time views of the Bund and the financial district across the river where the Oriental Pearl Tower stands. These were amazing, the financial district in particular lit up like a Christmas tree in a darkened room.
The architecture of the Bund is protected by the authorities who are otherwise so keen on modernising China in general and Shanghai in particular. A visit to the Bund is definitely like stepping back in time.
Here is a video I made the same evening, of my boat cruise and a light show on the Oriental Pearl TV Tower.
The next day, I went to Zhouzhang, the fabled ‘Venice of the East’ (although I suppose one might as easily call Venice the Zhouzhuang of the West.)
I went for a gondala cruise on the canals of Zhouzhuang, which are hundreds of years old, with famous bridges of their own just like the ones in Venice.
Here is a photo of one of the most famous canal bridges in Zhouzhuan, the Shide Bridge, which was created during the Wanli period (1673–1619) of the Ming Dynasty along with another bridge next to it at right angles, called the Yongan Bridge.
The twin Shide and Yongan Bridges are symbolic of Zhongzhuan. A modern painter from the region named Chen Yifei made a painting of them, which found its way onto a United Nations postage stamp issue in the 1980s. You can read about that on this monument in Zhouzhuang.
Here are some more canal boat scenes. The resemblance to Venice, or Venice’s resemblance to Zhouzhuang, is evident. The Venetian explorer Marco Polo spent much of his time in China in this region, including the larger centre of Souzhou, which was said to have had 2,000 bridges at the time, and one commentator speculates that this must have been because Polo, as a Venetian, “felt right at home.”
The old part of town seemed rather reminiscent of the oldest English villages.
I also visited a colourful temple.
Here’s a video I made of the temple and of my gondola ride on the canals:
And then I went back to Shanghai, to explore more of the downtown area, including the former French Concession, which people still tend to call the French Concession to this day even though it stopped being French in 1943.
The French Concession and the International Settlement were never restored after the end of World War II and were, instead, officially abolished. However, many traces of the old influence remain, including European-style houses, churches, and London plane shade trees, which the Chinese call French planes because they are particularly common in the French concession.
Here are some more street scenes from the French Concession, in its leafy summertime glory.
Here’s a short video of a stroll along a street in the French Concession, to which I have also appended one of an alley behind my hostel, complete with rods sticking out for laundry to dry, much less chi-chi and more real!
In the French Concession, I visited the former house of Dr Sun Yat-sen, the great early-twentieth-century revolutionary who helped to overthrow the last emperor in 1911 and who is venerated by both the Beijing and Taiwanese regimes as the ‘forerunner’ and the ‘father’ of modern China respectively. Dr Sun became the Provisional President of the new Republic of China after the fall of the emperor but quickly resigned, indicating that he had no desire for personal power. The house, which strictly speaking he only occupied in the latter part of his life, is on Xiangshan Road, known in Dr Sun’s day as Rue Molière.
Dr Sun also helped to found the Kuomintang party, known in the West as the Nationalist Chinese faction, which ruled China for much of the first half of the twentieth century but which after 1949 only remained in control of Taiwan after fighting a civil war against the Communists. The Kuomintang was initially quite revolutionary itself, though, in the view of the Communists, it later became corrupt. Even so, Dr Sun is venerated by the Communists as well as the Taiwanese, since in his day the Kuomintang was not yet deemed to be corrupt.
As the following dedication makes clear, Dr Sun and his wife Soong Ching Ling tried to get the Communist and Kuomintang factions to cooperate, though that did not work out at the highest levels. Having said that, though the Kuomintang is mostly identified with Taiwan and anti-Communism these days, there is still a pro-Communist faction of the Kuomintang on the mainland.
Speaking of Communism, here’s an old-school statue of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in one of the French Concession parks. It was erected in the mid-1980s.
These days, it is fair to say, China’s wall posters aren’t as heroic as they used to be.
I also visited People’s Square, the acknowledged centre of Shanghai, from which its distances tend to be measured. There is a fountain with a lovely coloured base in tones of copper and blue.
The Shanghai Museum, the Shanghai Grand Theatre, the Shanghai Urban Planning Exhibition Hall (one of the world’s few museums of town planning: what an interesting idea), the City Hall, and several other significant buildings, are also arranged around People’s Square.
And here is a much less formal view of what some street cleaners, I presume. I should add that Shanghai is really spick and span!
And here is a fourth video I made, of People’s Square and also of Nanjing Road, the great pedestrianised outdoor shopping mall that extends eastward from People’s Square.
Travel Tips
The currency of China — strictly the People’s Republic of China, as opposed to Taiwan, which calls itself the Republic of China— is called Renminbi. The primary unit of the Renminbi is the Yuan, which as of the time of writing is worth 23 New Zealand cents or 14 US cents.
The Shanghai metro is fantastic to get around on. The trains run behind sliding doors at the stations I was familiar with, a feature which makes the London Underground look old-fashioned. The metro is air-conditioned, and most ticket sellers speak English.
(Another ultra-modern feature of Shanghai is that all toilets seemed to be autoflush, even the squatting toilets.)
Getting around, I found to be a real lifesaver!
Many English-speaking people are put off visiting China because of the unfamiliarity of the language and the fact that locals fluent in English are not always on hand. However, these days, you can purchase handheld translation devices, and I suspect that these will make a big difference in years to come.
Another fact that puts travellers off is that Western VPNs and SIM cards often don’t work in China because of the so-called China Firewall, which blocks many websites routinely used in the West including Google, which means that Google Maps won’t work. I found the offline MAPS.ME app to be a real lifesaver.
I had a lot of hassles as a result of this when I arrived, and that was one reason I did not catch the maglev from the airport, as I was too distracted (and ended up getting a taxi, which cost 200 Yuan).
At the airport, I discovered that my VPN (VPN Express) didn’t work, so I couldn’t use Google Apps to find my way around and book things. On the other hand, the AliPay app was still working, so I could pay for things, and so was DiDi, which is good for finding your way around in a taxi.
I got a VPN called VPN Ify which did work in China, along with the Baidu search engine and its Baidu Maps, which is very good for finding your way around more generally.
It was also very difficult to find a local SIM card. One guy told me that he arrived at the airport and got a local SIM with no problem, but it took me three hours to get a local SIM card, in a district known as the French Concession.
This was because a lot of the local mobile shops have closed down, for reasons that perhaps have had something to do with Shanghai’s strict and prolonged Covid lockdowns, which led to people going short of essential supplies and to student protests.
There is a subreddit called the Chinalife Community, which seems to be full of useful tips on China travel issues in general; and one of its posts recommends the purchase of an eSIM.
I also got quite a few useful tips about these issues, including the use of MAPS.ME, from fellow travellers in my hostel. At least for the solo traveller as opposed to a member of an organised group tour, China is still a bit of a ‘tourism frontier’; which is a pity because as you can see, China is amazing and in many ways a better place to visit than many Western tourist destinations, which have gone to seed by comparison, with dirt, poverty, crime, and homelessness. Going to China also means that you will avoid the tourist crush.
(Having said that, because Shanghai is more developed than many other areas of China the traveller will face additional difficulties in the other parts, which I have visited, but not lately. It will be interesting to see what they are like now, as I continue my journey.)
Another useful tip for the visitor to Shanghai and nearby towns is to patronise the street food stalls where you can sometimes also get a cheap cup of coffee. I paid 45 Yuan, about ten New Zealand dollars, for a coffee in a local Starbucks, just so I could sit down. But you can get coffee cheaper from the street vendors. Interestingly enough, the American 7–11 chain is everywhere, and this also sells excellent street food.
Domestic tourism has recovered since Covid, but I am not sure about international tourism. Just lately, it has become possible for Australians and New Zealanders to get two-week visa-free access to China.
Shanghai is generally quite free from crime and it is a pleasure being here. But on the way to the hostel, I noticed that many construction cranes had stopped working. I was told that a lot of people had been laid off from their jobs. There’s definitely a slowing of the Chinese economy, and people are worried.
Well, that’s about it. If I think of any more travellers’ tips and general observations they will be in the next post, about my visit to two more cities in this region, Hangzhou and Huzhou.
