Surviving Shanghai’s searing summer calls for stamina

Press, 27 September 1988, Page 32

Surviving Shanghai’s searing summer calls for stamina

Bu

SUSAN KUROSAWA,

who flew to Shanghai

as a guest of Cathay Pacific Airways

After - seeing Weiwei the panda blowing a trumpet while riding a bicycle at the Shanghai Acrobatic Theatre, my other impressions of this great sprawl of a Chinese city paled into total insignificance. Acrobatic cats were the second major drawcard at the show: small, white moggys with wild eyes and well-developed pectorals who swayed along the parallel bars, their muscular front paws working like crazy while their back legs and fluffy little tails bobbed under stiff pink tu-tus. Apart from booing noisily at the sequin-suited animal trainers and having a nasty row with a small, ninjaquick Japanese tourist who wanted to use my head as a tripod to take closeups of the flying felines, my immediate reaction was to race back to the Shanghai Hilton and ring the Kurosawa cats to reassure them, life in inner-city Sydney wasn’t really all that depressing. It was to inspect the new Hilton that a press group was invited to visit Shanghai, and this ultra-modern, icily air-conditioned hotel.was to prove a refuge for several days in August, one of China’s hottest months. The local newspapers made much of the temperatures, referring to Shanghai as China’s “furnace city,” and the sweeping skyline views from our lofty hotel windows were permanently hidden by blanket-thick heat haze. Down on the bicycle-infested boulevards and crinkled back alleys of the city, streetside hawkers did an enormous trade in fresh watermelons, and the entire population of Shanghai seemed to be spitting shiny black seeds and cheerfully staining shirtsleeves as they wiped pink juice from their mouths. Shanghai requires stamina. The tearaway traffic rivals India for lack of logic, but instead of dodging sacred cows, Shanghai’s truck and taxi drivers appear to aim directly at cyclists who scuttle the streets on big, black 'bikes, rather like wily cockroaches intent on survival. It is a city of some 13 million, built on swamp and mud, and ever growing sideways, like pancake mixture spreading on a sizzling hotplate. The sheer size of the place and the massive overcrowding of all forms of public transport means visitors are usually forced to take organised tours to get about, and even then one’s bearings seem hopelessly confused as it takes buddha-like calm and concentration to survey the scenery rather than watch wobbling cyclists miss the tour bus wheels by mere centimetres. * * * The Huangpu River slashes Shanghai to the east and, in summer months, the emphasis unfortunately lies firmly on the final syllable of that name. It’s a sluggish, putty-coloured and highly odorous stretch that rates as one of the world’s most important commercial waterways. Cruises by big passenger ferry take you up to the mouth of the Yangtze, but it’s hardly a romantic river journey. A. member of our group described the experience as sailing past Pyrmont docks in Sydney for three hours, and that’s a pretty fair if decidedly unflattering verdict. Factory after smoke-spewing factory, grim godowns (as warehouses are known in China) and great docks line the banks, and the water is thick with cargo ships, container vessels, busy trawlers, quick tugs, and flimsy little sampans propelled by pyjama-suited coolies in conical straw hats. The Bund — one of the world’s most

famous riverbank promenades — skirts the smelly Huangpu. This broad, tree-lined avenue is permanently strolled by noisy, jostling mobs, and is still flanked by 19205-style buildings with serious brown-brick facades. It’s easy to see Steven Spielberg would have required only a dab of windowdressing when shooting the fall of Shanghai scenes in his recent “Empire Of The Sun” epic. The Tudor-style architecture, sweeps of gravel driveway, high walls and clipped gardens of Shanghai’s prewar European residents can still be seen in the old British Quarter, but the city does small trade in nostalgia, and you’ll need to swift-talk your guide into taking you to see these relics, especially if it means cutting short your shopping time for beaded cardigans and panda-decorated cushion covers at the Friendship Store. ** * • The romance of old Shanghai tangibly lives on at the Peace Hotel just off the Bund where each night a group of well-worn jazz musos belt out the Goodman greats in a smoky, shady bar-cum-coffee lounge that embodies the unreal atmosphere of a stage set. It’s a vignette that briefly captures the cosmopolitan feel of Shanghai, once a city famous for intrique, scandal, vice and bourgeois pleasures. We did, I suspect, what all tourists do in Shanghai. We visited the Yu Garden in the heart of Shanghai’s old town and saw the celebrated Huxinting Teahouse where Queen Elizabeth II stopped to sip cha on her visit to Shanghai. We admired — as best we could over the heads of swarms of Sunday strollers — the classical symmetry of the Yu Garden, we bought wind-up bird kites — and spent hours trying to make them work as the instructions, of course, were in Chinese — and, beside a rockery at the Pavilion For Viewing Frolicking Fish, a young man made a resounding “hoick” noise at my left elbow and landed a splendid spit on my opentoed Italian sandals. We saw the treasured creamy white and apple green jade buddhas at Yufo Si temple; and in Fuxing Park we gave English lessons to earnest young Chinese who clutched their phrasebooks and asked obscure questions about the split infinitive. The young women were anxious to know if we considered their clothing sufficiently fashionable; one girl shyly prodded my shoulderpads and asked if these were the new vogue. I showed her how they pulled off with velcro tabs, and she bounded off to the Ladies’ Articles section at the Number One Department Store to check if such Western what-nots had yet arrived in Shanghai. The temptation, however, was to stay cloistered within the oasis-like atmosphere of the spanking new Hilton. The hotel has brought a new level of style and sophistication to Shanghai’s accommodation scene. A soaring, light-filled atrium, voluptuous expanses of gleaming granite, attractively appointed guestrooms, a lovely pool in a glass-topped pavilion and, of prime importance to business travellers, a fully equipped executive centre, rank this property right up there with the Hilton International group’s very best. As a blessed bonus, the hotel’s Teppan Grill serves absolutely delicious and surprisingly inventive French-cum-Japanese cuisine. It may not be the authentic flavour of Shanghai but it makes a viable statement about this amazing city’s polyglot past and it wins hands down over a bowl of noodles amid the assorted smells and deafening brouhaha of the Bund in high summer.