IN SHANGHAI

Evening Star, Issue 19327, 13 August 1926, Page 2

IN SHANGHAI

M IHTERKATIOKAL CITY The Bund in Shanghai! From your ship, which has anchored in the turgid, tawny-colored river, you will come ashore in launch or sampan, be assisted to the landing-stage by a dozen eager coolies, and find yourself in such a place as your most vivid fancy has never metured, oven in the dreams of the Mast which you have, perhaps, cherished ever since geography days at school (states, a writer m the Christian Science Monitor’). Here before you is a great city, a European city with its immense banks, commercial Structures towering like the sky line or an American metropolis, numberless, motors, tramcars, metalled streets, and Caucasian faces. Yet in such a blend of East and West as perhaps no other place reveals, here along the Bund on a spring afternoon there mingles with all this that is of Europe the seething life of the Orient; the übiquitous nksha men; the thousands of wharf coolies,, with'their burdens and their strange sing-song chant not altogether lacking in a note of cheer; the low. pony-drawn carriages; the vendors of a hundred strange eatables; _ the rich and portly Chinese merchants in their private ’rickshas feigning a total lack of interest in the foreigner; the gorgeously silk-clad Eastern women in motor cars from London and Paris: the astonishing traracar which runs through the medium of overhead wires, but without rails, bearing down upon one with startling unexpectedness; the tall, dignified, and impressive Sikh guards of the International Settlement, bearded and in turbans of many hues, their very complacence revealing their high sense of responsibility; tho Chinese police, not less tranquilly sensible of their importance; the occasional infantryman, sailor, or marine, shore patrol from the vessels of all the Powers which lie at anchor off tho Bund; tho vividly-clad lady of Japan, pattering along in her wooden sandals; the mingled Caucasian faces of every Western nation, with a chattering in more tongues than were beard on tho Tower of Babel; and through and over it all the elusive, magical atmosphere of China, the call of an exotic, Oriental land, tho “ spell of the East.” , That, very sketchily, is the Bund, the riverside boulevard and promenade, broad, smooth, park-like, and immaculately clean through the American and English sections, more confused in , the French Concession, where the river freight boats tie up, and the coolies unload their varied contents into tho great go-downs. And off the Bund, reaching, for miles landward to tho borders of the eight-milo-squaro “ settlement,” wind and twist the vivid, teeming streets of one of the most extraordinary cities of the ages, having tho atmosphere of every race and nation, tho mingled populace of all tho world. Commencing as streets of Europe—England, Germany, and Russia—they merge almost imperceptibly into streets of the Orient. Little by little the character of tho shops changes, European names are replaced by Chinese; tho haberdashery of William Smith, Limited, is succeeded by the fruit shop of Yim Wung Hick and Co. Miles there are of such as that, until one wonders, forsooth, whore all the customers come from. _ And then, behold! all is changed again, and you are once more in Europe, or, indeed, in America. The residential section of the international city has begun; and now, if, perchance, you have como along Nanking road until it develops into tho uphoniously-named Bubbling Well road, you find yourself wondering at the beauty of broad American lawns, dainty English gardens, French verandahs, and Italian terraces. You seem to ho in many lands. If you are well travelled you experience again something of the atmosphere, however elusive, of every_ place you have ever seen. In actuality, you will feel, this is an international city. Everything .is bore, all the world, tho various bits of many lands now assembled in Shanghai. & You stand in the meoting-fllace of the races,_ in tho most cosmopolitan of all the cities : —in Shanghai, with its constant surprises, its alluring, colorful activities of days and nights, its inexhaustible capacity for amazing you’; and you wonder if it is not all a dream.