VANITY FAIR

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 75, Issue 178, 30 July 1932, Page 2

VANITY FAIR

SHANGHAI; OLD AND NEW. To the roving American who enters it from within China, after more than a year of wandering in the northern part of that over-populated land, Shanghai seems at first glimpse about as intere f ;>g as Omaha or Memphis. Here are the same, dismal railroad yards, a strangely) familiar station, dingy with age and jostling with hurried travellers; the streets, with their jangling, screeching (ram-cars, honking automobiles oblivious of the rights of pedestrians, their narrow sidewalks further cluttered by trolley-poles, might also be the back streets of any second-class American city. Many a modern building in Shanghai is hardly recognisable from thousands at home Bubbling Well Road turns out to be picturesque only in name; the vista down Nanking Road through the two great Chinese department stores forming its pillars of Hercules has so few hints of the exotic, that a Wandering-minded individual must pinch himself to realise that he is still in the Orient. ... The term ‘‘Shanghai’’ is misleading to those not familiar with conditions there. To some the name means the valueless land set aside for foreign residence when this port was opened by treaty to foreigners m 1843 and on which in less than a century there has grown up an important modern city, a metropolitan area which almost every nation in the world, except China, has some part in governing, a city quite distinct from China. The name is more commonly used perhaps, al least by foreigners, to designate an enfire. group of cities. The original Shanghai is a Chinese city still partly walled and more than two thousand years old, an important trading centre more than a millennium ago, and around this and de foreigners portion modern developments have caused other Chinese cities to grow up, some bordering so immediately on the settlement that it is sometimes impossible to tell where one city beg,ns and mother ends. This vast area, with an estimated population of three or four million, is what probably most often answers to the name of Shangh -.. , i , Though it is the fashion among those who know the interior of China to be scornful of it, one can find the genuinely Chinese in what is known as the native city of Shanghai, the old, once walled, original city. In fact it is in this and lesser treaty-ports, where the quarters of the Europeans rub elbows with the Chinese sections, that the contrasts of the two civilisations stand out most clearly, where one feels the widely different essences of the East and West and realises that they can no more mix than oil and Water, that they might remain forever side by side without serious interpenetration.—Harry A. rranch, tn Roving Through Southern China.’*