The Sign for Six

The waitress is making the sign for a phone with her hand: thumb and little finger extended with the rest of her fingers clenched into her palm. She’s not holding it to her ear though, and I’m pretty sure that whatever she’s trying to say has nothing to do with a phone. Unfortunately, I have absolutely no idea what it is that she’s trying to say; I just want to order some dumplings. Eventually, after a silent exchange of blank incomprehension, she gives up on trying to communicate with me and heads back to the kitchen. I’m sure I’ll end up with something, even if it’s not my dumplings.

It’s not until a couple of days after this exchange that I finally learn what the waitress was trying to say to me – the gesture she was making is the Chinese symbol for the number six; she was asking if I wanted six dumplings. It had never before occurred to me, not even for the tiniest fraction of a second, that there might be a method of counting on your fingers other than the one I already knew, but it turned out that there was. And that seemed to summarise my trip to China: if there was anything that I had known and taken for granted, anything that seemed blindingly obvious, it would be different here.

I was in Shanghai, a city racing unrelentingly towards the future, but a future built firmly on Chinese traditions. Nowhere is this vision of the future more apparent than in Pudong, the waterfront district that has come to epitomise the new Shanghai. Pictures of the area from just ten years ago show a barren wasteland; now it has a skyline to rival Manhattan, albeit with a healthy dose of individuality. Where the skyline of New York is symbolised by the Statue of Liberty, Shanghai’s own iconic structure is the Oriental Pearl Tower: the building that has come to represent the city’s dizzying modernisation. A thin spike decorated with two giant spheres, the Oriental Pearl Tower looks more like a spaceship imagined in the 1920’s than a real building, but is actually inspired by a Chinese poem from the Tang Dynasty. Behind the Oriental Pearl Tower stands the Jin Mao Tower, modelled on a bamboo stalk and currently China’s tallest building. Behind that is a building site, from which will rise the world’s tallest building.

Whatever one’s opinions of the government of China, it is impossible not to be impressed by their ability to make things happen, and the burgeoning skyline of Pudong is just one example of this. While the British government endlessly debates the possibility of a high speed rail network, constantly commissioning feasibility studies and discussing budgets, Shanghai already boasts the world’s fastest railway – at 431km/h its maglev trains zoom between the airport and downtown at a speed that would make a rollercoaster whimper. And there’s none of the surly staff or overcrowded carriages of Britain either: an attendant takes your ticket from your hand to save you the effort of putting it through the electronic barrier yourself; a train guard stands stiffly to attention, crisply saluting as the train pulls out of its station.

But for all its lustre and sparkle modern Shanghai is not without its problems, many of which can be seen from the top of the Oriental Pearl Tower itself. This city of sixteen million people is rising to the sky, with row upon row of skyscrapers as far as the eye can see, their roofs lost amongst the blanket of smog that almost permanently envelops the city; only after the rains come, washing the particles of dust to the ground, is a blue sky briefly visible. When darkness falls over the city, the main shopping street, Nanjing Road, is illuminated in a flurry of neon signs, visible for miles around as an isolated strip of light in an otherwise dark city. It is here, in these areas of darkness, that the majority of Shanghainese live and work. A good meal here costs around $1.40, while entry to the Jin Mao Tower is about $14. Buildings are decaying; men stand in the street selling nuts and lychees, and roadside barbecues offer row upon row of crayfish. Nowhere have I been where the difference between rich and poor is so large, and so apparent. There is no doubt though that this will change, and in fact it is already changing: the city continues to grow; the people are getting richer; the lights are getting brighter, and the decaying buildings are being replaced.

Amidst all the hustle and bustle of new developments, it is still possible to find traces of the city’s history. On the waterfront, opposite the bright lights of Pudong, stand the grand old colonial buildings of the Bund (complete with a scaled-down replica of Big Ben), the riverfront street that was the beating heart of the old international city: a city of enclaves governed by Britain, France, America and Japan; a city where Westerners lived in gilded luxury in their nations’ concessions while the Chinese inhabitants lived in overcrowded squalor. It was a city of decadence and corruption, of violence and gangsters. Although this international inequity ended with the arrival of the communists, who summarily dismissed the foreigners, the Bund remains as a popular place to meet and promenade. The Shanghainese, however, seem almost oblivious to the presence of the colonial relics that overlook the street, their cameras instead trained firmly on Pudong, just across the river but a world away. Those who do pause to reflect on both sides of the river surely cannot fail to notice the powerful symbolism of the location; that the bright, modern buildings tower above the old colonial relics, elegant but dated, is hugely indicative of the rapidly changing world order.

The Bund, by virtue of its location, retains at least some semblance of visibility; the old Chinese parts of the city are tucked away in tiny pockets between roaring flyovers and concrete apartment blocks. Around Yu Yuan Gardens stands the finest collection of what I would regard as traditional Chinese buildings, all intricate woodwork and upturned eaves. In another powerful symbol of changing China, most of these buildings are now occupied by shops selling trinkets to tourists, and even a Starbucks. Such modern amenities have not, however, been built with foreign tourists in mind. Foreigners are still sufficiently rare that a Chinese woman on Nanjing Road asked if she could have her photo taken with me, and it is unusual to encounter anyone with a working knowledge of English. The tourist tat and coffee shops are instead aimed at the Chinese middle class, a demographic growing almost as rapidly as Shanghai itself.

At the heart of China’s economic miracle, Shanghai is changing as fast as anywhere on Earth: it is a place of excitement and dynamism, a place where anything seems possible. If you have been before, it will have changed beyond recognition. If you go again in the future, it will almost certainly have changed once more. And throughout all this change there are perhaps only two things that will survive: the city will always be a bewildering place, and the dumplings will always be delicious.

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