Sizzling Shanghai

By Andrew Nagorski

updated 1:37 p.m. ET Nov. 10, 2005

Remember in Lost in Translation, the lovely film about two Americans adrift in Tokyo, how disoriented Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson looked?  There they were in their rooms at the soaring Park Hyatt, their elevation only accentuating the disconnect between them and the city’s inhabitants, far below.  Well, I’ve stayed at the Park Hyatt Tokyo and felt some of the same disconnect.  But when I recently checked into Shanghai’s much newer Grand Hyatt, I felt all of it. No, double or triple that. It’s not merely that Shanghai’s Hyatt is the tallest hotel in the world, occupying the fifty-third to the eighty-seventh floor of the futuristic Jin Mao Tower (its Tokyo counterpart commands the top fourteen floors of a fifty-two-story building). It’s also that the Shanghai I viewed from the windows of my room or from the Cloud 9 bar, on the eighty-seventh floor, was completely different from the city I first visited a quarter of a century ago.  I felt like an astronaut peering down at a strange planet. 

Everybody had warned me to expect huge changes in Shanghai, and I had read enough about this economic showcase of the new China to believe that I was prepared for what I’d see. But I was wrong. To begin with, there’s the sheer volume of recently erected skyscrapers stretching for miles in every direction in this city of 17 million people. Then there are the new highways, bridges, museums, designer stores and topflight restaurants and hotels. The architecture ranges from the high-end to the tacky, with an overdose of gaudy neon lights, but the overall impression is simply breathtaking.  “It just knocks your socks off, what they’ve done: it’s so big, so marvelous,” says James R. Lilley, a former U.S. ambassador to China.

It’s also a city that is changing every moment. That is why the moment to see it is now, while its rich history is still evident in the older buildings and traditional neighborhoods. These have so far eluded the relentless drive to modernize, but who knows how much longer they’ll survive?

In 1979, when China was just opening up to Americans, my wife, Christina, and I visited Shanghai for the first time. Coming from bustling, supermodern Hong Kong, where I was based as a Newsweek correspondent, we felt as if we had taken a step backward in time. Although the Bund, the swath of colonial-era buildings along the embankment of the Huangpu River, gave the city a touch of faded elegance, there was no trace of economic development and no sense that this once great port city was still connected to the outside world. We could roam the streets for hours and never see another foreigner. 

Friendly crowds, everyone dressed in the same dark blue Mao suits, accompanied us, curious about us, the odd interlopers. In our hotel, a low, stately building in the district still known as the French Concession, everything from the stained walls to the tin cutlery reflected decades of neglect.  In the dining room, an elderly waiter leaned over and whispered in proper French, “You know, we used to have real silverware here.” It was his way of telling us that the hotel—and the city—had seen better days.

John Huba / Town & Country Travel Shanghai's singular skyline is marked by the Oriental Pearl television tower.

On our most recent trip there, we again arrived from Hong Kong, but we perceived nothing like the old, jarring contrast. Although Hong Kong still looks terrific—it, too, has undergone a building boom, and it remains a highly popular travel and shopping destination—Shanghai feels like the trendier, more up-and-coming metropolis. “Shanghai has the vitality, energy and optimism that are inherent in a place that is developing rapidly,” says Australian restaurateur Michelle Garnaut. “That’s not true of Hong Kong, which is more sophisticated and in a very different phase.”

Garnaut’s restaurants reflect those differences. Her M at the Fringe, in Hong Kong, which she opened in 1989, has a quiet, clubby feel. In Shanghai her hugely popular M on the Bund, launched a decade later, on the top floor of the renovated 1920s Nissin Shipping Company building and with a spectacular view of the Bund and the Pudong business district, across the river, is bigger, noisier—and much more profitable.

John Huba / Town & Country Travel In their large open kitchen, the chefs are part of the spectacle at the restaurant Shintori.

Shanghai has become cosmopolitan again. It’s not “the Paris of the East,” its sobriquet in the 1920s and 1930s, when the French, Brits and Americans called the shots, as they had ever since divvying up the city among themselves after the 19th century Opium Wars. But Shanghai is once again attracting a large expatriate community. It’s also experiencing a huge influx of Chinese from Taiwan, Singapore and other parts of Asia, a population that is dominated by businessmen intent on getting their share of the city’s highly visible new wealth.  Starbucks coffee shops are a dime a dozen (and their lattes cost about as much as in the United States), and almost every big high-end fashion brand has one or, increasingly, several stores here: Giorgio Armani, Gucci, Hermès, Ferragamo, Versace—the list goes on and on.

That means parties practically every night as new places open their doors.  “If you’re a professional partygoer, this would be your town,” says Thomas Connolly, the Irish general manager of the recently opened Jean Georges restaurant, which is located in Three on the Bund, a Mecca of pricey eateries and boutiques in a renovated building. “It’s all happening right here, right now.”

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During our visit, the Bentley dealership for the Shanghai region was displaying its latest offering in front of the entrance to Three on the Bund. The dealership’s general manager, Leo L.S. Wong, proudly explained that over the past year, it had sold twenty cars ranging in price from about $360,000 to $1.5 million. Regal Chinese models posed for photos in front of the Bentley, but the scene elsewhere was equally startling. Instead of the drab unisex look of yesteryear, Shanghai’s young women sported the newest fashions, highlights in their hair and delicate makeup.  Although street markets and peddlers offered plenty of fake brand-name products (“You want Rolex?” was a constant refrain), the truly fashion conscious wouldn’t be caught dead wearing knockoffs.

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You can still find communist kitsch, such as Mao statues and key chains, for sale, but it’s easy to forget that you are in a Communist country. Of course, politics remains in the hands of the party bosses, and woe to those intrepid few who dare raise the topic of human rights. But no one apologizes for the fact that money and the market, not Marxist ideology, dictate the dizzying pace of change. And if the distance from the rigid old system is measured purely by economic performance, the new China has leapfrogged way ahead of Russia, which, unlike China, formally renounced its Communist identity—and did so more than a decade ago.

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