Sizzling Shanghai

Shanghai is also trying to make its mark as an entertainment and cultural center. Last September saw the running of the Formula One Shanghai Grand Prix race, and the city is already preparing for its moment in the sun as the site of World Expo 2010. The glittering Shanghai Grand Theatre has boasted such singers as Luciano Pavarotti, Plácido Domingo and José Carreras, as well as musicals like Cats and Les Misérables.  (At other venues, pop singers Elton John and Whitney Houston, among others, drew huge audiences last year.) On the theater’s sixth-anniversary evening, we dropped in for a performance of Swan Lake by the visiting Hong Kong Ballet, part of Hong Kong Culture Week.

“Shanghai has a rich culture in all the arts,” notes Stephen Jefferies, the artistic director of the Hong Kong Ballet. “It’s coming back to life.” A striking example is the nearby Shanghai Museum. Shaped like a ding, an ancient food vessel, it houses a magnificent collection of bronzes and other traditional Chinese art. Caught up in the thrill of the new, the Shanghainese have been slower to recognize their most valuable legacy: the city’s remaining old architecture. For the first generation of those who witnessed the economic boom, the wholesale demolition of crumbling neighborhoods seemed perfectly normal. “When I was in Paris, I was so surprised that the old architecture had  been preserved,” says Yu Lei, the thirty-five-year-old managing editor of the Shanghai Tatler, a local monthly. Today, however, many Shanghainese are beginning to question whether new always means better, or, at the very least, whether a hybrid of the  old and the new isn’t preferable to either.

The project that best exemplifies a successful hybrid is Xintiandi (“New Heaven and Earth”), a pulsating complex of boutiques, restaurants and bars in traditional looking recently renovated town houses. These exhibit a chic blend of early-20th century European and Chinese styles as rendered by the modern architects commissioned by Hong Kong’s Shui on Land, a huge property developer. E.C. Liu, a Chinese-American and the in-house chief architect, maintains that simply salvaging the old buildings would have been impossible. “If you treat these houses like museums, they will become museums,” he says. “They won’t be living buildings.”

Patrick Cranley, an American businessman who is a founder of the Shanghai Historic House Association, concedes that this isn’t preservation but applauds the result.  “Xintiandi made an old neighborhood cool,” he says. “Suddenly the Shanghainese were shown that Shanghai architecture has value.”

In other neighborhoods, new construction looks virtually unstoppable, although some tenants of the old buildings have been emboldened to fight eviction orders or demand better compensation for leaving. But the city has begun to designate more buildings as historic landmarks, and a neighborhood like the French Concession remains easily identifiable by the trees that line its streets, which have disappeared in other areas. City officials are figuring out that such lingering reminders of the old Shanghai serve as prime tourist attractions.

Among those reminders are the scattered traces of the city’s once flourishing Jewish community, which was established by 19th-century entrepreneurs. This population grew with the arrival of refugees from the Russian Revolution and from Nazi Germany, who took advantage of Shanghai’s open-door policy. Art Deco buildings, such as the Peace Hotel, built by the powerful Sassoon family, survive, as does the Ohel Moishe Synagogue, now a modest museum. There’s also a new Shanghai Jewish Center, which serves the needs of the small number of Jews among  the expats. As in the past, reports Rabbi Shalom D. Greenberg, the Shanghainese display no hint of anti-Semitism, even if they accept some stereotypes at face value. “In Europe, if you’re rich and smart, people tend to resent you,” says Greenberg. “Here they want to copy you.”

John Huba / Town & Country Travel Yuyuan Gardens is a peaceful oasis.

But Shanghai doesn’t merely copy others: it’s a city with a distinctive, electrifying look, feel and tempo. It’s impossible to think of any place in the world where the leap from stagnation and isolation to frenetic development and transformation has been faster or more dramatic. The end product is a dazzling new Shanghai— unique and unrivaled.  When my wife and I landed in Newark after our return flight, our route home took us up the New Jersey Turnpike, from which we gazed across the river at the Manhattan skyline. No matter how often we return from trips, it is a sight that always impresses us. This time, though, something was different. Compared with Shanghai, it seemed less exciting, not that big a deal. Right now Shanghai is the city that looks and feels like the big deal.

Launched in 2003 and published four times a year, Town & Country Travel is the only national consumer magazine dedicated exclusively to the affluent traveler.

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