The River at the Centre of the World

by Simon Winchester

  I looked for him on this new journey, but in vain. I found where his old flat had been, but it had been demolished, and a hotel was being built on the site by a South Korean company. A shopkeeper who had appeared in the film remembered him, though rather vaguely. The last definite news was from two years before, when he heard that Ge's wife was living with relations across the river in Pudong, and had for a while worked as a waitress in the French-owned Sofitel on Nanjing Road, where she had been trying to learn how to speak French in the process. Had Mr Ge still worked at the bank, I reflected, and had he still lived in his old district, he would now be able to travel to his office in one of the new air-conditioned subway trains, and his journey – a trip that beforehand would have taken him ninety miserable minutes each way – would take him only nine minutes, and would cost no more.

  His old office block had been knocked down six months before, and the bank is now housed on the tenth and eleventh floor of a skyscraper overlooking the Whangpoo, a building that is every bit as glittering as its parent in Hong Kong. When I went there and asked for Mr Ge, an ancient Chinese man operating an abacus at the back of the room, and who spoke impeccable English, said the name to himself over and over again. ‘Ge Guo-hong. Ge Guo-hong.’ He then turned to me and, in the rueful tones of an Oxford lodge porter, said: ‘Sorry, old man – the name doesn't ring a bell with me.’.

  But then I found one of his friends, a man who worked in the bank's computer department. It turned out that Mr Ge was away from Shanghai and had been for ‘some years’. He was on special leave, studying at a university in Philadelphia. He was getting a doctorate and a command of English, and quite possibly a green card. There was more to it than that. The friend explained:

  ‘It was all to do with the film. You made it? You may not realize, but you changed his life in a very big way. Mr Ge was ashamed by what he saw when you compared his life with that Mr Wong, or whatever his name was. He became determined to do better than the man in Hong Kong. We all saw the film. The office people sent a copy up from Hong Kong – we looked at the tape time after time. We all felt the same way: we thought it was quite wrong that the Hong Kong people, who are not in any way as clever as we are, should do better than us.

  ‘So he has gone, sort of as our ambassador. He will come back, and he will be a great success. We will show those southern people how poor they really are!’

  I asked the young man what he thought of the new Shanghai, symbolized by the Pearl Tower he could see from his window.

  ‘I like the new Shanghai,’ he said. ‘But that thing? I try not to look at it. It's not the kind of symbol I want to see. I am very proud of this city. But that – that looks, how to say it in English? somewhat vulgar.’ ‘Tacky!’ chimed in another man, who said he had been to San Francisco, and who knew American slang. ‘Yes, that's it – tacky.’

  The bank's office is at the southern end of a half-mile stretch of castellated Imperial architecture that offers the world the best-known face of Shanghai. We have to thank a prescient taotai for its existence, however, and not the foreigners who built it. When the first settlements were being delineated – the Americans to the north of Suzhou creek, the British in twenty-three muddy acres to its south – the Chinese laid down a rule: to preserve the rights of coolies who used the towpath to track their grain boats up the Whangpoo and towards the Yangtze, no foreign building would be allowed within thirty feet of the river itself. So a line of stakes was driven in at the water's edge, and a wide road was created between the river and the new city. This was an esplanade to which the British gave the Persian name: the Bund.

  The scale of the walkway was titanic. It was more like a seafront than a riverfront: a stretch of open land positively demanding that a slew of imposing buildings be built to march along its length. The great consulates and clubs and commercial houses all competed to oblige: the Hongkong & Shanghai Bank, the Yokohama Specie Bank, Jardines, the Shanghai Club, the British Consulate, the Chartered Bank, Butterfield & Swire, Victor Sassoon's Cathay Hotel, and the immense Maritime Custom House, with its tower clock that played a fair version of the chimes of faraway Big Ben, or by some accounts, the clock on Westminster Abbey, and which in any case the Shang-hailanders, as the expatriate community liked to be known, called Big Ching.

  There may have been one or two touches of charm – the Chinese passersby liked to stroke the paws of the Hongkong Bank's bronze lions, rendering them golden and thus more prosperous-looking – but the stretch of buildings looks, in truth, pretty gloomy. There is a mausoleum-like quality to the architecture, the buildings all heavy and solemn, faced in greyish Ningpo stone and overdesigned, made to look ponderous, imposing and grand. It was as though someone had taken the Woolworth Building from lower Broadway, cloned it several times, and then set it down unsuitably in Cannes, in place of the Carlton Hotel. You look at the Bund today, close your eyes and wonder what might have been, and then open them to find these gaunt memorials to the British. What dismay!

  The Chinese seem to have a disdainful view of these once grand structures, though for other reasons, born more of nationalistic pride than the questioning of architectural taste. So there is now a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet unsuitably placed in the basement of the old Shanghai Club building, and a Citibank automatic teller machine stands outside the Cathay Hotel – it worked perfectly, and I was able to get depressing news of my available balance back in New York in no more than half a minute. Thus are the great monuments to empire being rendered prosaic, and brought down to earth.

  However, since foreign tourists like to come and see the buildings, and since they have tended to come at night when traffic on the normally congested Bund is lighter, the city authorities have begun to urge the managers of the string of buildings to illuminate them, to show them off. They may do so only for two hours, the power bill being so high – but when they turn on the switches at about nine each evening, the great buildings do gleam briefly with some sense of their old glory, bathed in the glare of battalions of golden and pink and green arc lights.

  I took a boat cruise along the Whangpoo one evening and watched enthralled as the banks of lights came on one by one – first the old consulate, then the bank, then the club. Some buildings remained dark until the very last moment. Whoever, for instance, is now in the old Jardines building (quite probably the Jiangsu Animal By-Products Import and Export Corporation, which has its tenancy hinted at by a dirty iron plate on the wall), clearly likes to keep its electricity bills down to a minimum, and for several moments there was a dark gap in the façade, like a broken tooth. But then the lights flickered on there as well, and for a while the entire serrated wall of stone appeared on fire, a last hurrah for the West's Imperial memory.

  Lily was with me, gazing over at the buildings slipping by. Flashbulbs popped from hundreds of watchers on the Bund – people taking pictures of our passing boat, not of the structures at which we were encouraged to look. The photographers were mostly standing in what is now called Whangpoo Park, and Lily pointed to it contemptuously. ‘That's where you put up the sign No Dogs or Chinese. Remember? But now you are gone, and now it is full of Chinese. Dogs too, I expect.’

  I argued with her. There had never been any such sign, I said.* The British knew only too well the disadvantages of such impertinence. The story of the sign was a myth, part romantic conceit, part an instance of the Communists' revisionist history of Shanghai, in which all foreigners were regarded as having exploited the place, and having cordially loathed the Chinese among whom they lived. Nothing could be further from the truth, I said – though frankly, of the last point, I wasn't wholly convinced myself.

  Lily wasn't listening, and she continued, overexcited. ‘Look at your ridiculous buildings. They're not pretty, not grand. Not useful. We do them up in coloured lights to make them look foolish. They are caricatures. Like circus performers. That's how we think of you now. We dress your great buildings in coloured lights to show everyone how ridiculous you were.’

 
*

  The boat had stopped in the river now. We were beside the Custom House – whose clock was indeed chiming familiarly, and no longer playing ‘The East Is Red' as it had during the Cultural Revolution and for some years afterwards. Then we were turning around to port, and as the Bund began to edge away behind us, so the new buildings of Pudong were coming into view once more. The gigantic monstrosity of the Pearl Tower, of course, and half a dozen other skyscrapers, their summits topped with the currently fashionable syringe-like architectural conceits that gave them extra height at little extra cost. There were huge neon signs for Hitachi and Samsung; behind us the last sign on the Bund, the French Bund, was for Nescafé. The two big new bridges were lit up as well, and in the distance I could see the lights of traffic streaming by on the new elevated périphérique, four lanes wide, two months open, and already crammed with traffic that its planners had underestimated, grossly. This was the new Shanghai ahead: the old, festooned in its brief moment of pastel brilliance, lay on the far side of the boat.

  Perhaps Lily was right. Perhaps this was how the Chinese wanted to remember us – as greedy buffoons, as vulgar and immoral intruders who were responsible for giving their city its aura of decadence, dissipation and decay. Perhaps that is why they had been demolishing the inner city so ruthlessly, so wantonly – tearing down the Frenchtown houses that had once been brothels, pounding into rubble the old White Russian mansions on the Avenue Joffre, making libraries out of clubs, hotels out of taipans' houses, fast-food restaurants where once the city's great and good had feasted at a more leisured pace. The Bund, left as it was and lit so extravagantly, was just a caricature of the Shanghai that had been left behind.

  The fine new skyscrapers and the glass-and-steel department stores and the great new public buildings – in People's Square particularly – now give Shanghai the appearance she wants and craves. She wants her image, like her self-image, to be one of determined progress and a historyless modernity. Cities like Tokyo and Seoul, which have such an appearance today, owe it largely to war and foreign bombers that smashed and burned most of the old buildings with cordite, high explosive and shrapnel. But the physical Shanghai suffered little from war, even when the Japanese invaded and occupied the place, and certainly when the Communists took the city over.*

  So she has had to destroy her past on her own. It is generally accepted that 1990 was the year when this all began: before that, the fortunes of the city were essentially controlled by the Communist masters in Beijing. For more than forty years the city was imprisoned in dust and decay, a bag of bones, a collection of relics of the loathed occupants of old. But in 1990 the brakes were taken off: Shanghai was told by the Communist leadership that she could rebuild herself, make something of herself, present herself as a showcase of the new China. And she started to do so with a vengeance – and as she did her population (for many years static at about 13 million) began to rise, newcomers attracted by the old magnetism, but this time a magnetism that had patriotically Chinese, and not foreign, characteristics.

  There can be little doubt that Shanghai is soon going to occupy an exalted place in twenty-first-century China – and a position that, I would guess, may be very much more exalted in China than that occupied by today's Hong Kong, or by its fast-growing neighbour along the Pearl River, Canton. The Shanghainese have a masonic solidarity about them, a grim determination, a ruthlessness that inspires fear and respect throughout all China. Now that they have been unshackled, they have a much greater potential – and many more friends and allies – than their country cousins in the south.

  Say ‘Shanghainese' to a man in Chengdu, or Xian, or Harbin, or Beijing, and he will curl his lips in mock terror. Say ‘Cantonese' before a similar audience, and the listener will curl his lips – but in disdain. The Cantonese – ‘rice-eating monkeys’, a Beijing friend remarked to me once – are ill regarded by just about all their brother Chinese. They have performed economically so well, it is widely thought, merely and solely because of the benign invigilation of the British, who kept them cosy and secure and colonized for a century and a half.

  ‘Who are the really smart Chinese in Hong Kong anyway?’ asked Lily, who detests the Cantonese. ‘They are the Shanghainese businessmen who went there after the revolution. All the really big fellows in Hong Kong are from Shanghai. Everyone in China knows that. And they'll come back – they're coming back here now – now there's money to be made and kept on the Yangtze. You see.

  ‘The Pearl River has no real future. At least, not compared with this. The British are leaving anyway. The Yangtze is everything. It means so much to China. What does the Pearl River mean? Pah! Not a thing! And, you know, what the people here are doing, they're doing on their own. They learned from you, the foreigners. The Shanghainese are not too proud to learn, that's always true. But what they are doing now, they are doing without any help.

  ‘Did anyone help build that tower?’ she asked, jerking her thumb towards the floodlit monster. ‘Everyone said it would be impossible, that we'd need to bring in foreign experts. But not at all. We did it ourselves.’

  I reminded her that when we were up at the top of the tower she had been laughing unkindly at the ludicrously hyperbolic Mr Su, mocking his evident love affair with the insect structure. She brushed my remark away, carelessly.

  ‘OK, OK – I may not like it. I admit that it is terribly ugly. And you may not understand this – but in a strange way I'm proud of it. I'm proud because it is homemade, like all of Shanghai's success today.’

  I nodded sympathetically. But she had her dander up, and her face was flushed. She wasn't quite finished.

  ‘You know what? This tower – it says to me that we Chinese are on the inside. We are running the place. We make the decisions. You foreign people are on the outside. At long last. And that is as it should be.’

  We took dinner that night in a small underground café called Judy's Place. It was the kind of noisy and bustling spot where expatriates like to come and feel briefly at home. It was not much different from places in Manila and Jakarta and in the less restricted parts of the Middle East. The waitresses were all Chinese students, pretty young women doing time to learn English and make a few renminbi as tips.

  The expats were there in their scores, drinking Bass and Corona and San Miguel, giving their Chinese girlfriends strange cocktails with erotic names, wolfing down hamburgers or bowls of chilli. There were all the usual signs pinned up on the tribal notice board: the Hash House Harriers were meeting next day, someone wanted a secondhand mountain bike, a fourth person was wanted to shoot snipe up in Liaoning province in Manchuria. There was a leaving sale of white-wood furniture from Ikea.

  On the night we were there, the noisiest table – and there were some noisy tables – was hosted by a handsome young Briton. He was the son of a governor of the Bank of England, as it happened, and he was the current foreign representative of Butterfield & Swire. He was a man in direct line of succession from old Night Soil Brown, the first of the tenants at Hazelwood.

  But compared with his predecessors of half a century ago this young man presid's over very little – which is perhaps why so many of his evenings are spent boisterously with the professional expatriate set, and not taking part, as his predecessors once had, in the grander task of the running of Shanghai. His company, still big and important and rich, does not trade as it did along the Yangtze any more. It has no boats. Nor indeed does it have access to Hazelwood – unless any of its staff wish to pay some forty pounds a night to sleep in the old taipan's bedroom. There is no office on the Bund. The firm makes such money as it can – it acts as the agent for Volvo motor cars and is involved in joint ventures, making paint, selling insurance. Most of the Volvos are bought by newly rich Chinese – and indeed, the senior representative of Swires these days is a Chinese. Once, in Hazelwood days, any Chinese employees were merely there as compradors; now – in the days of the Oriental Pearl Tower – the Chinese are the bosses.

  For much of the
twentieth century, Shanghai may have essentially belonged to Britons like this young man in Judy's Place, and to foreign firms like the one for whom he works. But in general those men and their firms made a bad show of it. The locals learned from them what they could, and they then discarded what was of little worth – including most of what these westerners thought of as their colourful and cheerful past – and then most of the westerners themselves. The Shanghai of the twenty-first century, now so forcefully shunning all that history, casting it away like so much baggage, is indisputably and irrevocably Chinese – just as once, long before the barbarians came in their tall sailing ships, it used to be. The wheel has come full circle as, in China, it always seems to do. The foreigners turned out to be only temporary kings, at best.

  When I came back to the ship that night it was raining hard. The sentry outside the naval base was standing ramrod-straight beneath a steel umbrella, not flinching when occasional gusts of wind blew water on his face. No Foreigners Allowed Beyond This Point, read a warning sign, but Lily gripped my arm and pushed me through. She had a pass. The sentry stared fixedly ahead.

  The boat on which I was staying was a cruise vessel, detached for the off-season from its usual work on the Upper Yangtze. It was owned by a Chinese man who lived in New York, and he had generously offered to let me sleep in one of the staterooms while I did my work in the city. This night the boat was all but deserted, and it was silent and brilliantly lit. Security around these wharves is tremendous: a Chinese wanting to leave his country could scale the razor wire and be on a foreign-bound ship. Like the Soviets in the old days, the Chinese authorities keep their borders closed tight, and this, technically speaking, was a border too.