The Old and the New

If there’s one area of Shanghai that can be considered an icon of the city, it’s the banks of the Huangpu river: the old-world Bund on one side and the shiny, brand-new Pudong on the other. Flocks and flocks of tourists gather here, to the point that it’s really hard to take a picture in any direction without getting at least a couple of heads in the front. Keep an eye on you belongings and your companions! Together, the Bund and the Pudong summarize a lot of what the city was and is about.

The Bund is a water-fronted avenue, lined with buildings made by Europeans in the first decades of the 20ty century, when Shanghai was the sin city of the East. These buildings include Art-Deco type hotels, several big banks, and headquarters of large corporations, with a very European flair and every single one of them topped by a few Chinese flags (all of them belong to the government nowadays.)

On the other side of the river it’s all about the modern buildings in dramatic shapes, like the Oriental Pearl Tower, with an architecture that looks it was inspired by some old sci-fi illustration, the tall Jin Mao building, which houses the luxurious Grand Hyatt hotel and has a terrific view over the city, and the brand new Shanghai World Financial Center, the world’s third tallest building, which is still in construction.

Everything in the Pudong looks new, and I doubt there’s any building there that’s more than 15 years old. It feels like all those steel-and-glass corporate towers and the predominantly white residential buildings all suddenly sprouted of the ground like mushrooms.

A recent addition to this interesting dichotomy is a tunnel under the river, which connects the two banks via a neon-lit psychedelic-type experience. Add the even more neon-filled Nanjing Avenue nearby, and it’s like Shanghai is steadily turning into Walt Disney World.