Shanghai by Boat

Downtown Shanghai

Sorry for the lack of updates recently, I didn't get around to it. Today was an extremely long day, so for now I'll just talk about yesterday, and hopefully tomorrow morning I'll write about today's adventures.

Yesterday's highlight was the visit to the international occupation districts and the boat tour up and down the river around the bend through downtown. During Europe's age of imperialism, they had districts of influence in Shanghai (and any other major city in the east) where they lived and carried out all of the usual western discriminatory practices, excluding Chinese from certain compounds within the borders of their own country. For most of the 19th and 20th centuries, this area was basically the downtown area of Shanghai. However, in an effort to take the focus of the European influence in these parts of town, the Chinese are building all of their flashy new skyscrapers on the other side of the river.

And as you can see from the picture, they have done very well in achieving the desired effect. In a recent trip to Toronto's SkyDome, my mother and I were mildly overwhelmed by the large, brightly colored TV screens that flashed advertisements from every angle. Once again, we can take this somewhat familiar element of life at home, multiply it by about 10,000, and maybe then get a decent idea of Shanghai. The entire facade shines and flashes at you from across the river. Brightly lit tour boats share the water with ocean-going barges whose lights are nearly invisible next to the rest of the city. The lights on the Pearl Tower flashe different colors and dance around the structure, while advertisements scroll across jumbo screens along the river's shore (hard to see in the picture). And then there's the building-size TV screen. The building on the far right is a TV screen. Well, it's a building too, but it doesn't just have plain colored lights on it. It plays Coca-Cola commercials to the entire city.

Skyscrapers are traditionally built to offset tremendously high property costs. By building a 100-story building, you can turn 1 acre of land into 100 acres of floor space. This is how a place like New York City comes to exist, with many extremely tall buildings standing in close proximity to each other. But here, there are relatively few extremely high buildings, and they are pretty well spread out. The most impressive structures in Shanghai were built mainly for the fact that the city is modernizing, and modern cities have to have impressive structures. The Pearl Tower was built because Shanghai didn't have any buildings like the CN tower, Sears tower, Golden Gate Bridge that immediately achieve recognition and affiliation with a great city. The city planners are putting on a really big and expensive sound and light show to convince the world that Shanghai is for real.