Shanghai, Shanghai. City on the sea, in Mandarin. Except it's not. It's on the Huangpu River, which is joined by the Suzhou Creek, and - twenty miles downstream - by the Yangtze. I hadn't wanted to come to Shanghai, or at least hadn't any great desire to do so. That was very wrong. Shanghai is wonderful. It has air you can breathe. The sun is visible. The water seems cleanish. The Bund is magnificent.
But most of all, it is open. You can walk through it. I realised, walking down a tree-lined street in the French Concession, that Beijing had been stifling. Shanghai feels like a “normal” city, in that its buildings are different shapes and sizes. It has contrast. It has beggars and glamorous bars, and little shops and Giorgio Armani. It has, and has had, relentless construction – most of the skyscrapers of Pudong, says Simon, weren't there six years ago. Now they are huge and breeding fast. But there are still normal sized houses and two-storey shops. Both these things are difficult to locate in Beijing. Or it seems like it. A woman who lived in Beijing for a decade was on the point of leaving China until she moved to Shanghai. Now, someone told us, she's buying a property there. Beijing, she said, was Stalinist.
In our one day in Shanghai, we had lunch in the French concession, then iced tea thanks to Bruno, the courteous manager of the Glamour Bar, at number 5 the Bund. He is so courteous, he immediately offered to let us into his apartment, once Simon had said he was now thinking of buying a place in Shanghai. Bruno's apartment is in an old building facing Suzhou Creek, which used to be so dirty the fish stood up in it, but now is clean enough. At least, it doesn't stink. Bruno was the first foreigner to buy an apartment in the building three years ago. Now there are special sections in That's Shanghai classifieds for “Old-style apartments.” Old is back in.
After an evening boat trip on the Huangpo, which started off badly when the tour guide led us to a coach, though the ticket office was right on the river, dinner was at the Whampoa Club at 3 The Bund. The Whampoa club is glamorous, again, and provides Chinese food that includes chocolate-covered spare ribs. I didn't partake. But something I did eat yesterday gave me an affliction that would be an appropriate subject for my book. Diet so far: dry toast, plain noodles and much green tea. And a five-course French dinner, but that was later.
More examples of Chinese civility: In a Shanghai taxi run by another taxi firm, the rules said the passenger was “entitled to refuse payment under any of the following circumstances where the driver smokes in the car; uses a cellular phone while driving; spits or litters out of the car; fails to use any common courtesies, ie. does not say hello or goodbye or bye bye.”
I got out of the taxi very slowly and expectantly, but the driver said bye bye.
Now we are back in Hong Kong. There are many things that distinguish Hong Kong from the mainland, but here are a few: They drive on the left (I didn't notice first time round), though left-hand drive cars aren't permitted on the mainland. Taxi drivers speak better English. All my pitiful Mandarin is pretty useless as it's back to the harsher-sounding and totally mysterious Cantonese. The BBC news website is once again available, and the BBC TV channel doesn't generally go black when a report about, say, the freedom of Chinese bloggers starts showing.
We are back in the splendid Four Seasons, where they return laundered shirts with perfectly matching cufflinks included. There's a TV in the mirror in the bathroom. There is no lady in a ballgown at the healthclub spa door. And there is a table behind the kitchen in the French restaurant where the select can sit and eat mightily good food and watch the chefs work. The Cantonese French chef, it seems, is the quietest chef in the business. It was like watching UK Food, without the shouting.