The River at the Center of the World: A Journey Up the Yangtze

by Simon Winchester

  So within the British fiefdom that was to grow up beneath the British flag beside the Soochow Creek, British policemen (actually Sikhs, recruited in and imported from the Punjab) enforced British law.* Within the French Concession, which lounged defiant and insular to its south, policemen from Vietnam did much the same. Such Chinese authority as prevailed in the rest of Shanghai – in the native quarter, for instance – was to these mercantile Europeans an exotic irrelevance. The newcomers were men beyond the reach of local law, and beyond the constraining reach of the mores of their home lands. Bad behaviour, unsupervised by home, could henceforth begin.

  And, whether justified or not, it is bad behaviour for which Shanghai is still best known. On the mudflats that stretched between where the Oriental Pearl Tower now stands and where Hazelwood still languishes were all the worst imaginings of a West unleashed, a concentrated essence of wantonness that made Shanghai one of the most memorably sinful cities in creation, a place that – so faded memory and modern journalism have it – may have been founded on godowns but was irretrievably grounded in Gomorrah.

  For a few dozen copper cash you could have a nine-year-old child of either sex perform any act you wished. Brothels the size of factories operated with total impunity. Opium divans were as common as teahouses. You are drunk on absinthe, and you run over a Chinese coolie in the street? Four hundred dollars paid to his friend, or to his mother, and the problem evaporated. Trouble with one of the locals – perhaps he was impertinent, or your servants didn't care for him? A trifling sum paid in Mexican eagle-headed dollars would secure the services of a man with a meat cleaver who would slice through the tendons of the offender's shoulder, so he would never again be able to lift a box or a sack, or even his arm.

  Shanghai was, if you believed its reputation, a dreadful place. Yes, most people – or at least the foreigners, and the rich Chinese who had evolved from the class of men called compradors, the businessmen's go-betweens – enjoyed themselves, or believed they did. This was a city where one could dance all night, go riding (on especially small Mongolian ponies, which raced vigorously at the track) at dawn, work all day and begin a new round of parties that evening without ever feeling weary. ‘I used to gamble, gamble, gamble oh, till five o'clock in the morning,’ noted one Shanghailander, a middle-aged gentlewoman transplanted from the innocence of Sussex. ‘Then I would go home, have a bath, get into jodhpurs, go down to the race-course, ride my ponies…’

  During the twenties and the thirties, Shanghai's salad days, there were the delights provided by the caravans of White Russian girls who had been evicted from their homeland by the Bolsheviks, and proved the finest and most accommodating of whores, pandering agnostically to the needs of either Devils or Celestials, while operating under the guise of what were peculiarly Shanghainese professions – artiste, entraîneuse, taxi dancer. (The less attractive, or less young, took to walking hopefully beneath the plane trees of Avenue Joffre.) Teenage boys would seduce their parents' Chinese maids, knowing no complaint was possible, nor would ever be entertained. Auden and Isherwood took a close look at gay Shanghai and found much to their liking – amid a Chinese community for which, as Lily would constantly remind me when we talked of such louche happenings, homosexuality was then (as now in most of China) regarded as an illness for which treatment was possible, and which was confined, it was firmly believed, almost wholly to men of the decadent West.

  More workaday needs were catered for as well. Your parrot's toenails growing too long, or your fox terrier's coat too bushy? The Shanghai Pet Store at the corner of Dixwell and Bubbling Well Roads would oblige. Handmade silk directoire knickers? Consult Messrs Ying Tai on Yates Road, or any of the other lingerie shops on what the locals called Petticoat Lane. The Kiddy Shop for your child's dungarees, Godfrey & Company for decent beef, Miss Maisie at La Donna Bella could do marvellous things with one's hair, and Madame Soloha's clairvoyance service often proved effective, though rarely for placing bets on the horses.

  In the concessions where the foreigners lived there were four dairies, two dog hospitals, three expert masseuses, two furriers, a saddler. Whiteway & Laidlaw was the big department store, better regarded than the Sincere Company or Wing On. Kelly and Walsh supplied books and copies of the latest English and American magazines. And there was always Ramsey & Company on Nanking Road, who could supply you with enough gin to float a battleship, and a pretty decent claret for when one of your tennis partners from Frenchtown brought her husband round to dinner: moreover, it would all be delivered, and given to you on tick.

  I once came across a small dictionary of pidgin, which offered something of the tone of the place. The pidgin itself (the word is said to be a corruption of ‘business’, so the excuse is that this is the Oriental version of business English) sounds from this distance like a cruel joke, with its no b'long ploppers (this is not right) and my catchee chows (I'm going to eat) and pay my look-sees (let me look at it). But it is in the English equivalents, as laid out in the dictionary, that one can more properly hear the attitude of the times. ‘Never mind,’ reads the book, irritably. ‘Tell him. I don't want that. Let me look at it. Upstairs! I don't want. Get me a ricksha. Fetch quickly. Give Master the letter. Tell him to come in the morning. Get the coolie. Give me two. No overcharging! Is the bargain settled? That will do.’

  It would certainly not do in Shanghai if you didn't belong to a club. A club was a vital institution for the expatriate world, and in Shanghai the clubs, like most in the East, were made to appear grander than they actually were by their rigidly exclusionary policies – no vulgar salesmen, no shopkeepers, only the grandest of men who had associations with trade, and no one with the vaguest hint of Asian blood. Behind their grand facades, however, was bland normality: the taipans and the griffins (the fresh-faced newcomers to the East) merely drank, played cards or billiards, slept, nattered, or read. The Shanghai Club, with its famous 47-yard-long bar, was on the Bund, and still stands; so was the Concordia for Germans, and the Masonic. There were the grand and agreeably social sporting clubs – the Rowing Club, the Midge Sailing Club, the Cricket Club. As soon as Britain's first consul, George Balfour, had officially opened his mission in 1843, he set about overseeing the building of the most important sporting body of all, the Race Club. It was built beside a huge track that after 1949 was deemed large enough a space to be converted to Shanghai People's Park, and of which a part has in more recent years been made into the city's monumental new People's Square.

  Everything in Shanghai in those days – the only days people talked about, until very recently – took place at a run: there was no time for languid contemplation in a city where everyone needed to make money in fistfuls, where no one trusted anyone else, where it was always feared that the next deal would go to the next man if you did not attend to your business. Rich men had two bodyguards – one Chinese, the other Russian – and each would watch the other for signs of disloyalty. There was a rigid hierarchy of distaste, as well: the English merchants looked down on everyone, the Indians and the Eurasians were despised by the English and the Chinese; the Sikhs were despised by the Parsi businessmen; the coolies were despised by the Sikhs. ‘Chop, chop!’ you'd scream at the ricksha boy, and you'd clip him round the ears if he didn't go fast enough.

  And all the while, below the glitter and the meretricious glamour of the place, so its rottenness seethed and grew. The poor would come to beg on Nanking Road and be shooed away by the guards. The ricksha boys had the thinnest shoulders you'd ever seen – you knew they were hungry and would live for thirty years at best. Lorries would growl around the International Settlement on chilly winter mornings, taking away the bodies of those who had died of starvation and cold during the night. A banker might be so rich that he. would (like one Joseph Hsia, who later moved to Hong Kong) have a gold smelter in his back garden: but outside his front door there would invariably be a gaunt Chinese, dressed in rags, shivering and hungry. Some of the rich were kindly; most, in this ice-cold metropolis, we
re anything but.

  And yet what made Shanghai so appealing to the foreigners who first settled there was an attitude among the local people that might well have prompted gentler sentiments than these. For unlike in the rest of China, where the barbarian foreigners were regarded by the Chinese with a deep and abiding contempt – after all, the inherent superiority of the Chinese was, and still remains, central to the national psyche – early settlers in Shanghai wrote of their distinct impression that they were, well, almost liked.

  Few foreigners would go so far as to say the Shanghai Chinese admired or respected them – there was a general acceptance that a people with five thousand years of uninterrupted civilization behind them had some right to hauteur. One might not agree with it, one might try to ignore, skulking behind one's own mock-superior airs – the club's exclusionary policies, frequent reminders of who had won the Opium Wars, or of who had sacked the Summer Palace up in Beijing. But it was always there, and it would be a wise expatriate who would try not to fight it.

  Yet in Shanghai there seemed less need to fight. It was always thought that here the subterranean hostility had abated somewhat, that the Shanghainese ‘were little afflicted’, as one writer put it, ‘with that peculiarly passionate hatred of the pale-eyed and fair-haired beings which was so widespread among the Cantonese.’ They seemed more open-minded here, more willing to adapt to foreign ways, more tolerant of the devils from across the water. The Shanghainese learned, happily and willingly, and masking their disdain, from the foreigners. And within this distinction lies the root, undoubtedly, of the future success of the city. Her location on the Yangtze is her greatest boon; her people, unique in all China (and speaking the ugliest of languages, a discordant mélange of Mandarin and Cantonese spoken by no one outside the Yangtze delta), are her greatest asset.

  For while sin is at the core of Shanghai's reputation, the more sober reality – what allowed the city to survive and to prosper, and what made it less of a Gomorrah than it seems – was its unashamed and freebooting mercantilism. This was a city in which the trader was absolute king, a city (perhaps the last in the world) that was created by and for and utterly dominated by the demands of the merchant. Shanghai was a place so dedicated in its commitment to commerce that Hong Kong seemed by comparison a dreamy city of poets and philosophers. Shanghai was a place founded in the traditions of Genoa and Venice. It was guided by the same kind of aggressive self-interest that was invented by the Germans of the Hanseatic League – with the Rhenish traders of fourteenth-century North Europe replaced by the Britons and the Frenchmen and the Americans who came to China in the nineteenth. True, the merchant of Shanghai played, and he played hard and fast and loose, and there are those who will say he became unshackled from his moral guide-wires in doing so: that is one side of Shanghai's story, and the more titillating one for today's palates. But he also worked, and traded, conducting business on a breathtaking scale: the legacy of that side of the city is what remains. And this is what a place like Hazelwood stood for, or stands for today: the memory of sin on the city's surface, but the reality of sturdily respectable – or at least sturdily profitable – commerce underneath.

  I walked down what used to be Avenue Joffre one spring evening to see something of that legacy at work. I was coming back from taking a stroll around what is left of Hazelwood's lawns, and I headed east, towards the winking towers on the Whangpoo. The avenue is now Huaihai Road, and though its name gives it stout revolutionary credentials,* and though for many years it was as dull and grey as ditchwater, it is now one of the liveliest of streets in any city, a Chinese version of the Ginza.

  Coloured lights were strung in arches along its length. Small dress shops, tiny Japanese restaurants, sports cars parked outside nightclubs with their ubiquitous neon lure, the flickering Kara-O K signs, smart-looking cafés with names like Los Angeles and the wrongly spelled Cordon Blue. The street was choked with people – mostly young, nearly all Chinese: the Europeans stay on the six-mile strip of Nanjing Road, a few blocks north, where the prices are higher, the shops are open later and there is a McDonald's. Huaihai Road is by contrast a purely Chinese affair: the shops, the bars, the discos all Chinese-owned, the customers all from the suburbs and the tiny city streets called hutongs and the tower blocks of flats near by.

  As we were passing one particularly glossy-looking bar, Lily suddenly beckoned to me: three girls were sitting together at a window table, each nursing a can of Coca-Cola. One girl was talking on a mobile telephone; there were three pagers on the table, each beside a pack of Marlboros.

  ‘Prostitutes!’ said Lily. ‘Can tell them a mile off.’

  We sat down with them. None of the three spoke English, nor had any of them ever had a western client. The girl with the phone said her name was Xiao-an – Little Serenity – and she charged four hundred renminbi for an hour with a man. Did the police bother her? ‘They are often our best customers,’ she said, and the three exploded in laughter. She was not a Shanghainese – she had come down from the far north, after hearing how good the money could be. She thought she would stay in Shanghai a year, and then go back home to Harbin in Manchuria and set up a karaoke club of her own. ‘This is a good life,’ she said. ‘Shanghai must be like your New York, I think.’

  Outside the window I could see two policemen, who must have been only too aware of what was going on. Indeed there were a lot of police in Shanghai: at every crossing one stood on a plinth, directing traffic.

  I spoke to one of them: he was unarmed (although Lily kept insisting that all Chinese policemen did keep side arms under their shirts), but he did have a radio, and he would be able to get brother officers within thirty seconds if any motorist broke the law. Shanghai seemed to me one of the most aggressively policed of Chinese cities. Maybe it has to be: maybe the old habits of lawlessness – this was a gangland city, after all – have not yet died. Something of the sin remains.

  And older citizens are brought in to help regulate matters too: old men with tattered red and green flags stand at every intersection to make sure people don't jaywalk, and that cyclists don't ride against red lights. Equally venerable men and women are employed by shops to advise innocents on how best to get onto an escalator, or how to find their way among the maze of stalls and corridors. ‘There was no unemployment in Shanghai under the old-style Communists,’ one old man remarked to me. ‘And there isn't any now, under the new ones. Everyone here works. Everyone here makes money, everyone makes his contribution to seeing that the city keeps going.’*

  This ancient directed me around a corner, to Joyful Undertaking Street (where I tried to explain to an uncomprehending Lily why a joyful undertaker would be hard to find) and the old pink building where the Communists first met in July 1921. It used to be a girls' school: now a museum, a shrine for the Shanghai faithful. Pictures of a young-looking Mao were on the wall, ranged beside those of the other twelve delegates at that first gathering. But I noticed that of this group, eight are dignified with full-page pictures in the brochure on sale in the foyer for a couple of renminbi. The others – an augury of things to come – have small and out-of-focus snapshots, and explanations in the rubric that they either had left or had been expelled from the Party, or, horribile dictu, had gone over to the Japanese.

  We wandered idly through the school halls, looking at various icons of Imperial cruelty. A ticket that gave a worker in a capitalist tram-factory permission to spend only two minutes in the bathroom particularly exercised Lily – it made her so angry, in fact, that she immediately developed a spectacular nosebleed and had to be looked after by the crone who ran the place. The woman kept soothing Lily by saying how her red blood was a symbol of her socialist purity – she looked witheringly up at me while she delivered this homily – and demanded that Lily sign the visitors' book in blood. ‘It is a symbol,’ she kept saying. ‘A sign. I am very proud to know you.’ Lily, as perplexed as most modern young Chinese about the realities of Marxist-Leninism, made an excuse, signed the boo
k in ink, and we hurried back out into the lights of Huaihai Road.

  There, under one spreading tree a number of elderly ladies had set up ear-cleaning stalls. Nearby, younger masseuses offered to twist and pummel the tip of one of your fingers, promising thereby to make you feel younger and more active for the night ahead. Beside them was a man selling crickets' cages, and another offering steaming buns, ten jiao each. This was China still, no matter the neon, the mobile phones and bleepers, and no matter the distinctive rumble I could hear beneath them – a Manhattan-like rumble – of the brand-new subway trains rolling their passengers home.

  The subways – one line is now ready, six more are to be opened before the end of the century – are already changing the lives of the millions who live here. One example came home to me especially vividly. A few years before I had been making a film in which I examined in some detail the life of a young Hong Kong bank worker, and of his opposite number in Shanghai. It was, back in 1988, a brutal comparison.

  The Hong Kong man spoke English, had a huge flat, drove a two-year-old Toyota, worked in a vast air-conditioned skyscraper, took annual holidays in Thailand and California. His Shanghai counterpart, Ge Guo-hong, was a clever, rather intense young man who did exactly the same work for the same bank, but in a cramped and ancient office that stood not far from where I was now walking. He told me, rather sullenly, that he spent three hours in a dirty bus each day travelling to and from work, standing – never sitting; he could never find an empty seat – in the hot and muggy air. He lived in a tiny one-room flat five floors up – no lift, of course – and his wife worked in a factory: their combined earnings were such that neither had ever had a holiday. His life, he said, was not good.