monday 2

our second monday of the trip and our first full day in shanghai.

on monday morning, we visited the yu garden and walked through shanghai's china town. that's right, shanghai has a china town. in late imperial times, the city was divided up among western powers, and there was only one tiny section where chinese people were allowed to live. this is shanghai's china town.

the yu garden is an old residence of some government official, and it's at the center of a restored, old looking, very touristy area where you can buy a lot of antiques, authentic or not-so-authentic as they may be. you can also buy jewelry and knock-offs of designer bags and watches and an endless array of other touristy items.

the yu garden and the buildings in it are gorgeous, but it makes you wonder how such an imperial relic survived the hard-core communist days. apparently such places were just sealed off from the public for years. it and places like the summer palace and temple of heaven in beijing show how much the government takes advantage of these imperial relics for economic gain. it also demonstrates how little the party adheres in practice to its ideology.

after haggling and making some good deals on touristy crap, we went to the river for a cruise that showed us the skyline, and the insane amount of development on the river stood in contrast to the preserved, old yu garden. it seemed like there were as many buildings going up as there were already standing. shanghai boasts two of the very tallest buildings in the world. one is not yet finished, but it's construction is paused right now because the builders want to wait for a rival building in taiwan to be finished. that way, they can make sure that this building is definitely the tallest building in the world. another interesting thing about that building is that it is either owned or being developed by a japanese businessman, and that, combined with the original design that called for a hollow circle at the top of the building - reminiscent of the "sun" of japan - didn't fit well with the nationalist ideology so important to china's political stability. so anyway, the design had to be changed so that the building will now have a hollow square at the top instead of a hollow circle. it will look a lot uglier, in my opinion, but i guess those in charge don't care as much about aesthetics as they do about national pride. so yeah, lots of construction along the river, and a ridiculous amount of barges and ships getting loaded to bring cheap goods to the us and other countries.