In between two worlds

Smog hangs permanently over Shanghai, but as it is a police state the streets are always clean. Picture / Kenny Rodger

Lounging on a ruby nightclub sofa scattered with pillows, smoking apple-scented tobacco through a hookah, watching the girls of glossy black hair bewitching their Chinese boys; this is the perfect position to ponder the baffling metropolis of Shanghai.

In the warm midnight air of a bar called Barbarossa, the conversation is getting louder as exorbitant cocktails slide down jewelled throats. A bartender wearing a security earpiece listens quietly as someone asks for drugs, pauses a second, looks up, laughs out aloud, backs away.

Across the bar, a Belgian man with his forearm in plaster is talking about when the Armani boutique opened: "You should have seen all the rich Chinese with their pretty girlfriends buying leather jackets - but it's sad," he says, "Shanghai never used to be this hip, so hip it's starting to get annoying, you know what I mean?"

Hours later, going up in the hotel elevator, a sexy little thing in a small skirt and scuffed white heels stands beside her new businessman friend. He must be 65. They are both Chinese.

They stand silently apart, he clasping and unclasping wrinkled hands, she looking down at her handbag. When I move to step out at Level 26, she takes a half-step towards him, hesitant.

This is post-colonial, post-Mao Shanghai, elegant and filthy, open all hours, special discount, number one genuine imitation, the baffling metropolis, contradictory and thrilling.

Sometimes Shanghai is China, sometimes not. It is a police state and a shopper's paradise. In a vast subterranean restaurant, waiters in white face-masks descend trundling escalators, wheeling trollies laden with Peking Duck to be carved table-side for the salarymen.

On the Bund balconies, the after-dinner Westerners cluster, breathing an awestruck "aaah" as the city's gleaming new skyscrapers, all in choreographed in unison, switch off their neon lights at the government-decreed hour of 10pm.

Thick grey-beige smog hangs permanently over the town, but no rubbish is allowed to linger on these spotless streets. Nine million rusty bicycles whirr through streets colonnaded with French colonial buildings.

Exquisite young women save their Government pay-packets, averaging 1000 renminbi ($200) a month, for floaty dresses with Italian names.

For more than 100 years, Shanghai was the hook-up joint of East and West, the most decadent city in the Orient. In the early-19th century, China infuriated Britain, France and America by outlawing opium, the currency western merchants were busily importing, in exchange for Chinese tea and other goods, through China's only open port, Guangzhou.

After a British attack on its coast in 1842, the Qing Emperor offered a peace deal: western traders would be allowed to set up shop in Shanghai and trade with little interference from Beijing. Over the next century, the city became a capitalist's dream, swarming with foreigners and decadent.

It all came crashing to an end in 1966, when China's new communist leaders launched the cultural revolution from Shanghai, closing industry, dispatching students and monks to be "re-educated" in the countryside and destroying temples and churches.

By the 1990s, Beijing turned it around again, announcing Shanghai would be developed as a model of controlled capitalism, with the goal of becoming Asia's new financial hub.

Now, the city's leaders are rushing towards modernity, mowing down old buildings and reclaiming swampland, wooing foreign multinationals and knocking up ever more skyscrapers in a frenzy of construction.

Despite four decades of political repression, Shanghai is still a little wild at heart. It boasts one of Asia's most famous sights; the Bund, an avenue of neo-classical buildings arrayed proudly along the Huangpu River. At night, tourists and locals promenade along an elevated riverside walkway, a fleet of floating restaurants bobbing below, imagining the opium-soaked glamour of old Shanghai.

On the other side of the river, in the new industrial area of Pudong, flicker the lights of tomorrow's Shanghai, towers and needles and orbs of glass and concrete, zooming skywards.

Close up, it's all a bit grotty. Walking along the Bund one afternoon, I battle German tour groups, striding businesswomen in navy suits, apricot-sellers jogging with twin wicker baskets bouncing from poles slung across their shoulders.

The traffic roars past, not bothering much about lights or pedestrians, and the smoke and noise swirls behind them.

But when I push open one of the heavy metal doors on these imposing buildings, I step into another realm; dim, hushed and antique.

In the vast marble cave of the Indochine bank, clerks scribble, heads down, at lamplit desks lining the walls. I snap a photo, and a uniformed guard approaches, admonishing, finger-waggling.

In the lobby of the Peace Hotel, tinted shafts of light slant down from the stained-glass windows, blue and green. A sour mothball aroma wafts.

In the cool, echoing complex at Bund18, behind the Zegna and Cartier stores, the Sibilla Cafe's display cases offer pastel macaroons, lined up like gemstones on black velvet, more for coveting than for eating.

Out front, two taxi drivers lean out of cars, screeching abuse because neither wants to give way.

The decay of the Bund is a perfect illustration of Shanghai's odd relationship with its history. The city's real thrill is its atmosphere of crumbling colonialism, but Shanghai's tourist officials aren't interested in old; they want visitors to pack into elevators, zoom up the tallest towers and marvel at the skyline.

Once you get there, however, the only way to see the view is to buy a postcard. From the 88-floor Jinmao Tower, all I can see is the thick brown-yellow smog enveloping the city, turning distant buildings into mere smudges. "Very foggy today," says our tour guide brightly.

Of course, it's not fog, and with a little prompting even the tour guides admit there is no such thing as blue sky in Shanghai. Travel magazines and postcards always show clear skies, but the only time I saw anything approaching clean air was on a public holiday, after the cars and factories had suspended their rumblings for a few days.

It is much better to experience Shanghai at ground level. Across town in the charming old French concession, tree-lined boulevards are cluttered with boutiques.

The coolest antique store in town is the sleek Madame Mao's Dowry on West Fuxing Rd, where the hipsters can spend 800 RMB on the kind of Little Red Book their parents were forced to own or 100 RMB on a chipped enamel mug promoting the 2008 Beijing Olympics, complete with Chairman Mao's proud face.

Many visitors have no greater fun than haggling over a knock-off Rolex or pair of "Nice" trainers at the markets, but after about four depressing minutes, I escape to walk through the glorious backstreets instead.

At every turn looms an architectural gem, like the French Concession's Moller house, a 1930s Swedish shipping magnate's idea of a Gothic fairy-castle.

Blond expats browse the English-language bookshops or twirl pasta around their forks, sitting in the muted sunlight outside the tourist-focused Xiantiandi shopping enclave, and in the glittering malls like Parkson on Huaihai Rd, the Shanghainese girls browse for shoes and handbags.

These girls aren't interested in the latest Prada knock-off; they have a distinctive, outrageous fashion sense all their own. Like black-haired Sarah Jessica Parkers, they strut down the roads, spangled handbags and strappy sandals all aglimmer, a vision worth visiting Shanghai for alone.

Our guide Stella Jiang, 26, an employee of the Government-owned China International Travel Service, arrives one morning to shepherd us around a temple wearing red sequined shoes and an array of floral and striped items which all somehow work together, all topped with a pink silk parasol.

The following day Stella crowns another ensemble with a tiny rhinestone tiara, nestling in her highlighted curls. An English literature graduate from a local university ("we studied Jane Austen, Shakespeare, the classics,"), Stella's real name is Jiang Yuan-Yuan, but it's the fashion to select a Western name, so she plucked one from a cartoon show.

"I can tell you this is the tallest/fastest/longest/biggest ... in the world," she says repeatedly, as we approach yet another marvel of Chinese ingenuity, be it a bridge, tower, or train. Often, the boast is justified: the Maglev train, which links Pudong with the airport is a 431km/hour adrenaline rush, whipping through the suburbs so fast that another train passing in the opposite direction makes only a millisecond's whoosh.

The people make this city special. At the Jade Buddha Temple in central Shanghai, 28-year-old Kou Ling-Ling conducts a tea-tasting ceremony as if she is conducting an orchestra, assessing her patrons' mental and physical wellbeing: "You look tired, terrible, you need some of Tea Number 1 and Tea Number 3 for energy and weight loss," Ling-Ling barks at one of our group.

But Shanghai's most extraordinary people must be the acrobats of the Shanghai Grand Theatre. I've never been crazy about acrobatic troupes, which these days seem to be all dry-ice mysticism and pretentious soundtracks, so I have low hopes as we shuffle into the theatre and wedge our cumbersome Antipodean limbs into our seats, knees clanking.

But in Shanghai, acrobatics are still pure; this is a bunch of humans doing incredible things with their bodies. With only faded plastic crash-mats between the acrobats and death, it is about as technologically sophisticated as Year 3 PhysEd, but dazzling for its sheer athleticism.

The climax, where four death-cheating motorcyclists whiz about at top speed inside a spherical cage, has me shrieking "Oh No!" and "Don't do it!" like a 4-year-old at a pantomime.

English is not widely spoken here beyond the hotel lobbies, and foreigners still attract stares - especially when we venture out on a day-trip to the nearby city of Suzhou.

As the locals goggle at the dreadlocks sported by one of our group, we step through garden gates on nondescript streets to discover glorious private gardens, where the local nobles spent centuries building elaborate bridges and cultivating bonsai (a Chinese invention, just like golf, according to our patriotic guide, Shelley Xie.)

At every opportunity, Shelley says 13th-century explorer Marco Polo was so inspired by Suzhou's picturesque canals he dubbed the city "Venice of the East".

These days, the canal-side houses are nicer to look at than to live in. They have no plumbing and each morning sanitation workers collect each household's "honeybucket" - surely the best euphemism ever.

The presence of Mao is still real. "The police are always protecting you," reads a sign outside the police station in Suzhou. It feels half reassuring, half menacing; exactly the impression we get from the "official history" at Shanghai's Urban Planning Exhibition Centre.

"The big capitalist powers forced China into overseas trade after the Opium Wars so the Qing emperor signed the unfair [1842] Treaty of Nanjing," says the centre's guide, Vivian Suen Xiao Lan, 23, wearing high-heeled shoes sparkling with sequinned bows.

"While the Chinese people suffered humiliations, Shanghai was also forced into earth-shaking transformations, but during World War I because the big powers were preoccupied with the war, they neglected the economic exploitation of China, allowing China to develop."

Vivian is part of the city's riddle. Her shoes may glitter, but she is a Shanghai Miss with the soul of a Red Guard, reciting her propaganda by rote.

Some days, especially listening to zealous officials like Vivian, Shanghai feels like a dynamic new frontier, the future of Asia. Other days, it just seems like a wannabe player, so desperate to catch up with Singapore and Taipei that it risks overlooking its real treasures - its architecture and warm, charming people.

Third-world and futuristic, baffling but tremendous fun, Shanghai is eternally surprising.

* Claire Harvey travelled to Shanghai as a guest of Air New Zealand.

* Air New Zealand will begin thrice-weekly direct flights from Auckland to Shanghai from November 6 using its new fleet of Boeing 777s. Return fares will start at $1949 (plus airport charges). See website link below.

Win a trip to Shanghai

To celebrate Air New Zealand's start of direct flights between Auckland and Shanghai on November 6 the airline and Herald Travel are offering readers the chance to win a holiday for two in China's booming economic capital. The prize is worth around $6000 and includes:

* Return tickets for two, including all taxes and departure charges, flying Air NZ premium economy class Auckland-Shanghai.

* Three nights' accommodation in the Jin Jiang Tower hotel, 161 Changle Rd, Shanghai.

* Dinner and drinks for two in The Cupola, at 3 on The Bund, Shanghai or, if that is booked out, at the New Heights restaurant of which The Cupola is a part.

* Transfers both ways between the airport and the hotel in Shanghai.

* The prize cannot be taken until the start of direct Air NZ flights and must be used before May 1 next year.

How to enter

To be in to win just put your name and address on the back of an envelope, give the name of Shanghai's famous waterfront avenue and post to:

Shanghai Holiday, Travel Section, NZ Herald, PO Box 3290, Auckland.

Entries must reach the Herald by noon on August 1 and the first correct entry drawn will win the prize.

The name of the winner will be published in Travel on August 8.