Shanghai

We arrived on our high speed train from Wuhan into Shanghai at 7ish on Friday night, after frantically phoning around to find a hostel as everywhere seemed to be booked up for the weekend. Luckily we found somewhere, so after buying a very good value 72 hour metro card for around £4.50 we set off for the hostel, which luckily was fairly centrally located. After ordering 96 dumplings between us for dinner, we tried to make a night out of it, buying Baiju (rice wine) and mixing it with Fanta and Sprite as recommended by our hosts in Yangshuo, but we couldn't totally get rid of the horrible taste, and heading to a club recommended online. It was essentially a fancy cocktail bar, so we quickly moved on to another club which was in a cool former air raid shelter, but sadly was fairly empty, so gave up and caught a taxi home.

The next morning, nursing hangovers and looking for lunch, we travelled to the French Concession in search of a famous Shanghai restaurant, but sadly it was closed. Fortunately across the street was a Muslim restaurant where I enjoyed some delicious Mongolian beef fried rice, which gave us the boost needed to further explore the French Concession - visiting Tianzifang, a touristy but fun maze of souvenir shops in traditional Shanghai alleys, which you could imagine were in the past filled with opium dens and gangsters. After buying a few souvenirs we hopped on the metro towards Shanghai's iconic riverside, known as the Bund, which was lined with stunning art deco buildings and a huge riverfront promenade. We strolled along the promenade as the sun went down, enjoying views of the Bund itself and of the financial district of Pudong, dotted with skyscrapers (including the world's second tallest), with the bright lights juxtaposed with a giant communist monument to the revolution at the end of the promenade. After soaking up the atmosphere for a while we went in search of dinner, via the 5 star Fairmont Hotel, which was a beautiful art deco building with a 1930s interior which we explored as far as we could. We eventually found Yang's Dumplings, a famous Shanghai chain which specialised in delicious fried dumplings, the best dumplings of many we've had in China. After dinner we returned to the hostel, before heading out to a club recommended to us in Hong Kong known as the mansion. It is notoriously hard to find, so we got a taxi driver to drop us off in the general area and bumped into some fellow partygoers, students in Shanghai who included a Tajik and a Kazakh. We eventually found our way to the club, through a little hatch in a wall and ended up having a great evening of socialising and dancing, leading to us only getting back to the hostel by about 5am.

Waking up very late and feeling a little worse for wear, we attempted to make the most of our afternoon, heading to the Shanghai Museum, which took us a while to find despite it being shaped like a massive gold Chinese traditional cooking pot. The ground floor of the museum featured the Bronze collection, which had Chinese bronzes dating back 5000 years, with a pot decorated with Yaks a particular highlight. Also on ground level was the sculpture gallery, which had a number of beautiful pieces, including an amazing stone carved with 1000 tiny buddhas and a statue of the Buddhist female icon Guanyin, depicted strikingly similarly to the Virgin Mary. We moved on upstairs to the ceramics gallery, which had some attractive Tang dynasty multicolored pottery figurines of camels and dancing ladies, but was otherwise less impressive than most Chinese porcelain we see in the West. Adjacent was the painting and calligraphy galleries, which featured interesting information on the development of the Chinese script and beautiful paintings, often vertical landscapes, which reminded us of the mist shrouded mountain scenery of Emei Shan. Pressing on, we visited the Jade gallery which was fairly dull, followed by the coin gallery which mostly consisted of hundreds of traditional Chinese coins which were just identikit round coins with square holes, although there were some interesting silk road coins. The final gallery focused on Ethnic Minority Crafts and was particularly interesting, featuring ethnic minority dress from across the country and other artefacts including Uighur knives and creepy Tibetan opera masks. Tired out and overly cultured, we lowered the tone a bit by having dinner at the McDonald's near the hostel before getting an early night.

Still tired from our weekend exploits, we woke up late on our last day in Shanghai and made our way once more to the French Concession, where we searched for and eventually found the Shanghai Propaganda Art Center, a museum located in an apartment block basement, apparently due to its somewhat sensitive subject matter. The museum turned out to be a treasure trove of amazing original posters. It took us on a chronological journey starting with art nouveau style posters of femme fatale 'Shanghai girls' from the hedonistic Republican period, followed by early 1940s and 50s socialist realist propaganda extolling the virtues of the simplified alphabet an industrialisation, with it often being the same artists behind decadent adverts in the 1930s and communist propaganda in the 1940s. The posters helped tell the story of China under Mao, often criticising the US and supporting North Korea, while purges were reflected by different editions of posters having different politicians removed. While the poster as propaganda declined after Mao, there were still a number extolling the wonders of Chinese technology. What made the museum more amazing was the fact that later Chinese leaders ordered all propaganda posters destroyed, so they are generally very rare. We were so impressed by the museum (and felt we needed something to remember it by as photography was forbidden) that we each bought ourselves a print of a poster a souvenir. After a fun afternoon in the museum, we returned to the hostel to collect our bags before our train journey that evening to Hangzhou....Read more