The Bund and Shanghai Sightseeing
Friday, October 24th, 2008. After taking a “mental health day” at the hotel, it was time to get out and see the sights of Shanghai. Our guidebook doesn’t recommend much here besides expensive hotels and restaurants, except for the Shaanxi Musuem (arguably China’s finest museum, but likely a close second to the museum we didn’t get to see in Xian) and the Bund.
Jason standing before the skyscrapers along the Huangpu River. This area is known as “The Bund.”
Shanghai, if you’ll recall, was once a “treaty port.” Somehow the Chinese government was “convinced” to “share” their market with the major western powers of the time – the French, English, and Americans. Shanghai’s city center was basically handed over to the French, British, and Americans (among others), and businesses from each of these countries used Shanghai to access the rest of China. Up until shortly before the Japanese invasion that is, when Shanghai’s development ground to a halt because of corruption and poor governance.
The history of Shanghai is a mixed bag – one of China’s most important port cities for the past 400 years (or so), it has been known the world over as the “Paris of the East.” It’s also been the scene of Japanese war crimes and, likely, mass executions immediately following the Communist revolution. In short, Shanghai has been at the center of a lot of events in world history.
Thus, much of Shanghai shows signs of western influence. The Bund, a section of the Huangpu river, has colonial and art-deco buildings on one side and modern Chinese skyscrapers on the other. As much a tourist trap as an historical site, the Bund is a great place to observe the meeting of East and West. Westerners, many of whom are on business, are everywhere, yet this is still a huge Chinese city with many of the same customs and characteristics of mainland China.
Shanghai is in many ways a repeat of much of what we’ve seen. However, it is more of a metropolis than Beijing as well as being tremendous in size. The city is more dense than Beijing as well – there are more skyscrapers and it’s much more “vertical” – and the automobile traffic is much worse than Beijing too. Still, there’s an energy here that is hard to explain.
We managed to fall into a tourist trap today. Known as the Bund “sight-seeing tunnel,” it costs 40 yuan per person and it’s billed as an amazing underground experience. I would say it could be more accurately described as the fastest way to get across the river, with the tag line “Get in a glorified, slow-moving subway car with lots of lights and cheesy music in the tunnel.” If you’re in Shanghai, skip The Bund sightseeing tunnel.
Footage of the underwhelming Bund Sightseeting Tunnel.
Returning to our hotel, we visited a large shopping mall just down the street known as “Wanda” (pronounced wond-ah) with lots of western restauraunts. While none of the staff at the Wan-da is terribly helpful (they seemed a little irritated by our presence, in fact), the prices are reasonable and the food is decent. We’re getting awfully tired of visiting shopping malls here in China, but the fact is they usually have a good collection of clean restaurants. If only shopping malls weren’t so crowded and over-the-top commercialized…
The Wanda Shopping Plaza is amazing, but it’s also a little over the top. We’ve been spending too much time at malls while traveling in China, but it’s sort of unavoidable. The food options are best here.
