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My 22nd floor hotel room in Pudong overlooking the docks gave an excellent view of the constant procession of freight ships and barges moving slowly down the Huangpu River, just short of its junction with the mighty Yangtze. When my Shanghai class finished yesterday I took the subway into the city, first taking a stroll down the Nanjing pedestrian mall that looks better every time I visit, then on to the Xintiandi / Tianzifang district. Tianzifang is a maze of crowded tourist shops housed in a complex of old characterful buildings; Xintiandi is a gleaming modern suburb of upmarket apartments, international stores and restaurants. Walking between the two I chanced upon the former house of the late Zhou Enlai, Mao’s Deputy in the 1950s, 60s and 70s. Once part of the French Concession in the old colonial days, this area is now home to some of Shanghai’s more wealthy residents who live high up in the apartments or in the graceful houses dating from a bygone era set along the tree-lined streets.
I had dinner at the Xintiandi branch of Din Tai Fung. While my vegetable and pork and shrimp dumplings were being rolled and steamed, the waitress gave me a copy of the Shanghai Daily to read. The news wasn’t good – the death toll from the gas explosion at the Happy Sheep Hotpot Restaurant in Shanxi province has risen to 14 with 47 others seriously injured. And elsewhere, the man who lifted the lid on China’s 2008 milk products contamination scandal has been found murdered; not, as was first feared, in a revenge attack for his having blown the whistle, but stabbed by his own wife fed up with being beaten up every time he came home drunk which, it seems, was often. No doubt the news would have got brighter on the following pages, but my dumplings arrived.
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