The River at the Centre of the World Read online

  3

  The City Without a Past

  The tiny patch of brilliant green – it looked tinier, somewhat shrunken from when I had seen it last, five years before – lay half hidden behind a grove of London plane trees. There were shrubberies, a croquet lawn, the tattered leavings of a tennis net, a rusty roller with a dried-out wooden handle. The sharp scent of boxwood, of damp moss, of old pinecones. At the centre of the gardens a squat country house with a copper roof, dormer windows and ten Doric columns on the second floor. In places – the shadow of an old brass plate, the outline of iron letters on a garden gate – relics of what they called the place half a century ago: Hazelwood.

  I had always liked the house. As a creation of the mid-thirties, it reeked of solid Home Counties suburbia, Betjeman country, although its creator insisted it was art deco and had it done up in canary yellow. It had been built as the residence of the taipan of Swires – or Butterfield & Swire, as it was known more precisely – the great British business house that along with its rival Jardine, Matheson & Co. once dominated trading in and around China. Swires ran China Navigation (CN Co.), one of the greatest shipping lines that worked the Yangtze. The grand men who were chosen to manage the firm for four- or five-year stints in Shanghai were immensely well looked after, treated like diplomats, or like the suzerains that in this peculiar hothouse of a city they invariably turned out to be. This house was part of the package.

  I liked the house in part because of what it represented – mercantile confidence, colonial swagger, a certain rigorous high-mindedness – and in part because of who designed the building: Clough Williams-Ellis, one of Britain's more eccentric architects, and a man I had known a little. In the remote corner of north Wales where he lived, he cut a striking figure, not least by wearing plus-fours with canary-yellow socks and a cravat. His wife was a Strachey – his own bohemian air may have been half derived from his association with Bloomsbury – and he helped edit her anthologies of science fiction.

  Architecture was his love, and eternal warfare against those he called ‘the Philistines' his self-appointed mission. With a view to creating beauty wherever he might, he designed buildings in almost every corner of the world. The quarry workers' tenement he inherited was turned into a house of fantasy and delight. He created an entire village near his home – and so fantastic did it turn out that it was later to become world-famous as the set for a cult television show.* He designed a baroque chapel in Hertfordshire and a Tudor castle on the Wye. He rebuilt the centre of one of Ireland's prettiest towns. He designed Lloyd George's tomb. And he designed – though he never visited – two properties for Swires in China: the taipan's house in the port city of Tientsin and this house in Shanghai, Hazelwood. What he would have thought of the old place now, sitting in the midst of so much modern philistinism – for modern Shanghai is nothing if not a philistine metropolis – is not hard to imagine.

  Whenever I found myself in these parts I would always come and pay homage to the house and through it, to old Clough: I thought of the place rather as a friend, a place I could hold on to, or as somewhere that, in this most crowded and jostling of cities, I could get my bearings.

  Once it was a home, comfortable, well set, with four tennis courts and a raked gravel drive. It was much the same kind of house as you might have visited for a Saturday lunchtime gin in genteel suburbs like Camberley or Virginia Water, or perhaps White Plains or Grosse Point – except that this was Shanghai, the most iniquitous town in the world, a cruel, mercenary city of white-hot passions and ice-cold hearts.

  Not that those who lived at Hazelwood seemed party to any obvious iniquity, nor any cruelty or passion. You could remember what they looked like: the Swires men invariably tall, with square jaws, neat moustaches, kitted out in yellow cardigans and cavalry twill; the women matronly, competent, handsome, with the deep voices of the hockey field. (The first resident was the redoubtably square-jawed N. S. Brown, known to his staff, less than kindly, as Night Soil Brown.)

  You could remember the innocent sounds, as well: the crunch of gravel as tyres pulled in under the porte-cochere, a sudden burst of laughter from the grass court, the patient clicking of the pruning shears by the matron with the trug of roses, the music drifting lazily from a wireless in the drawing room. The Chinese amah calling to the children to come inside for tea.

  But these days what once was Hazelwood is just a small hotel, the Xinguo Bingguan, the Prosperous Kingdom Guest House. It was confiscated from Swires in the 1950s, like almost all the assets and property of the city's foreigners. Nowadays there is a glossy brochure: ‘Inside the Xing Guo Hotel the scenery is beautiful and peaceful. Big trees with exuberant foliage are alive with melodious birds. Fragrant wafts of flowers in full blossom breeze about. Several villas in European style are enwrapped by the greenery…’

  What was once the main bedroom of the house, the one where the taipan slept and which had the french windows leading onto the terrace, and a view over the south lawn, has now been made into what they call a suite. The proprietors – the local government, a city ward in fact – will take sixty-five American dollars for each night you stay there, and they will charge it to your credit card. You are assured of privacy, just as the lairds of Hazelwood once were: the house is quite invisible behind the high brick walls that insulate it from the people and the traffic on Avenue Haig and Avenue Joffre and Rue Cardinal Mercier, and Bubbling Well Road, as the streets around were then known.

  It was indeed made to be quite hidden from all of the city, amid which it nestled, secretly. It had been designed as a private house for one of Shanghai's most powerful foreign figures, a man who wanted a place tucked away from the bustle and the sin, a place where you could forget the existence of the city's 668 brothels and the calls for drinks at the longest bar in the world and the assorted terrors of Blood Alley – and for all the time he lived there, and for decades afterward, Hazelwood was private indeed.

  But things have lately changed in Shanghai, and Hazelwood's splendid seclusion has gone. The privet hedges and the plane trees may still be there. But now, from another angle, an entirely new one, the house has recently become eminently and rather dramatically visible. A great new building has just gone up, one that dominates the city skyline and provides a place from which to gaze down on this and on all the old jumble of structures from Shanghai's extraordinary past.

  It is impossible to miss: I saw it the very instant that I drew back the curtains of my cabin, and I almost jumped with surprise. The boat on which I was staying was moored at the northern end of the city reach, just downstream of the old Russian Consulate, at the place where the Whangpoo makes the final turn of the S-bend that once dictated where Shanghai was first built. My cabin faced south, and so the view was impeccable – directly down the river. The huge walls of old Imperial Shanghai ran down the Bund to the right. The suspension wires of the new Yangpu bridge – the second of two – glinted ahead in the distance. But on the left, bathed in white searchlight glare and winking with dozens of anti-collision lights, rose the extraordinary, unexpected, bright-red-tinted and breathtakingly ugly Oriental Pearl Television Tower, the tallest and, for the time being, unarguably the most vulgar structure in the East.

  The Oriental Pearl Tower is a mongrel of a thing, a high-technology fantasy by an architect who was commissioned merely to build something that was defiantly and symbolically Twenty-first Century. It stands, perhaps with deliberately revisionist cheek, on top of the very spot where Jardines once had their main Pudong wharves and warehouses. It is 1535 feet high, all legs and bulbs and pods and needles; it looks like an insect. It is not unimpressive: those who see it for the first time gasp, for it quite dwarfs every other building in Shanghai by both its scale and its bellowing chutzpah.

  At night it looks as though it is about to take off. (‘I wish it would,’ muttered Lily, who at first thought it a very disagreeable addition to the city's skyline.) By day it stands suspended above the hurrying crowds, looking dark and vaguel
y menacing, half lighthouse, half gibbet. It is of course suggestive of tomorrow, but at the same time it somehow seems to be a warning of tomorrow. Some people who see it shudder: it is so huge, it went up so quickly* and on close inspection it is so badly made. And indeed, by being so gigantic, so hurriedly done and so shoddily put together it does manage to symbolize – in more ways than its makers know – the realities of the fast-growing new city that sprawls around and beneath it. But that is not why I found it so menacing a structure: I think it was the fact that it combined its sheer ugliness with its utter domination of the view. How, I kept wondering to myself, could city fathers with any sense of civic pride have permitted such a thing?

  A deliriously proud citizen named Mr Su took me to the top of the monster. According to his thickly laminated business card, he was its Vice General Manager, and I gathered from his ceaseless chatter that his task was for him a labour of love – he adored both his building and all of new Shanghai. As we stepped from the lift, he spread wide his arms and began to point out grand and new and ever more glittering structures that were rising around the city on every side, down amid a forest of construction cranes. For a while I happily ignored him: I was content to peer down through the grey-blue haze of factory smoke and car exhausts until I found the tiny landmark patch of green that was Hazelwood, far away to the west. I spent some while gazing fondly down and across at it, getting my bearings in a way I had never imagined possible. It was infinitely more pleasurable to do this, to shut out Mr Su's unending drumbeat of statistics and notable achievements and, in a poignant sort of way, to savour the connection and reflect on the dissonance between Clough's old house down there and this new colossus on top of which we were standing.

  But eventually Mr Su became less easy to ignore. He moved away from the windows, invited me into another lift, took us up a few floors, then down a few more, along a corridor and onto an escalator until I was quite comprehensively disorientated. He had by now stopped talking of the changes that were being wrought down in the city, bubbling away instead with explanations of the specific architectural details of his own building. He did so at a great clip, shouting all the while, like a circus barker.

  ‘The symbol of this city is – what? The pearl. Pearl of the Orient, yes? Well, look at this: how many pearls you see?’

  We seemed to be standing now near one of the tower's three elephantine legs, and I saw he was waving pictures before me, jabbing at each of them with his finger.

  ‘Look at Seattle. Only one pearl at the top. Look at Moscow. Look at Toronto – bigger than us, yes – but how many pearls? One, just one.

  ‘Now look up, look at ours.’

  And I looked, and halfway up the closest leg was a thirty-foot sphere of red glass, like a thrombosis.

  ‘Er – a pearl?’ I ventured, hesitantly.

  ‘Yes – exactly.’ He looked amazed at my insight. ‘And look – there's another, and another.’

  One pearl, so-called, on each of the three legs. One immense sphere – another pearl, I should say – where the three legs joined. Then five more smaller globule-pearls, each sixty feet in diameter, up along the main shaft. Another truly massive one at the top of this shaft, then a smaller one farther up on a subsidiary and narrower shaft, after which was the spire and on top of this the television antennae.

  ‘Eleven pearls. Eleven! How's that for a symbol? We wanted to be different, and we wanted to make a statement about who we are. So we truly are the Pearl of the Orient now, don't you think?’

  Lily was stifling her laughter at all of this – though I rather sensed she was changing her mind about the tower now that we had taken this tour; she had nudged me at one point and said that the building was making her feel ‘quite proud’ – but there was no stopping Mr Su. ‘Come into the elevator. We go to the topmost pearl. The most private room in Shanghai. Here you will get away from everything. You want to hold a secret meeting, you hold it here, in full view of everyone – but no one can get here. You understand?’

  Men in red uniforms stood as lift doors opened and shut, girls in red uniforms took their positions on red carpets inside the lifts, red light filtered in through the red glass. (‘Canadian, imported specially. Far too expensive. The old buildings here only ever had blue glass, or clear glass, so we are much better, yes?’) There was a fiery anger to the inside of the tower, a furnace feeling that was not much relieved when finally we arrived inside the sphere – the pearl – at the top of Shanghai. The place was still plastery with makings, workers scurrying around hammering and drilling and tightening things, and there was sawdust on the red carpet. The light that filtered in was tinted rose.

  ‘One thousand three hundred of your feet up in the air,’ announced Mr Su happily. ‘Still not quite the top, but this is as far as guests can go. Here we will have conferences, honeymoons. Who knows?’ He giggled amiably. ‘Very private.’

  As private as Hazelwood once had been, I thought. There it stood, five miles away across the hazy plain of mud over which the early Shanghai had been settled. Five miles separated us, and sixty or seventy years – which was just about all the real history that Shanghai ever had.

  Technically the city actually is quite old: there are suggestions that a fishing village existed on the site in 200 BC, and it was given its present name – which means simply ‘above the sea’ – in AD 900. But it never amounted to much, and compared with its neighbour cities – places like the then-called Soochow and Hangchow and Ningpo – it was generally ignored. It had a modest wall, three miles around, built more to protect the inhabitants from Japanese pirates than to give itself airs. The wall was unusual in that it was round – most Chinese walled cities are square – and its outline, surrounding what was once called the Chinese City, or the Native City, is still plainly visible on maps.

  At ground level, the wall is less easy to spot: the curving road can just be made out, and beyond it the streets are narrower and grubbier. The laundry hung out to dry from one house touches the clothes poles suspended from the house opposite. There are rats everywhere, despite posters advertising incentives – cash, rice, cheap radios – for carcasses handed in to the local street committee chairman. Tiny stalls sell joss sticks and spices and plastic shoes, and there are more open-air restaurants – a dignified term to describe a scurvy-looking man presiding over a wok filled with dark and ominously bubbling and hissing fat – than elsewhere in the city. Generally, though, the relict part of Shanghai's old quarter is dull and charmless, with an unhealthy feeling, and when I suggested to Lily that we might linger there and perhaps take dinner, she made a face and refused point-blank.

  The city's real history – the history that has made her so notorious a place – began at the end of the eighteenth century: this was when the East India Company, spurred on by the reports of missionaries who had seen it, began to take an earnest mercantile interest. What the company officers in Calcutta liked about Shanghai – what was then, as now, the city's crucial advantage – was her prime location.

  Shanghai was no isolated trading port like Canton or Macau, merely suspended on the underbelly of China, cut off from the vastness of the Empire by ranges of hills and linked to it only by moody and irritatingly short rivers. Shanghai, rather, was at the downstream end of the Yangtze, a river that, though then quite unexplored by foreigners, clearly penetrated deep into the heartland of the nation.

  The distinction is an important one, and it has implications today for the future of, among other places, Hong Kong. All of the southern entrepôts, of which Hong Kong is the best-known, are in truth little more than gateways to the south of China. Circumstance has forced them to become gateways to all of China. But a glance at any map will show they are not really gateways to China at all – they are simply gateways to south China. For eighteenth- and nineteenth-century merchants eager to win permission to trade with the vast Chinese Empire, any gateway was good enough – even entryways as limited in access as the southern port cities.

  Shanghai,
however, is linked intimately with the entire country: no hills, no barrier of any kind, separates the port from the interior. A journey from Tibet to Shanghai is merely long: it is not, as the Yangtze herself so perfectly illustrates, impossible. And so, both when the East India ships first recognized that fact and today (and in the future), this city on the Yangtze is an entrance and an exitway for all of China. (This is a reality that was recognized too late, one might argue, in the haphazard process by which Britain settled her colonies in the East. How might matters have turned out if Shanghai had been the colony, not Hong Kong?)

  The crews of the East Indiamen who visited the Shanghai of the beginning of the nineteenth century had only to glance at the cargoes in the Yangtze junks moored out in the roadsteads to know that this modest city should, one day, be the principal port for all of China. The bills of lading preserved today speak of bolts of silk, bags of green and black tea, sacks of bean cake, tobacco, camel wool, porcelain, noodles, liquid indigo, musk, rhubarb, lily flowers, nutgalls, fans, ginseng, mulberry paper, bamboo shoots, books, the hides of strange and exotic beasts, cuttlefish, straw hats, rice, varnish, dried fish, tung oil, sunflower – all China – settled in the junks' holds. So in 1830 the company plucked up the courage to send in a ship, the Lord Amherst, to ask the local taotai for permission to trade: they were sent away with orders never to be so impertinent again.

  But all had changed a decade later. Under the combined malignities of Patna opium and Lord Armstrong's heavy guns – a story that belongs to a later chapter, as it culminated in solemn ceremonies held farther up the river – China caved in to the West's demands and conceded that the foreign devils could indeed have permission to trade – not only in Shanghai, but in the other four so-called treaty ports of Canton, Amoy, Foochow and Ningpo as well. From 1843 onward they could trade and, moreover, their traders could live in these same five cities and could enjoy the extraordinary privilege known as extraterritoriality, as if they were diplomats in an embassy, or crewmen aboard a ship on the high seas.