Shanghai'd

Richard West

The old Shanghai of the Twenties and Thirties has always been, after St Petersburg, the city I most wanted to visit except in the sense that, like most addicts of cheap fiction and Hollywood films, I have countless times been to Shanghai in imagination. I am familiar with those murky alleys where opium smugglers clash With White Russian princes, and secret agents with indescribably evil faces are found with daggers of an intricate oriental design stuck in their backs. I must long ago have seen The Shanghai Gesture, complete with gambling den, brothel and sad police- man, where Gene Tierney, the prostitute, says: 'It has a ghastly familarity, like a half-forgotten dream. Anything could hap- pen here.'

I have quite recently seen again Shan- ghai Express, where Marlene Dietrich, asked if she has a husband, drawls the immortal line: 'It took more than one man to change my name to Shanghai Lily.' I know such buildings on the Bund as the Cathay Hotel, where Noel Coward wrote Private Lives, and the British Club, with the longest bar in the world. The long bar's like the Café de Paris. Stay there long enough and you'll meet everybody you know,' says Major Brabazon-Biggar, a Far East bore in one of the P. G. Wodehouse books, who goes on to tell a hilarious story, a pastiche of Somerset Maugham, of being approached at the long bar by a dishevelled Englishman, gone to the bad through drink, drugs and native women. Of course he turns out to be Sycamore, who went to the old school and once made 146 before going out to a googly.

Having just witnessed what had been done to Peking, I sadly imagined that every building and artefact of the old Shanghai Would have disappeared along with the gangsters, the whores and the White Rus- sians — thousands of whom were returned to Russia in 1949 and there shot or enslaved in the Siberian Arctic. But I found to my surprise and delight that Modern Shanghai has scarcely changed, Physically, from the Shanghai of my day- dreams, and may not have altered much in its character. If appointment is the oppo- site of disappointment, Shanghai is the biggest appointment in my travels.

In two days of incessant walking, with taxi drives to the outer suburbs, I was amazed to find so much of the old city not Only still there but well-maintained. In the French Quarter you pass under a canopy of leaves from the plane trees lining the street, past villas, apartment blocks, shops and restaurants in good condition. I thought at first that Shanghai must be one of those 'Potemkin villages' that were built to deceive the Empress of Russia on tours of the provinces — but you cannot build a Potemkin village of ten million people and then let strangers wander about it at will.

The Chinese city, which once was an enclave of crime, wretchedness and de- pravity in the European Quarter, is still a warren of alleys but now is devoted to honest trade rather than brothels, grog shops and opium dens. The municipality employs wardens with arm-bands and loudspeakers to regulate the pedestrian traffic of shoppers for every kind of food, and goods as various as TV sets and fish-hooks.

The British Club is now a hotel for Chinese only, and little remains of its ancient grandeur except for the `Doulton and Co, Lambeth and London' porcelain in the gents and, yes, the long bar, in what is now the restaurant. The physical bar has been cut in three and you cannot sit at it, but we were able to pose there for photo- graphs after our lunch. The shrimps and beef in oyster and chicken legs, with Tsing Tao beer, cost just over a pound a head and tasted better than what I should guess was the old club fare of overcooked beef and sour claret. The Cathay Hotel still flourishes under the name of the Peace Hotel. In its coffee-house each evening, a band, composed mainly of saxophones, blares out American hits from the Thirties and Forties like 'Time Goes By', 'Chatta- nooga Choo-Choo' and 'Melancholy Baby', still further giving one the sense of having strayed into an ancient Hollywood movie about Shanghai.

The bookshop of the Peace Hotel has 'Remember — mention the policemen and the pickets.' most of my own favourites, from Scoop to Heart of Darkness, as well as Pan Ling's In Search of Old Shanghai, the wisest and most enjoyable book of its kind I have ever read. That would merit two articles just to itself. Among other things, Miss Ling observes that the old restaurants have now reappeared, most of them under their former names, to satisfy the hunger for spiced beans, Nanxiang steamed buns and fermented glutinous rice soup. She says that the Shanghai dialect has survived the efforts to replace it with Peking speech: `Nor have the slangy expressions thrown up by the preoccupations of the old society — gambling, whoring, European-bashing and ripping people off — been totally blotted out by . . . a socialist and strait- laced society.' She reminds us that 'Shan- ghai's vocation has not been government, or art or religion — it has been money- making.'

It still is. One of the weirdest buildings in Shanghai is the yellow and brown mock- Tudor mansion, with lawns, cedars, cyp- resses and Surrey pines, that once be- longed to the Sassoon family. So rich were the Sassoons in their time that their name was used by the Chinese for all the Jews, as in the story recounted by Evelyn Waugh of a Chinese servant explaining Good Friday to a friend: 'Number one Sassoon gets nailed to a cross and other Sassoons get angry.'

When Shanghai fell to the Communists in May 1949, the last of the Shanghai Sassoons, who had got his money out, said in New York: 'Well, there it is, I gave up India and China gave up me.' The stock- broker Tudor house survived the Cultural Revolution and indeed was used as the HQ and residence of the Maoist Gang of Four. When the gang was disgraced and jailed, the mansion was leased to the British Petroleum Company, whose representa- tives, when I called there, had much enjoyed their stay, although they were moving to Canton.

The Chinese Central Committee has just published its plan for drastic liberalisation of trade and industry and the encourage- ment of the profit motive: Shanghai appears to have jumped the gun. The shops in Nanking Road are packed with merchandise and shoppers, like Oxford Street in the sales — it is a sight inconceiv- able in the Soviet Union or one of its colonies such as Poland, whose wretched people — those not in the boss class must queue for hours each week, even for the essentials of life. The factories of Shanghai make this the largest industrial city in China. An ever-increasing number of firms have some sort of link with foreigners, especially the 'overseas Chinese', who enjoy privileged status.

On my first day in Shanghai I was approached by a young man who told me in English that he was an economics graduate, a worker who wanted to be a businessman. All he needed, he said, was a foreign partner who could provide the capital. Delighted to find that Shanghai had restored one of its ancient professions, that of the con man, I asked him what sort of business he had in mind. 'Import- export,' he said. 'We would sell tea from sources I have in the provinces, and in return we would import photographic equipment. We could sell it legally in the shops. The government encourages private enterprise because the state system doesn't work. And foreigners get a tax concession.' Regretfully, I told him I had no capital or, as the Irish say, on the contrary.

An Englishman in our group made the comparison between Shanghai and Liver- pool. Both were great ports, centres of shipbuilding, with splendid edifices of banking, insurance and commerce, world- famous hotels, racecourses and sleazy red- light districts. Both have Anglican cathed- rals built by the architect Scott. Shanghai had a large European quarter — Liverpool had a large Chinatown.

Who would have thought in 1949 that Shanghai would now be prospering, while Liverpool had deteriorated into a vast slum of misery, crime and idleness, its port almost defunct, its shipyards and factories closed by the trade unions, its old buildings decayed or knocked down, its population addicted to drugs and race riots, or shoved into still more horrible new towns like Kirkby?

In Shanghai, in one year in the Thirties, 20,000 people were picked up dead in the streets. Liverpool MPs such as Mr Heifer were outraged when Norman Tebbit, the Cabinet minister, suggested that people who wanted a job should 'hop on a bike'. Almost the whole population of Shanghai hops on a bike to go to work.

The Roman Catholic Archbishop of Liverpool Derek Worlock and his friend the Anglican Bishop David Sheppard, who joined in the protest over the bikes, and often support the fashionable left-wing causes at home and abroad, should study the churches in Shanghai. The Scott cathedral is closed. The Jesuit church of St Ignatius is open and well kept. I noticed that the Stations of the Cross are here represented by sacred paintings and not, as in Liverpool's Catholic cathedral, by photographs of Vietnam war victims and `underprivileged kids'. The garden is bright with roses, chrysanthemums, salvias and Michaelmas daisies, in contrast to Liver- pool's Catholic cathedral, surrounded by weeds and empty beer bottles.

All that was lacking at St Ignatius's was

any sign of a priest. The doorman was evasive. Some English language students next door lost all their fluency when taxed with this matter. An aged Catholic fled when some bystanders started to listen in to our conversation. This may be one of the 'national churches' that have re- nounced allegiance to the Pope. Most of the real priests and their congregations were among the 30 million or so Chinese who were murdered shortly after the 'li- beration' or during the Cultural Revolu- tion, when Red Guards destroyed two of the spires of St Ignatius. According to Amnesty International, the Roman Catho lic Archbishop of Shanghai, the 84-year- old Ignatius Pinmei, has been in prison for 30 years. Ten Roman Catholic priests and monks in Shanghai were jailed in Novem- ber 1981, and the 76-year-old Bishop Peter Joseph Fan Xueyan, who had been in prison 15 years, was given a further ten- year sentence. Perhaps these men did not have the enlightened, left-wing views of the clergy in Liverpool.