Shanghai – First Impressions – A Little Summer Series of Excerpts

Seems like there’s an ex-pat exodus from China at the moment with plenty of final, final, final essays, posts and whinges from half-baked laowai heading home to mum’s. Most of it is silly, a little of it self congratulatory and universally it’s boring as batshit – as all those leaving posts are self-referential they are by default dreary. Well, enough of that nonsense. I’m away for a while on holiday for a bit so thought I’d post a series of first impressions of Shanghai by various people from the 1840s up to the Second World War, all of whom are far more interesting than anyone complaining about a bit of bad air or spitting these days. Arriving in Shanghai during this century of change, by boat invariably, or occasionally overland, was to be staggered by the city (rather than moaning about the strength of the wi-fi signal and poor lattes)…..and so…

…a gallimaufry of writings upon arriving in Shanghai.

But first a little more introduction:

There’s something very special these days about stepping off a boat and arriving in a city for the first time, or even for a return visit. You don’t do it that often and usually now it’s at a remote location some distance from the city centre rather than in the pulsating heart of a metropolis. Many cities have historically allowed for a grand entrance to made by boat – the vats ports of London and Liverpool and Hamburg, the spectacular geographies of Gibraltar, Hong Kong and Yokohama; the teeming waterfronts of old Marseilles, Bombay and San Francisco while, of course, passing the Statue of Liberty to arrive at Manhattan was the dream of many a new world immigrant. These great cities not withstanding, Shanghai was probably the best place to arrive anywhere in the world. Whether you came in from the South China Sea all the way up the Huang Pu River to Pudong or transferred to a smaller craft for the final arrival right on the Bund, it is clear, as the reminiscences, in this book remind us, of how spectacular it must have been to arrive, disembark and then be swallowed up by the most teeming, modern and cosmopolitan city in the Far East. The shock to the senses was, over the years and across all those arriving, pretty immense, even for travellers relatively used to arriving in cities across Asia. Shanghai was then, as it is for many people now, just “more so” than most other places.

 Of course the craft they arrived on changed over the years, as did the Bund they arrived at. British Consul Rutherford Alcock, arriving in 1846, wouldn’t have recognised the Shanghai waterfront British soldier Ralph Shaw did when he arrived in 1937 with the Durham Light Infantry.

Tomorrow back to 1842….and an early arrival….