The River at the Centre of the World (10 page)

‘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.

So within the British fiefdom that was to grow up beneath the British flag beside the Soochow Creek, British policemen (actually Sikhs, recruited in and imported from the Punjab) enforced British law.
*
Within the French Concession, which lounged defiant and insular to its south, policemen from Vietnam did much the same. Such Chinese authority as prevailed in the rest of Shanghai – in the native quarter, for instance – was to these mercantile Europeans an exotic irrelevance. The newcomers were men beyond the reach of local law, and beyond the constraining reach of the mores of their home lands. Bad behaviour, unsupervised by home, could henceforth begin.

And, whether justified or not, it is bad behaviour for which Shanghai is still best known. On the mudflats that stretched between where the Oriental Pearl Tower now stands and where Hazelwood still languishes were all the worst imaginings of a West unleashed, a concentrated essence of wantonness that made Shanghai one of the most memorably sinful cities in creation, a place that – so faded memory and modern journalism have it – may have been founded on godowns but was irretrievably grounded in Gomorrah.

For a few dozen copper cash you could have a nine-year-old child of either sex perform any act you wished. Brothels the size of factories operated with total impunity. Opium divans were as common as teahouses. You are drunk on absinthe, and you run over a Chinese coolie in the street? Four hundred dollars paid to his friend, or to his mother, and the problem evaporated. Trouble with one of the locals – perhaps he was impertinent, or your servants didn't care for him? A trifling sum paid in Mexican eagle-headed dollars would secure the services of a man with a meat cleaver who would slice through the tendons of the offender's shoulder, so he would never again be able to lift a box or a sack, or even his arm.

Shanghai was, if you believed its reputation, a dreadful place. Yes, most people – or at least the foreigners, and the rich Chinese who had evolved from the class of men called compradors, the businessmen's go-betweens – enjoyed themselves, or believed they did. This was a city where one could dance all night, go riding (on especially small Mongolian ponies, which raced vigorously at the track) at dawn, work all day and begin a new round of parties that evening without ever feeling weary. ‘I used to gamble, gamble, gamble oh, till five o'clock in the morning,’ noted one Shanghailander, a middle-aged gentlewoman transplanted from the innocence of Sussex. ‘Then I would go home, have a bath, get into jodhpurs, go down to the race-course, ride my ponies…’

During the twenties and the thirties, Shanghai's salad days, there were the delights provided by the caravans of White Russian girls who had been evicted from their homeland by the Bolsheviks, and proved the finest and most accommodating of whores, pandering agnostically to the needs of either Devils or Celestials, while operating under the guise of what were peculiarly Shanghainese professions – artiste,
entraîneuse
, taxi dancer. (The less attractive, or less young, took to walking hopefully beneath the plane trees of Avenue Joffre.) Teenage boys would seduce their parents' Chinese maids, knowing no complaint was possible, nor would ever be entertained. Auden and Isherwood took a close look at gay Shanghai and found much to their liking – amid a Chinese community for which, as Lily would constantly remind me when we talked of such louche happenings, homosexuality was then (as now in most of China) regarded as an illness for which treatment was possible, and which was confined, it was firmly believed, almost wholly to men of the decadent West.

More workaday needs were catered for as well. Your parrot's toenails growing too long, or your fox terrier's coat too bushy? The Shanghai Pet Store at the corner of Dixwell and Bubbling Well Roads would oblige. Handmade silk
directoire
knickers? Consult Messrs Ying Tai on Yates Road, or any of the other lingerie shops on what the locals called Petticoat Lane. The Kiddy Shop for your child's dungarees, Godfrey & Company for decent beef, Miss Maisie at La Donna Bella could do marvellous things with one's hair, and Madame Soloha's clairvoyance service often proved effective, though rarely for placing bets on the horses.

In the concessions where the foreigners lived there were four dairies, two dog hospitals, three expert masseuses, two furriers, a saddler. Whiteway & Laidlaw was the big department store, better regarded than the Sincere Company or Wing On. Kelly and Walsh supplied books and copies of the latest English and American magazines. And there was always Ramsey & Company on Nanking Road, who could supply you with enough gin to float a battleship, and a pretty decent claret for when one of your tennis partners from Frenchtown brought her husband round to dinner: moreover, it would all be delivered, and given to you on tick.

I once came across a small dictionary of pidgin, which offered something of the tone of the place. The pidgin itself (the word is said to be a corruption of ‘business’, so the excuse is that this is the Oriental version of business English) sounds from this distance like a cruel joke, with its
no b'long ploppers
(this is not right) and
my catchee chows
(I'm going to eat) and
pay my look-sees
(let me look at it). But it is in the English equivalents, as laid out in the dictionary, that one can more properly hear the attitude of the times. ‘
Never mind
,’ reads the book, irritably. ‘
Tell him. I don't want that. Let me look at it. Upstairs! I don't want. Get me a ricksha. Fetch quickly. Give Master the letter. Tell him to come in the morning. Get the coolie. Give me two. No overcharging! Is the bargain settled? That will do
.’

It would certainly not do in Shanghai if you didn't belong to a club. A club was a vital institution for the expatriate world, and in Shanghai the clubs, like most in the East, were made to appear grander than they actually were by their rigidly exclusionary policies – no vulgar salesmen, no shopkeepers, only the grandest of men who had associations with trade, and no one with the vaguest hint of Asian blood. Behind their grand facades, however, was bland normality: the taipans and the griffins (the fresh-faced newcomers to the East) merely drank, played cards or billiards, slept, nattered, or read. The Shanghai Club, with its famous 47-yard-long bar, was on the Bund, and still stands; so was the Concordia for Germans, and the Masonic. There were the grand and agreeably social sporting clubs – the Rowing Club, the Midge Sailing Club, the Cricket Club. As soon as Britain's first consul, George Balfour, had officially opened his mission in 1843, he set about overseeing the building of the most important sporting body of all, the Race Club. It was built beside a huge track that after 1949 was deemed large enough a space to be converted to Shanghai People's Park, and of which a part has in more recent years been made into the city's monumental new People's Square.

Everything in Shanghai in those days – the only days people talked about, until very recently – took place at a run: there was no time for languid contemplation in a city where everyone needed to make money in fistfuls, where no one trusted anyone else, where it was always feared that the next deal would go to the next man if you did not attend to your business. Rich men had two bodyguards – one Chinese, the other Russian – and each would watch the other for signs of disloyalty. There was a rigid hierarchy of distaste, as well: the English merchants looked down on everyone, the Indians and the Eurasians were despised by the English and the Chinese; the Sikhs were despised by the Parsi businessmen; the coolies were despised by the Sikhs. ‘Chop, chop!’ you'd scream at the ricksha boy, and you'd clip him round the ears if he didn't go fast enough.

And all the while, below the glitter and the meretricious glamour of the place, so its rottenness seethed and grew. The poor would come to beg on Nanking Road and be shooed away by the guards. The ricksha boys had the thinnest shoulders you'd ever seen – you knew they were hungry and would live for thirty years at best. Lorries would growl around the International Settlement on chilly winter mornings, taking away the bodies of those who had died of starvation and cold during the night. A banker might be so rich that he. would (like one Joseph Hsia, who later moved to Hong Kong) have a gold smelter in his back garden: but outside his front door there would invariably be a gaunt Chinese, dressed in rags, shivering and hungry. Some of the rich were kindly; most, in this ice-cold metropolis, were anything but.