The true colours of Shanghai

Overnight there’s a low white mist which softens the colours of the neighbourhood but the true colours of Shanghai are released when the sun comes up.

You’ll be in good company if you start your day in Fuxing park, in the French Concession.  Curving pathways of sycamore create dappled, shady areas, each with a community of singers or saxophone players; waltzers or Tai Chi-ers.  The mood is wonderful, with smiles and lightness of heart all around.

Stepping through the arches into the alleyways of Xintiandi, you leave the cars and chaotic mopeds of the main streets and can amble around an area where Chinese courtyard architecture has mixed with European styles.  These houses, built for the workers of the Shanghai treaty port (as a safer alternative to the highly flammable wooden houses of the time) have now been settled by fancy boutiques and restaurants: Jo Malone; Vera Wang and Arket etc.   

We had our first engagement with the local police outside the building where the first National Congress of the Chinese national party was held in 1921, with Mao Zedong.   Joining the queue for memento photos, Katie was not allowed to pose, until she had taken off her sunglasses!  A mark of respect for this important shrine? Or only being able to track our movements if they can see our eyes and match our faces to our passports and visas?

A stroll away, there’s a similar, but less-polished, area called Tianzifang.  People still live here and it feels less re-invented and a bit more real.   

Staying authentic (ish) I loved the Jade Buddha Temple and monastery.  It was burned down by the rebels in the 1911 revolution but the statues were moved somewhere safe and the whole complex has been carefully rebuilt in a new location.  Now, surrounded by sky-scrapers, existing and emerging, it has kept the sharply curved eaves and roof dragons to ward off evil spirits. 

Wafted along by the fragrance of incense burning in the courtyards, each hall or courtyard seems more extravagantly full of treasures than the last. 

The first three golden statues represent the buddha of the future, of the past and of the present.  And around them are dozens of larger than life statues of those who have achieved enlightenment and will pass to nirvana at death.  (the first one below reminded me of the Peking Opera movements and poses!)

You’re not allowed to take photos of the life-sized jade buddha, carved out of a single block of stone – with diamonds and emeralds embedded.  But at least this photo of a postcard shows you what it was like!

Amongst the photos of famous visitors was this one of the Duke of Edinburgh.  The poppy might have been a bit of a faux pas, given our role in the Opium wars which turned Shanghai into pretty much a semi-colony?

At the ceramic tables in the courtyard Chinese visitors (most are Chinese) are carefully writing out their red prayer cards - praying for benevolence in the year ahead. Hopes for health, happiness and good fortune are quietly tied to all the lanterns and bonsai pine-trees around the temple. Yes, much is new and restored - but it is no less special because of that.