BORIS SHIU FOR TIME

CITY THAT NEVER SLEEPS: Shanghai's skyline glitters from the top of a Pudong skyscraper

Shanghai Swings!
	The long slumber is over, and Shanghai is grooving to an exuberant global beat
	By Hannah Beech

Posted Monday, September 20, 2004; 20:00 HKT
When Alphonso Zhu sauntered into the Paramount ballroom—suit pressed, hair smoothed back with Yardley's Brilliantine—the scion of one of Shanghai's richest families would often be greeted with a welcome fanfare from the band's trumpet section. One of the most eligible bachelors in town in the 1930s, Zhu courted Chinese, European and Eurasian girls with multilingual ease. In his spare time—and playboys in swinging Shanghai had plenty of it—he started up a jazz band with the sons of the Swedish consul general. The music stopped in 1949.

Under communism, Zhu's family home was confiscated, and he was assigned a menial job. The Paramount, once the hottest joint in town, became the Red Capital Theater, where workers were corralled to watch films on the glories of socialism. Recently, though, a man whose life has roller-coastered along with Shanghai stepped out for a most remarkable event: the grand reopening of the Paramount, where sequined Russian showgirls kicked up their heels and Chinese women swirled by in slinky cheongsams. "This is the greatest city in the world," says the 86-year-old Zhu, in his precise, courtly English. "And now, I feel, it's only getting better."

He's not alone in that thought. From its very origins a century and a half ago, Shanghai was a mixed-blood metropolis that upended every notion of Orient and Occident. A Western trading port built on an Eastern marsh, its fashions were French, many of its banks and trading houses were British, its security guards were turbaned Indians from the raj and its signature soup, borscht, was brought by Russians fleeing from the Bolsheviks. Chinese refugees flooded the city, too, more than a million of them, bringing acres of bamboo scaffolding and the secrets to making the finest silk. By the 1920s, Shanghai was an exotic stew of Jewish opium traders, Chinese compradors and Viennese dancing girls. Seduced like so many others by this sprawl of humanity, Aldous Huxley wrote in 1926: "Yes, it will all be there, just as intensely and tenaciously alive as ever—all there a thousand years hence, five thousand, ten. You have only to stroll through Shanghai to be certain of it. London and Paris offer no such certainty."

Communism, of course, stalled the full flowering of Huxley's brave new world. Shanghai slumbered for half a century. But today, the world's love child, a hybrid of history, is stepping out again, with not just Chinese but global aspirations.

In 1985, Shanghai had just one skyscraper over 100 meters high; it now has more than 300. A fleet of Mercedes-Benz taxis took to the road earlier this year, while bicycles, that most proletarian mode of transport, were banned from the city's biggest avenues. The past few years have brought China's finest museum, a soaring Grand Theater and the Xintiandi entertainment district, where a maze of renovated lane houses offers 30,000 people per day everything from fine dining to hip nightclubs. In the past year and a half, the city has given birth to its first Ferrari, Bulgari and Armani stores, and Louis Vuitton will this week open its largest boutique in Asia outside of Japan.

Across the river from this retail mecca, a futuristic vision called Pudong sparkles as the city's new financial district on what was mostly marshland 15 years ago. By 2008, Pudong will boast the world's tallest building, providing Shanghai the superlative exclamation point it craves. This year, the city expects more than $12 billion in contracted foreign direct investment, nearly 40 times that of 1985. More foreigners now visit Shanghai than in the city's first heyday. Some travel from the new airport on what is perhaps the city's finest metaphor: a $1.2 billion magnetic-levitation train that reaches 430 kilometers per hour, making it the world's fastest locomotive—even though the entire trip takes only eight minutes. "I've lived all over Asia, and no place has the kind of energy that Shanghai does," says Rudi Butt, the Hong Kong-born executive director of the Yongfoo Elite, a private dining club in the historic French Concession, where a corporate membership costs $7,000. "Just walking down the street, you feel like people are picking up their pace and making everything go faster and faster."

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