上海：一条江，两次开放

Most people who come to Shanghai go to the Bund first.

Standing on the riverbank looking east, the towers of Pudong line up on the far shore, and at night they light up in colour.

This image appears in almost every promotional film about Shanghai.

But if you only stand on the bank and look across, you'll miss something more interesting.

For two yuan, you can take the ferry across.

The ferry is one of the cheapest forms of transport in Shanghai.

It isn't laid on for tourists.

At morning and evening rush hour the boat is full of commuters, and delivery riders pushing bicycles.

The boat crosses in a dozen minutes or so.

In those dozen minutes, you pass along a very clear timeline.

The west bank is the Bund.

That row of stone buildings was put up in the early twentieth century, and belonged then to banks, trading houses and insurance companies.

Shanghai in that period was one of the most important trading ports in the Far East, with foreign capital and local merchants both doing business here.

The style of these buildings came from Europe, but the hands that built them were Chinese.

The east bank is Pudong.

Before 1990, Pudong was mainly farmland, warehouses and small factories.

There's an old Shanghai saying: better a bed in Puxi than a room in Pudong.

Then the state decided to develop Pudong, and in thirty years the situation changed completely.

The tallest tower there now is over six hundred metres.

So the two banks of this river aren't just a contrast between new and old.

They record two different openings: one brought by foreign capital, one driven by state policy.

In the afternoon I left the river and walked into a lane in the old part of town.

The longtang is a form of housing particular to Shanghai.

A main lane leads inward, with two- and three-storey houses packed tightly along both sides.

For much of the last century, one building often housed several families.

The kitchen was shared, bamboo laundry poles stuck out of the windows, and children ran up and down the lane.

Walk in today and it's much more complicated.

Some houses still have their old residents.

Some have been turned into cafés, boutiques or guesthouses.

And whole lanes have been demolished, their residents moved to new estates beyond the outer ring road.

In one lane I met an older woman.

She said she had lived there for more than forty years.

I asked her whether she would be willing to move.

Her answer wasn't as simple as I'd expected.

She said the flat is too small, it's cold in winter, and the bathroom is inconvenient.

But she knows every single person here.

After moving to a new estate the flat would be bigger, but she might not exchange more than a few sentences with her neighbours in a year.

She said that when people discuss old housing, they usually only discuss the housing.

What's genuinely hard is the relationships between people, which are very difficult to rebuild once they're broken up.

That remark made me rethink the contrast between the Bund and Pudong.

We're used to telling Shanghai as a story about speed: a new city built in thirty years.

The speed is real enough.

But speed has a cost, and the cost usually lands on specific people.

At dusk I went back to the river.

The lights on the far bank started shifting, and tour boats passed one after another.

Lots of people were holding up phones to photograph those towers.

I thought of what the woman had said that afternoon.

Towers are for people to look at.

Lanes are for people to live in.

Both statements are true; the question is how a city keeps both at once.

Shanghai's current approach is to protect some historic buildings while continuing to redevelop other areas.

Whether it works depends on which street, and which household, you're talking about.

Before leaving, I took the ferry one more time.

The same two yuan, the same dozen minutes.

The first time I rode it, I thought I was travelling from the old city to the new one.

The second time, I understood that the two banks are the same city, making choices at different moments.

If you had one day, would you go up to the six-hundred-metre observation deck, or walk down a lane that may soon be gone?