上海：一九九〇年的两面

Most people who come to Shanghai go to the Bund first, standing on the riverbank photographing the Pudong skyline to the east.

That photo is very useful, because it compresses a complicated city into one sentence: the old is on this side, the new is on that side.

The trouble is that while the sentence isn't false, it explains almost nothing.

If you want to work out the relationship between the two banks, the cheapest way is to spend two yuan on the ferry.

The ferry isn't a sightseeing attraction; it's municipal transport.

At morning rush hour the deck is packed with commuters and delivery riders pushing bicycles.

They keep their heads down over their phones, with no interest at all in the towers on either side.

For them this is just crossing the river.

But in those dozen minutes you pass through two upheavals spanning more than a century of Shanghai.

Start with the boat itself.

Public ferry service on the Huangpu began in 1911.

Before that, wharves and factories were already being built in Pudong, and workers had to be shuttled across each day by steam launch.

Until the Dapu Road Tunnel opened in 1971, the ferry was the only way across the river.

The Yan'an East Road Tunnel opened in 1989, and bridges and metro lines followed.

The ferry's peak was the 1980s: over a million passenger trips a day, with twenty-two routes on the river.

In 1993 the annual figure was about three hundred and seventy million trips.

A ticket cost six fen then; today it's two yuan.

Get on today and you can usually find a seat.

The west bank is the Bund.

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

Shanghai in that period was one of the most important treaty ports in the Far East.

The architectural styles came from Europe, the drawings from foreign firms, and the construction was done by Chinese craftsmen.

The east bank is Pudong.

On 18 April 1990, the state announced the development and opening of Pudong, establishing the Lujiazui, Waigaoqiao and Jinqiao development zones that same year.

Before that, Pudong was mainly farmland, wharves, warehouses and small factories.

Shanghai has a widely repeated old saying: better a bed in Puxi than a room in Pudong.

The Oriental Pearl was completed in 1994 at four hundred and sixty-eight metres, the tallest structure in Shanghai at the time.

Today the tallest is the Shanghai Tower, at six hundred and thirty-two metres.

In a bit over thirty years, a stretch of farmland grew into China's highest skyline.

In the afternoon I left the river and walked into a longtang in the old town.

The longtang is a housing form particular to Shanghai: a main lane leads inward, flanked by tightly packed two- and three-storey shikumen houses.

It was once the main way this city lived, not merely the nostalgia of a few people today.

In 1949, Shanghai had over nine thousand two hundred shikumen lanes, more than two hundred thousand buildings, covering some twenty million square metres.

At that time seventy to eighty percent of the city's population lived in them.

Walk in today and it's much more complicated.

Some houses still have their old residents; some have become cafés and guesthouses; and whole districts have been demolished.

The statistics don't fully agree, but more than eighty percent have been demolished, and only about one thousand nine hundred reasonably complete examples remain.

What's most worth noticing is the timing.

Large-scale demolition began around 1990.

Which is to say: the same few years in which Pudong's development was announced were the years Shanghai began clearing shikumen block by block.

Building a new city on the east bank, demolishing the old city on the west.

These two things are usually told separately; they are in fact two sides of one decision.

In one lane I met an older woman who had lived there for more than forty years.

I asked whether she'd be willing to move.

She listed the drawbacks first: small rooms, cold winters, an inconvenient bathroom.

Then she said she knows every single person in that lane.

After moving to a new estate the flat is certainly bigger, but she might not exchange more than a few sentences with a neighbour in a year.

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

What's genuinely hard to rebuild is the relationships between people.

That remark made me look again at 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, and so is the achievement.

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

At dusk I went back to the river, and the lights on the far bank started changing colour.

Before leaving I took the ferry once more, the same two yuan.

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

The second time I understood: this boat carried the people across first, and only then did the towers appear over there.

Now the towers are six hundred and thirty-two metres tall, and the boat is empty.

If you had one day, would you go up the six-hundred-metre observation deck, or walk a lane that may not be there in a few years?