上海：同一年，一边建一边拆

On my first day in Shanghai, my friend didn't take me to the tallest tower.

She took me to ride a boat.

I said: a boat?

She said: two yuan, about a dozen minutes.

I said: is this a boat for tourists?

She said: no.

She said: this is the boat Shanghai people take to work.

We walked to the river and got on.

Some people had bicycles with them; some were in work clothes.

The boat set off.

My friend said: this river is called the Huangpu.

The west bank is called the Bund; the east bank is called Pudong.

I said: why are the two sides so different?

She said: because they didn't start at the same time.

Those buildings on the Bund were already there a hundred years ago.

Most of the towers in Pudong were built in the last thirty years.

I said: thirty years?

She said: yes.

She said: on 18 April 1990, the state announced it would develop Pudong.

Before that, Pudong was mainly farmland and small factories.

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

I said: and now?

She said: the tallest tower in Pudong now is six hundred and thirty-two metres.

The Oriental Pearl opened in 1994, four hundred and sixty-eight metres.

Back then people thought that was already very tall.

I looked at the towers on the east bank.

I found it hard to believe that thirty-odd years ago that was farmland.

My friend said: this boat you're sitting on is much older than those towers.

She said: it's been running since 1911.

I said: over a hundred years?

She said: yes.

She said: before 1971, the boat was the only way across the river.

That year the first road crossing opened.

Before that, workers going to Pudong all had to take the boat.

I said: there must have been a lot of people on it then.

She said: in the eighties, over a million a day.

There were twenty-two ferry routes on the river.

In 1993, three hundred and seventy million passenger trips in one year.

I said: what did a ticket cost back then?

She said: six fen.

I said: six fen?

She said: yes, six fen — now it's two yuan.

The boat took only a dozen minutes to cross.

My friend said: in those dozen minutes, you looked at a hundred years.

We walked around in Pudong.

The roads are wide and the towers are tall; at midday a lot of people in white shirts came out to eat.

An hour later, they all went back in.

In the afternoon we took the boat back to the west bank.

She said: now I'll show you another Shanghai.

We walked into a very narrow lane.

The houses on both sides are old, only two or three storeys.

She said: houses like these are called shikumen.

People were hanging laundry, and someone was washing vegetables in a doorway.

An old man sat on a small chair listening to a radio.

I said: it's very quiet here.

The road outside is so noisy, and you walk in here and it's quiet.

My friend said: Shanghai people nearly all used to live in houses like these.

In 1949, Shanghai had over nine thousand of these lanes.

Back then, seventy to eighty percent of the whole city lived in them.

I said: how many are left now?

She said: over eighty percent were demolished.

She said: the reasonably intact ones number about one thousand nine hundred.

I said: when were they demolished?

She said: the large-scale demolition started in 1990.

I said: 1990?

She said: yes.

She said: the same year the state announced it would develop Pudong.

For a moment I didn't say anything.

The same year: building on one side, demolishing on the other.

I asked her: do you think that was a good thing?

She thought for a moment.

She said: I grew up in a lane house.

It was crowded, cold in winter, and the toilet was inconvenient.

But I remember every single person's name.

Now I live in a new tower and the flat is much bigger.

But I might not say more than a few sentences to a neighbour in a year.

In the evening we went back to the river.

The towers on the east bank all had their lights on.

I thought about that two-yuan boat in the morning.

It once carried a million people a day.

The people it carried across built the towers on the other side.

Now the towers are tall and the boat is empty.

When you go to a new city, do you want to see its highest point, or the places where people live?