Shanghai

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AS I STEPPED OUT of a taxi by one of Shanghai’s fake goods market, a crowd of hawkers surrounded me.

‘Lady, lady, Louis Vuitton,’ one was shouting. ‘Handbags. Chloé. Prada. Tod’s. You want? Very, very cheap,’ another was calling.

If you want to see Chinese capitalism in action – or you desire a counterfeit but convincing designer handbag, Rolex or Montblanc pen – this is the place.

Open-fronted shops have copies of the Chinese editions of Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue and Elle on their counters; staff will wrap purchases in authentic-looking designer-logoed boxes and soft fabric drawstring bags; you might even get a receipt.

There is every kind of shopping in Shanghai, from eccentrically named emporia (the Shanghai Naughty Family Pet Co, which caters to a local love of mischievous pets, chipmunks being the current favourites) to glossy plazas and malls selling genuine designer fashion at high prices (thanks to steep import duties).

Alternatively there are down-at-heel fabric markets, such as Dongjiadu Lu, where you can buy silk and cashmere at knockdown rates to have a tailor run up something bespoke (or copied).

Like most tourists, I’d headed first for the bazaar at Yu Gardens, where topsy-turvy wooden buildings apparently lurching under the weight of tiles on their pagoda-style roofs. Except that, like most of Shanghai, the age of the buildings is no more genuine than the branding on the market bags.

For atmosphere it's unbeatable

Altogether more alluring is Dongtai Lu, a street of ramshackle two-storey houses with cantilevered upper floors and prettily carved balustrades, where stalls sell bric-à-brac: old mahjong sets, lacquered jewellery boxes, 1930s advertisements of sultry Oriental lovelies applying cold cream, smoking or enjoying Haig whisky, Mao watches, birdcages (some, sadly, containing songbirds), porcelain and tiny-format Tintin books in Mandarin.

For atmosphere, it’s unbeatable: a place where stallholders still doze in easy chairs, men in silk pyjamas cycle sedately by and people still use yokes to carry their wares. It didn’t seem 21st century at all, until I looked up at a skyline of skyscrapers.

In 1935, Fortune magazine described Shanghai as ‘the megalopolis of Asia... inheritor of 19th-century London and 20th-century Manhattan’.

The Grand Hyatt is the world’s highest hotel, above the 54th storey of the 88-floor Jinmao Tower, fashioned like a kind of telescopic industrial pagoda.

It’s so lofty it can lean up to a couple of feet in a gale, a fact worth knowing if you’re enjoying a drink in its modish 87th-floor bar and the room starts to sway.

But it will be dwarfed by the 95-storey Shanghai World Financial Center, currently under construction.

Shanghai’s iconic landmark is the Oriental Pearl Tower, a sort of tripod-based rocket on which two pink illuminated spheres have been impaled. Across the Huangpu river, the 45-storey Bund Centre is crowned with a giant illuminated lotus.

The Bund Sightseeing Tunnel, an underwater rail link that runs between Puxi, the commercial centre, and Pudong, the high-rise business distric, has glass capsule-like carriages whizz though a shower of psychedelic flashing lights, past bobbing inflatable figures you seem in danger of running over and into a virtual shark-infested aquarium.

The bund

Nevertheless, the best views of the city are from the terraces of the grand colonial edifices built by the likes of Jardine Matheson, Shell, Sir Victor Sassoon and the British government that run along the sweeping esplanade known as the Bund.

Bar Rouge, one of the hottest bars, shares a building with Patek Philippe and Sens & Bund, the only restaurant outside France presided over by Jacques and Laurent Pourcel, whose flagship, Le Jardin de Sens in Montpellier, has three Michelin stars. Shanghai is surely the restaurant capital of Asia just now.

Fifteen doors down, in what was once the Union Assurance Company, New York’s most celebrated restaurateur, Jean-Georges Vongerichten, has opened the eponymous Jean Georges.

A floor above, Hong Kong superchef Jereme Leung cooks at Whampoa Club (go for the neo-Art Deco décor, black cod and sticky rice-stuffed osmanthus-coated lotus root). On the sixth floor, David Laris, the highly rated Sydneysider, briefly in charge of London’s Mezzo, has set up Laris.

The area known as Xintiandi, just west of the Bund, is another good bet for restaurants, especially Yè Shanghai, where I ate the best authentic Shanghainese meal of my trip – more sweet sliced lotus root and tiny jewel-coloured cabbage rolls stuffed with beetroot and carrot dipped in black vinegar (which people here prefer to soy) and dumplings called xiao long bao, stuffed with crab.

I lunched there with Patrick Cranley, an American who is co-founder of the Shanghai Historic House Association, which campaigns to preserve what little is left of old Shanghai.

Traditional housing

Xintiandi is one of the best examples of traditional Shanghainese shikumen housing, 70 per cent of which has already been razed. The handsome two-storey tenements, arranged on gated grids of narrow lanes, were originally built in the 1850s, hence the unmistakably Western ornamentation. If you look carefully you’ll spot baroque scrolls, leaves, even baronial shields.

His own residence was designed by Clough Williams-Ellis of Portmeirion fame – who never actually visited the site, which may explain why it’s rather less outlandish than it might have been.

Best of all, however, is the Museum of Arts and Crafts, a splendid neo-classical stately home. Its collection ranges from intricate marquetry, ancient porcelain and carved jade to bits of knitting and needlepoint, most bizarrely a kitsch tapestry portrait of almost photographic accuracy of the Princess of Wales in her wedding dress.

Unusually, many of the exhibits are for sale. But then this is Shanghai, a city obsessed with selling. ‘Is buying from the museum a guarantee of authenticity?’ Patrick asked a curator. A smile played across her lips. She was giving nothing away.