The Bund

The Bund, Shanghai's historic waterfront area, is about the only bit of Shanghai that hasn't changed much in the last 100 years. Here it is now, and a hundred years ago, when it was the centrepiece of the International Settlement area.








It gets very crowded most evenings, mostly with locals and domestic tourists taking in the view of the Pudong skyscrapers opposite.

And here's the Peace Hotel. This was the tallest building in the city when I visited in 1985. I spent several hours in the cafe here on that visit, killing time, having failed to negotiate accommodation there or in any of the hotels that might take foreigners. China travel was like that then. Hotels generally had dormitories and rooms. If you said you wanted a dormitory, they'd say they only had rooms. If you said room, they only had dormitories. In Shanghai they had neither, but would happily keep you waiting there all day while they thought about it.

Buying train tickets was a bit like that too. You'd spend hours queuing, with the required details all written down in Chinese characters. When you got to the front of the queue, they wouldn't even be bothered looking. They'd just point you to the next queue. Where you'd waste another hour before being sent back to the first. This could go on for days.

So the Peace Hotel conjures up mixed memories for me. On that fateful day I chose to escape from Shanghai in the late afternoon, by leaping aboard a Suzhou-bound train, ticketless of  course. A nice man, a teacher, I recall, smoothed things over with the ticket inspector, and Suzhou, I found, was a much quieter place, with hotels that let you in and stay there even.