THE retired Chinese writer and poet, Ding Jing Tang, was 11 years old when he first arrived in Shanghai in 1931 from northern China.
"I felt I was abroad in a foreign country," he recalled as he supped tea in the Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House, of which he is honorary president. "There was an International Settlement and a French Concession. There were many beautiful houses and rich people. It had a Paris flavour."
Shanghai was then in its heyday. It was the Paris of China, the Queen of the Orient. It was also the Whore of the East, a city of opium dens and brothels, a by word for vice and exploitation. British, Italian, French, German, Japanese and American troops patrolled the streets and Russian and Indian doormen stopped locals from entering the big stores on the Bund, the waterfront of grand edifices and porticos which was Shanghai's Wall Street.
Shanghai was not just a great commercial and financial hub, but a great religious centre, where the foreign missionaries owned many properties. The young Ding Jing Tang was taught bible studies in the YMCA.
But all that came to an end with the communist revolution in 1949. It wasn't until 1990, after China began to open up to the world again, that the central government decided to make Shanghai once more into a great financial powerhouse of Asia.
The process began in the Astor House Hotel, a Victorian building which once boasted the city's first telephone, first elevator and first silent movie and which happened to have a suitably sized ballroom to use as a trading floor. Here Shanghai opened China's first stock exchange since precommunist times.
Today, dozens of young men and women in red waist coats log share transactions on computer screens where once Japanese spies, American tycoons, White Russians, Jewish refugees and assorted adventurers, swindlers, gamblers, gun runners, and traders danced the night away.
"Most of the investment comes from big Chinese enterprises but millions of ordinary Chinese have bought shares," said Li Qian, a former English teacher who now receives visitors to the Stock Exchange, as we looked down on the traders from a glass enclosed balcony. "They are doctors, workers, pensioners, anybody with savings."
Lu Hu Yun (38) was one such invest or whom I encountered studying share prices in one of Shanghai's dealing shops, a large hall where people sit on rows of orange plastic seats to study price changes on an electronic screen or mill around pay windows with cigarette ends in their mouths, placing orders. Mr Lu left Shanghai many years ago for a better life in Australia but he could only get menial work there and five years ago friends advised him to come home. "There's more money to be made in Shanghai," they advised him. "They were right," he said, tipping back his baseball hat. "It is easier to make money here. I play the market full time. I figured most Chinese would buy cheap shares and the price would go up, so I bought only cheap shares and I've, doubled my money.
Other punters had similar stories. Tao Li Hu, a laid off garment worker, had lost a little since he began playing a year ago but said cheerfully "I made psychological preparations, and I'll get it back." The small crowd listening nodded in agreement. Despite a minor crash in December when the Chinese government stepped in to cool down an over heated market, people still have confidence they will at least get more for their savings than they would in bank interest.
"In Shanghai people have invested half of all their savings in stocks," said Ms Li. They had substantial savings to invest because "traditionally Chinese people are quite diligent and quite smart. They live a very simple material life and their philosophy is to save money in case of some emergency."
The millions raised through floating shares on the Shanghai market have helped power the dazzling growth of a new financial city in Pudong New Area, just across the river from the Bund. Seven years ago anyone looking over Huangpu River from old Shanghai would see only fields and a few warehouses. Now there is a skyline to rival Manhattan, dominated by the Pearl TV tower, the highest building in Asia, and one of the ugliest. Many of the planned 140 futuristic skyscrapers of mostly blue and green glass - one is clad all in gold - are ready for occupation. Others are still gaunt concrete skeletons, shrouded in bamboo scaffolding and green safety nets.
Everywhere building is going on at a frenetic rate. There are 240,000 construction workers in Pudong. Officials boast that one third of the world's cranes are located here. In their frantic eagerness to build, few, planning restrictions have been imposed on speculators and Pudong New Area has become a free wheeling theme park for modern architects. "Developers are required to provide a certain amount of floor space. After that they can do whatever they want," said Van Zonglin of the Pudong New Area planning office.
The Chinese government has provided 25 billion yuan £2 billion) to put up a new infrastructure on a huge scale, including two bridges connecting Pudong to Shanghai proper, an express motorway, a new international airport, and power, gas and water plants, said Mr Fan.
They are creating Pudong to perform the role of the City in London on the principle, "build it and they will come". The stock exchange will soon move here to a 25 storey structure shaped like a piece of Lego, joining 20 financial institutions already in place. Two thirds of the new buildings will be finished in 1997 and the rest by the end of 1998.
The main problem is not money, said Mr Fan, but a shortage of international standard architects, engineers, computer scientists and bankers needed to build a first class, modern financial centre. Pudong already boasts Asia's biggest department store, the Japanese connected Yao Han store.
Yao Han has its own car showroom where rows of American Lincoln Town Cars are on sale at 900000 yuan (about £75,000), though sales director Gui Mu Zong says their most popular model was the more modestly priced Honda Accord. One Lincoln was sold last year to an out of town Chinese entrepreneur in the construction business. A big proportion of the buyers are foreigners. There were 37 foreign companies in Shanghai in 1990; now there are 4,200, said Mr Fan, and the number of foreign residents has gone up from a few hundred to 20,000, a third of the number which inhabited pre war Shanghai.
The furious rate of expansion in Pudong, an area the size of Singapore, has meant the sudden uprooting of 120,000 peasants. "It was a backward, rural area," said the official, but the inhabitants had to move as "according to Chinese law, the ownership of the land belongs to the state". Many had been given apartments and were glad to move, he said.
"We have gas, water, refrigerator, everything," beamed a former villager Chu Mao Zhou, who was out shopping when we stopped our taxi to talk to people at random in a relocation area. A crowd of curious children, well wrapped in anoraks against a bitterly cold wind, crowded round laughing. More adults joined them. They all agreed. Life was better.
BUT across the river in Shanghai there have been demonstrations against the forced movement of people from some of the poorer areas.
City dwellers protested bitterly when blocks of small houses were bulldozed away and then left as a derelict site while a developer raised money for construction.
Some of the fine architecture of old Shanghai is disappearing too, said Tess Johnston, a grey haired former US diplomat with a folksy Virginia accent, who was stationed for the last 10 years in Shanghai and in 1992 compiled a book on its Western architecture, along Dongqiang, called A Last Look. She returned to Shanghai last month after retiring to finish what has become the passion of her life, making a full record of the buildings which were all that was left of Western technology and ideas in China after liberation, and which are now endangered by the greatest urban transfiguration since Baron Haussmann rebuilt Paris in the 19th century.
The Bund is safe, she said, because the Chinese recognise the commercial value of it as a tourist attraction. Named after an Anglo Indian word meaning "embankment", it became a showpiece of Western architecture after Shanghai was established as a treaty port upon Britain's victory in the 1843 Opium War. By the 1860s, Shanghai had been transformed from a village into a booming city with American, British, French and Chinese quarters. As more and more foreign businessmen came seeking their fortunes, the offices and bank buildings became ever more opulent.
The most wealthy taipans, the foreign bank, training and company managers, moved into elegant mansions, with luxuriant gardens in the tree lined streets of the French quarters, like the Moller Mansion, a fairy tale castle built by a leading Swedish businessman, Eric Moller. In the late 1920s Shanghai's skyline was transformed by high art deco apartment and commercial buildings, like the famous Cathay Hotel, completed in 1929 at the intersection of Nanking Road and the Bund. The poet Ding Jing Tang remembers the Cathay as "a prestigious place for foreigners such as arms dealers and opium merchants" before it was bombed in the Sino Japanese war in 1937.
After the second World War the American and British forces controlled the city and "they were very rude to the Chinese people," said Mr Ding, who had secretly become a communist in 1938. "But with Liberation in 1949 we got rid of all our foreign rulers." The new communist rulers rehabilitated the opium addicts and eradicated the brothels. The 77 year old writer, whose eyes have wrinkles as if from a lifetime of smiling, suffered like hundreds of thousands of Shanghai people when China was convulsed by the Cultural Revolution of 1966-1976. Red Guards roamed the streets destroying everything Western. "They even stopped women and made them take off their high heels," said Mr Ding, who was banished to the countryside for many years because of his former foreign connections.
Some 280 Shanghai buildings are now listed as protected. "But there's lots of lovely stuff going down, like little houses with British chimney pots," sighed Tess Johnston as she dispensed" hot apple cider amid the books which clutter the room of a friend's house, where she is living while looking for a permanent home in a city where rents, are as high, as in Tokyo.
Twenty per cent of the building in A Last Look are modified or gone. Even along the Bund some of the protected buildings have been gutted and only the facades preserved. The Cathay, now renamed the Peace Hotel, has, however, been beautifully restored, complete with the dark wood panelling installed in the 1920s by Sir Victor Sassoon to give the ambience of an English club.
One of the most bizarre conversions has been of the old Russian Orthodox Mission Church built in 1931 in the French concession. It served as a machine shop for some years but in the 1990s the gold Cyrillic writing and icons were painted over so that it could become the headquarters of a securities exchange firm. A second floor was inserted to accommodate a disco, the "St Peter's Club".
Tess Johnston does not blame the Chinese for the way they have transformed the city since 1990. "Why should anyone want to save something which is the emblem of colonialism?" she said. "Overseas money is coming in by the trillions. If something very beautiful happens to be standing in the middle of a block they need, it goes. I get all weepy about the wonderful architecture but the Chinese don't get all weepy. They want Shanghai to be like Hong Kong and you can't blame them. They want to be proud of it."
Today Shanghai's streets have as much neon lighting as Hong Kong and are full of shops selling American and European fashion, perfumery and jewellery. Has it become a foreign city again, I asked Ding Jing Tang. "No, I don't think I am living abroad this time," he said, laughing. "I think Chinese people should be open to the world but on the basis of equality. We have that now. There is a big difference in attitudes. People in America didn't feel equal when they were a colony of Britain, but after they got independence they felt equal. It's similar in Shanghai.
"When young I always dreamed of a proper country where people can make friends with foreign people equally," he said. "This dream has come true."