Shanghai
China's financial powerhouse on the Yangtze delta
Shanghai is where China meets the sea and counts its money. Nearly thirty million people live in this delta megacity, whose riverfront tells the story in a single glance: the colonnaded banks of the colonial-era Bund face off across the Huangpu against the rocket-ship skyline of Pudong, where the Shanghai Tower screws itself nearly six hundred metres into the haze. It is brash, commercial, and relentlessly forward-looking, the most cosmopolitan of Chinese cities.
The city sits on the flat alluvial plain of the Yangtze River delta, barely a few metres above sea level, laced with creeks and canals and fronting the East China Sea. The Huangpu River bisects it into the older Puxi on the west bank and the purpose-built financial district of Pudong on the east. Its low elevation and coastal exposure make subsidence and storm flooding persistent engineering concerns for a city built on soft delta mud.
Until the nineteenth century Shanghai was a walled county town and cotton port. The 1842 Treaty of Nanjing forced it open to foreign trade, and its International Settlement and French Concession turned it into Asia's most glamorous and notorious metropolis between the wars, a city of jazz clubs, financiers, and revolutionaries. After decades of communist-era dormancy, the opening of Pudong in 1990 ignited an explosive boom that made Shanghai mainland China's leading financial center, busiest container port, and showcase of twenty-first-century ambition.