The British writer JG Ballard grew up in pre-war Shanghai and described it vividly in his award-winning, Spielberg-movie-adapted novel Empire Of The Sun. On my recent visit to one of China’s most dynamic cities, I went looking for what’s left of Ballard’s Shanghai.
Shanghai is one of those cities I’ve always wanted to visit, long before I ever ended up living in Asia. One of my favourite childhood books was Tintin – The Blue Lotus, written and drawn by Herge, which is largely set in 1930s Shanghai during the Japanese occupation. And one of my favourite books from adulthood is JG Ballard’s Empire Of The Sun, a quasi-autobiographical account of how Ballard and his family were taken prisoner by the invading Japanese in Shanghai and interred in Lunghua prison camp for the duration of the Second World War. The book was subsequently turned into a movie by Steven Spielberg with a young Christian Bale portraying 10 year old Jim Ballard. Ballard subsequently wrote more about his childhood memories of Shanghai in Miracles Of Life, his autobiographical memoir and final book before he died on April 19 2009.
As China has opened up to capitalism and transformed its cities, much of the country’s own past has been erased with little thought for historical value. I’d obviously realised that there would be little of the Shanghai depicted by Herge and Ballard left 70 years on – but I was still curious as to the traces of what remained. I knew, for example, that the Shanghai house Ballard lived in with his parents before being taken prisoner still existed, and true Ballard afficionados have done extensive research to locate the landmarks of young Jim’s Shanghai and map it onto the modern day cityscape. Of Herge’s immersive depiction of Shanghai as a lawless, opium-smuggling harbour city balancing on a razor edge of ethnic, political and military tension, there was little sign (just as well). (Interestingly, the Herge version tallies well with Ballard’s own childhood recognition of just how brutal living in Shanghai could be, as described in Miracles Of Life). Shanghai now is one of the powerhouses of China’s rise, and is officially the busiest port in the world for shipping cargo tonnage. Most of what leaves China for the rest of the world goes through Shanghai.
As such, I had thought that perhaps modern day Shanghai would be something like Hong Kong – hyper modern and extremely crowded, a city where space is at an absolute premium and every day living is synonymous with being constantly under pressure. Instead, I was surprised to find just how expansive Shanghai is – wide roads, space, light, even quiet, leafy boulevards in the French Concession district, the name one of the only things left over from Herge’s depiction. The French area is a magnet for tourists due to its picturesque streets – it reminded me of Hanoi without the madness of a million motorbikes clogging the road. There are for sure still plenty of areas with labyrinthine roads and too much traffic, but the relaxed pace of the French area so close to the center of the city was a real surprise.
The other city Shanghai reminded me of was London, specifically at Shanghai’s most famous area, the riverside stretch of buildings collectively known as the Bund. Built by the British at the height of their trading within China, the Bund’s solid, squat dark stone architecture is almost a direct fascimile of those on London’s Embankment, another bastion of high finance and wealth on the other side of the world. Having worked in the Embankment’s Shell-Mex house for a couple of years, it was a slightly eerie feeling to see these buildings recreated in Shanghai. Still, it’s a minor miracle they even still exist – when Mao’s Communists seized power in China in 1949, they destroyed much of what was deemed to be the Old Way, especially when it came to the hated British invaders – yet the Bund’s buildings remained intact, either boarded up or occupied by Communist government ministries, until the 1970s when China began to open up again and the value of the Bund’s buildings was recognised. Perhaps the most famous example of this is the stunning murals on the ceiling of the HSBC Building on the Bund, which were only discovered a couple of decades ago after being whitewashed and hidden away behind plasterboard so as to escape vandalism by the Communists.
Perhaps the most iconic symbol of China’s new prosperity is the defiantly ugly Oriental Pearl Tower, which sits directly across the river from the Bund in the new financial district of Pudong. Even being in the shadow of the Jin Mao Tower and the Shanghai World Financial Center (which briefly held the World’s Tallest Building title), the Oriental Pearl’s gaudy spheres still captivate the world’s attention.
Pudong itself is renown for being a wasteland of culture or anything else – beyond admiring the supermodern architecture up close (the World Financial Centre was promptly christened “the Bottle Opener” due to the rectangular space at its summit) there’s little else to do, except go up to the Cloud 9 bar, part of the Grand Hyatt Shanghai hotel inside Jin Mao Tower, for the stunning panoramic views over Shanghai. (M On The Bund, back on the other side of the river, is one of Shanghai’s best known bars with a beautiful outside balcony which provides a superb view of Pudong at sunset).
Amongst the banks and the Bund’s other financial institutions lies the recently restored splendour of the Art Deco Fairmont Peace Hotel, which was a favourite haunt of the young Jim Ballard when his father would take him there for business meetings in the happier days of their Shanghai living before the Japanese invaded. Non-residents can wander the Peace Hotel’s atrium and corridors, and while photos are not allowed (which I would be pretty fed up about if I was staying there), I managed to sneak a picture of the beautiful glass dome above the central atrium.
The house that J G Ballard grew up in is still there in 21st century Shanghai, but has been converted into an upmarket wine bar. Extensive renovations have changed the layout and exterior of the house considerably, but even so, it’s still recognisably a house. Having heard about the changes beforehand thanks to my friend and Shanghai resident Wen, I imagined that I would not find it particularly interesting to see the house, but thought I should go anyway during my visit. However, once we walked inside – Wen having diplomatically negotiated permission for me to take a few photos, which isn’t normally allowed – I was stunned by just quite how moved I felt to be standing there, amongst the tables and the linen. Upstairs particularly, where the former bedrooms are now private dining rooms, the unmistakable outline of a former family house could clearly be seen. Perhaps it was finally to see something, even if was just fragments, of the real place Ballard had written so much about, where fiction momentarily becomes reality even as that reality is being erased by another. A microcosm of what happens in every city all the time, as previously important places and the people they signify disappear from view either through physical destruction or simple forgetting.
The name J G Ballard means little to the Chinese – and the restaurant staff still aren’t quite sure what to make of the annual trickle of foreigners turning up during the day wanting to poke around the house. But for me, his writing has not only fascinated me for the last two decades of my life, but also provided a prism through which to see and think about Shanghai. Much of what I did in Shanghai was typical tourist fare (especially the quest to try every type of Shanghainese dumpling possible) , which is normally said in a slightly derogatory tone – but for me, even in their new tourist-friendly incarnation, the Bund and Pudong are undeniably the heart of Shanghai, and the history they represent, both past and future, was exhilarating not just to see but also to think about and consider, kickstarted by Ballard’s own memoirs of the city from a childhood lived nearly a century ago.
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If you want to know more about J G Ballard and Shanghai, it’s definitely worth having a read of the Wikipedia entries for Tintin – The Blue Lotus and Ballard’s own Empire Of The Sun, Miracles Of Life and his Wiki biography. It’s also worth tracking down “From Shanghai To Shepperton”, the BBC documentary about Ballard where he returns to Shanghai for the first time since the 1940s in the early 1990s.
