Few of Shanghai surprises survive

SHANGHAI (JP): After a sumptuous lunch in the eighth floor Dragon-Phoenix dining room of the Peace Hotel, built in 1929 as the Cathay, I dozed in an overstuffed lobby chair.

The art deco chandelier gave off a dim light and it was not long before the dread disease of nostalgia set in, taking me back to 1937 Shanghai, which I had previously visited only in novels and motion pictures.

Was that Noel Coward in the white suit, just getting in the elevator? He's probably going up to his suite to do some more work on his play Private Lives.

Who could forget leggy, enigmatic Marlene Dietrich, in the film Shanghai Express, alighting from the train of the same name, telling reporters "You have to have known many men to earn the nickname 'Shanghai Lil'?"

Or the pouting Poppy played by Gene Tierney in Shanghai Gesture, directed by Josef von Sternberg?

Many authors have rhapsodized about Shanghai, but none captured the city's idiosyncrasies better than J.G. Ballard in Empire of the Sun, clear in the following passage:

"As they stepped from their limousines at the Cathay Theater, the world's largest cinema, the women steered their long skirts through the honor guard of 50 hunchbacks in medieval costume. Three months earlier, when his parents had taken Jim to the premiere of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, there had been 200 hunchbacks, recruited by the management of the theater from every back alley in Shanghai. As always, the spectacle outside the theater far exceeded anything shown on its screen."

Dusk was settling over the city. I asked the doorman to have my Packard brought from the garage.

"Where to?" the driver, Hongkong Harry, wanted to know.

"The Shanghai Club," I said. It would be exciting to have a drink at the reputed "longest bar" in the world. The club is where London-style gentlemen's rules were strictly enforced, and indiscretions were not treated lightly. A member's worst fate, according to legend, "was to be horse-whipped on the front steps of one's own club".

"Sorry, sir," the driver apologized, "The Shanghai Club is now the Dongfeng Hotel."

Frustrated, I told him to take me to the grand old building of the Hongkong & Shanghai Bank, also on the Bund, just for a look at the famous stone lions guarding the entrance.

Hongkong Harry threw up his hands.

"Sorry, sir. The building is there but it was taken over by the city government first and then a firm. The lions are said to be in storage somewhere."

"All right then, take me to that big building across Soochow Creek from the Russian Consulate."

The driver headed the Packard toward the Broadway Mansions apartment, built in 1933, home of the Shanghai Foreign Correspondents' Club where the engaging Korean singer, Karen Kim, sang every evening at between 10 p.m. and midnight.

We pulled up in front of the imposing brick building, but the doorman quickly set me straight.

"This is now a hotel, the Shanghai Mansions. Sorry."

I decided to go to one of the cabarets I'd read about. Maybe dancing with a Chinese or White Russian hostess would cheer me up.

"Take me to Landow's Casanova or Cafe Palais, or the Club Majestic out on Bubbling Well Road."

"They've all been closed since the communists came in 1949," the driver said.

The only thing left was to do some sightseeing the following day. I made a mental note to visit the former homes of Sun Yat- sen, Chiang Kai-shek, Zhou Enlai, Soong Ching-ling and other members of the Soong family, Big-Eared Du (Yuesheng) the notorious gangster, the old Cercle Sportif Francais, now the Garden Hotel, with a pool where Mao Zedong used to take a dip, and the site of the first congress of the Chinese Communist Party.

I awoke to find I was in Shanghai 1997, not 1937.

Outside on fabled Nanjing Road there were no rickshaws to be seen, only a traffic jam of burgundy-colored, made in Shanghai Volkswagen Santana taxis, buildings with ATM machines protruding from their sides and a skyline crowded with construction cranes.

-- Edward Neilan