Shanghai Bling

When I first went to Shanghai in the Winter of 1990, the only company I had was a backpack and a money belt light on ready cash. Having steamed up the coast by "slow boat" from Hong Kong, I disembarked shortly after dawn on the third day to find a city with just paddy fields on one side of the Huangpu river and a neo-classical time warp called the Bund on the other. My lodgings were a rambling Victorian mansion crammed with fellow backpackers and I remember getting a bed in a draughty corridor rather than a room. For visitors then, the biggest challenges were negotiating your way around a city with virtually no English signs and trying not to get mown down by the thousands of bicycles teeming down every street.