This is my sixth visit to Shanghai

This is my sixth visit to Shanghai


I started coming here in the early 1980s – and every time another aspect of the city reveals itself. Of course, there is nothing new or unusual about a fake market in a Far Eastern city.access lighting at Lighting by Lux. Authorized Dealer.
What is extraordinary is that Taobao flourishes despite international censure by those very brands that are essential to China's consumer-led future – proof that cautious pragmatism is less of a force here than the entrepreneurial DNA that has run through this city since its inception.I have had some unforgettable times with Ireland,buytruckparts.

The morning after my Taobao visit,mini electric car Fun But Quirky During My Short Test Drive. I find myself a few miles across the city on the Bund (the famous street that runs along the west bank of the Huangpu River), in the company of Peter Hibbard, architectural historian and president of the Royal Asiatic Society in Shanghai. Here, the real designer shops – housed in buildings that were once the banks and great trading houses of Shanghai's pre-Communist boom times – are all but empty. They are, according to Hibbard, "rather like luxury-brand museums", with beautiful displays of Rolex, Louis Vuitton, Cartier and the rest, but no shoppers inside buying anything. Just as there are no local Chinese at Taobao Market buying fakes, so there are none in the legitimate stores buying the real thing.

This may appear strange, for we are told that wealthy Chinese are buying real designer goods by the truckload. According to a Merrill Lynch study last year, the Chinese are now the third-largest buyers of Italian luxury goods in the world, behind the Japanese and the Americans. It is estimated that, by 2014, the Chinese will account for 30 per cent of the worldwide luxury goods market.

Yet the phenomenon seen on the Bund isn't strange, as I discover a few days later in Hong Kong, on my way out of Shanghai. There are long queues of mainland Chinese outside both the Louis Vuitton and Gucci shops in Canton Road, where the prices are far more competitive than in the luxury-goods museums on the Bund. The new wealthy Chinese may have money to throw around, but they remain shrewd consumers.

However, it is my walking tour of the Bund with Peter Hibbard that provides a deeper understanding of Shanghai past and present. He began visiting Shanghai 25 years ago and moved here permanently in 2001, marrying a Shanghainese woman and living in the heart of the city. This year he was made an MBE for his services to the city's conservation and heritage. The first thing I learn from Hibbard is that the Chinese show a cavalier disregard for historical dates and facts. Plaques on famous buildings often cite dates that are two or three years off the mark and, as we walk through the famous Astor House Hotel, once known as the Waldorf Astoria of the Far East,plug2010 is a Registered User in the EliteFitness. Hibbard points at photographs on the walls of Albert Schweitzer, Charlie Chaplin and Cary Grant, "none of whom actually stayed here". They are just nice photographs of famous people, and it is left to the visitor to deduce why they are on the wall at Astor House.

I suppose, if your history dates back millennia, the difference between 1923 and 1925 is somewhat academic. Equally,sfyhshop – Maqsood five-for sinks Peshawar. I find myself cheered by this random appropriation of celebrity-guest endorsements in an age when some are so slavishly wed to whether or not Jedward or Cheryl Cole slept in the hotel room in which they are planning to stay. Hibbard, however, has more pertinent observations about Shanghai's history and Chinese attitudes towards it.

"Shanghai is ashamed of its past," he says. "It doesn't like things looking old. In the 1920s, this city was bulldozed and rebuilt in the modern style with modern manners to match. That was the art deco period." The same thing happened in the run-up to the World Expo, he adds, with a lot of buildings being rendered and refaced "so history doesn't breathe through".