In the morning we went to see the Jing An Temple, literally 100 metres from the hotel. We get a beautiful birds-eye view of it from the hotel’s breakfast room.The temple was magnificent, with many people bowing before the Buddha images and the Hungry Ghost cauldron burning juniper branches while giving off fragrant white smoke. However the temperature must have been more than 40 and the high humidity meant that we were sweating like pigs so we decided to go back to the hotel and rest for a few hours. We decided to have an early dinner in the late afternoon and set off looking for a dumpling shop. A noodle house looked promising but despite a young waiter spending a lot of time showing us the house’s delicacies there were none of the dumplings that Jennifer had set her heart on eating. Eventually we found a place with pictures of its meals including something that looked suspiciously like dumplings floating in a bowl of clear broth. So we went in, and they were delicious; a big bowl with 6 dumplings filled with crab meat for £3. We then got the metro to the Bund and, as per usual, all we had to do was to go to the Jing An metro station and stand looking at a map (and scratching our heads) before someone came up to us asking if we needed help. “You need the Green Line (No.2) to Nanjing Road East station and then walk down Henan Road to the Bund” is what we were told by a young girl, “Just follow the crowd”. We have, of course, seen Chinese crowds before (Wulingyuan last year being a particularly horrendous memory), but this was something else. There must have been hundreds of thousands heading for the embankment along the Suzhou Creek tributary of the Yangtse River. Shanghai has a population of 26 million and is the world’s biggest city after Chongqing. But the view across the Creek was magnificent, as indicated by the pictures. The noise was deafening; not just thousands of people all talking (more like screaming) at once but the hundreds of police directing the crowds and the traffic, bellowing through loudspeakers and blowing their whistles. An experience not to be missed. Last year we visited during the day before the buildings were lit up, and spent more time admiring the early 20th century buildings erected by China’s colonial masters (mainly British and French) in the days when parks had signs saying “No dogs or Chinese”. This time, they were lit up which detracted from their magnificence but the opium administration building (now a hotel) and the Peace Hotel where many famous people have stayed including Charlie Chaplin and Edgar Snow (who was present during Mao’s revolution in 1949 and wrote the classic account Red Star Over China) were magnificent..
Picture in the Jing An Temple
Building known as “The Tower” as seen from the temple
Sign indicating the location of Shanghai’s first electric lamp
The lamp post
A street near the Bund
Shop in Henan Street
Boat on Suzhou Creek
Dragon at a toy shop in Henan Street, periodically blowing cold steam.
Small section of the enormous crowd.