Expo Renews Focus On Shanghai’s Foreign Side
Posted by myps | Filed under Expo
The World’s Fair that kicked off Friday night is designed to focus global attention on Shanghai — but in doing so, it will largely reflect the outsize role foreigners have played in shaping China’s most cosmopolitan city.
President Hu Jintao opened the six-month Expo 2010 here with a riverside fireworks-and-armada extravaganza attended by French President Nicolas Sarkozy and others.
Aiming to match the prestige of past hosts such as Paris and Chicago, China is launching the first World’s Fair hosted by a developing country and the biggest by expected visitors (70 million) and spending ($45 billion, rivaling its preparations for Beijing’s 2008 Summer Olympic Games).
The focus will be on pavilions from more than 190 nations, spread on two sides of the Huangpu River, that include Britain’s pin cushion-like light box, Japan’s purple worm-shape tent and the U.S.’s $61 million movie theater styled like a catamaran.
The pavilions mark the latest of more than a century of shifting international influence here. Shanghai’s riverfront Bund zone includes Victor Sassoon’s 1929 Cathay Hotel and, a few doors down, the 1925 Hongkong & Shanghai Banking Corp. building with its mosaic ceiling of Calcutta and Bangkok ports.
A historical witness to China’s full-circle journey — from subject of Western influence to strident opponent to, now, international host — is the English Renaissance-style building at No. 2 Bund. Built a century ago as the Shanghai Club, it was frequented by British colonial tycoons. A half-century ago, it was seen as a symbol of Western decadence.
Now, it will be transformed into Hilton Hotel Corp.’s first Waldorf Astoria hotel in Asia.
Built in 1910, the club and its hallmark 110-foot Long Bar hosted bankers and taipans. In 1941, the Japanese Navy commandeered it. With Japan’s 1945 defeat, the club’s battered elite returned to discover shortened legs on billiard tables.
Communists, taking power in 1949, squeezed the club for liquor taxes that bankrupted it in 1954, according to ‘Building Shanghai’ by Edward Denison and Guang Yu Ren.
Within two years it was the International Seamen’s Club, with a Mao statue and a ‘Workers of World Unite’ banner in Chinese, English and Russian.
In the 1960s Cultural Revolution, Maoist Red Guards chopped the bar to pieces amid a purge of Western influences.
In 1989, the bar area reopened as Shanghai’s first Kentucky Fried Chicken.
Now, with heritage architecture gaining fresh acclaim ahead of Expo 2010, No. 2 Bund’s government-owned landlord allowed the neglected building to be remodeled into a Waldorf Astoria.
Atlanta architect-developer John Portman & Associates — a family firm led by John C. ‘Jack’ Portman III, who has been active in Shanghai since 1979 — is adding a 260-room skyscraper annex. Hilton didn’t respond to requests to comment.
Standing atop the club’s Sicilian marble staircase that he first climbed in 1986, 61-year-old Mr. Portman marveled at the club’s ‘ornate’ ballroom. The building, he said, is ‘a microcosm of what Shanghai was all about.’
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