The Incarnation of a City Shanghai, the Host City to the World Expo 2010 28 September 2008 Shanghai, the host city of World Expo 2010, is the largest and the most modernized metropolitan in China, with over 50,000 foreign nationals living and working along side 18.5 million native residents. However, unlike many cities in China, such as capital Beijing, Shanghai doesn't have a long and proud history to show the world. In fact, it was only during the reign of Emperor Xining (熙宁, 1068 - 1077) in the Northern Song Dynasty, a humble fishing village in the north of the bustling city Suzhou began to grow into a small market town called Shanghai.
Half a century later in 1127, a highly civilised Northern Song Kingdom was destroyed by normatic wolf-worshipping Mongol/Tartar tribesmen, with the emperor captured and capital Kaifeng sacked. Millions of refugees fled with the imperial court and crossed the Yangtze River to resettle in Jiangnan, thus Shanghai experienced a sudden surge in population from mere 12,000 households to a quarter million inhabitants. After another one hundred years or so, in 1267, Shanghai Township was formally established.
During the Ming Dynasty (1368 - 1644), Jiangnan region was the economic and cultural hub of the kingdom, with Nanjing acting as China's second capital and Shanghai known as nation's cotton/silk production and manufacturing base.
The good time lasted for a few hundred years, then China started to go backward under a parasite regime of the Manchurian group, who was formed by Mongol/Tartar forces vanquished by the Ming armies earlier. Soon The Middle Kingdom was gatecrashed by Queen Victoria's gunboats, for the purpose of forcing Chinese to purchase a certain addictive and poisonous drug known as Opium. An ethnic cleansing and apartheid China under decadent Manchurian reign wasn't able to gather itself together and guard its doors, and a treaty was then signed in Nanjing, that saw China degenerated into a semi-colony of the West, with strategic port cities to be co-rulled by the Western governments. And Shanghai was just one of such tragically strategic cities. Before long Shanghai found itself become a dumping ground for British opiums and American cotton products, which efficiently turned the locals into "sick men of the East Asia (东亚病夫)", and effectively destroyed the traditional cotton industry of Shanghai. Apart from economic benefits gained by the West, the Nanjing Treaty also granted the Western churches the freedom to wage religious crusade against Chinese cultural heritage. A large number of Christian missionaries from America, Britain, France and Germany flooded into the land of Confucius, Buddhism and Daoism, aiming at conveying China into the biggest Christian state in the world to help them in their long battles against Islam (the dream is still alive to this very day, see online forum hosted by freerepublica, for example). In this holy war of eradicating anything in China that is non-Western and non-Christian, the first bloody clash between local Chinese and Western missionaries soon occurred in Shanghai known as Qingpu Massionary Incident (青浦教案), which ended China's thousands years of tradition that saw different teachings and faiths co-existed peacefully. In the next 100 years or so, Shanghai became one of the largest cities in the world with 3 million inhabitants, and the biggest shame to Chinese people as half of its urban space was under the control of 35,000 Westerners, with the locals subjected to the jurisdiction of the foreign courts. Since the buildings in Shanghai durng that colonial period were chiefly modelled after the architectural styles in the homelands of the Western rullers, Shanghai as the Chinese "commercial centre of the southeast" ceased to exist, instead it was reincarnated as a Western showcase in the East.
An traditinal shanghai shopping street
The establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949 transformed Shanghai almost overnight from a city that was like a concubine to the West (二奶) into an independent woman of simple living and hard working. By then, Shanghai was a bit boring but rather honest with its products reputed as having the best quality in the whole nation.
The rapid economic development in the recent decade sees the city to be reborn once again, this time it has been reincarnated as a grand international metropolitan and an economic powerhouse of the East Asia. Shanghai,
a city with a short but turbulent history and a charming
yet shallow character derived from its past experiences
of living in the gaps between two civilisations, is now
busying itself with physical preparations for the World
Expo 2010. Hopefully in two years of time it is also able
to obsorb some nutrition from Chinese cultural roots in
order to make itself spiritually more substantial. |
|
