Shanghai: colonial stone on one bank, science fiction on the other

No city stages its own contradictions as neatly as Shanghai. Stand on the Bund at dusk with the Huangpu River running black in front of you: behind your back, a mile of 1920s banks and customs houses in granite and neoclassical swagger; ahead, Pudong — the bottle-opener of the Shanghai World Financial Center, the twisting Shanghai Tower, the pink spheres of the Oriental Pearl — switching on all at once. Ferries and coal barges push straight through the middle of the picture.

Walk inland and the scale drops. The former French Concession is plane trees and shikumen stone-gate houses, wet-market alleys, tailors, and cafés hidden inside 1930s villas; Tianzifang and Wukang Road are the obvious ways in, but the real pleasure is turning down any lane off Fuxing or Anfu Road and finding laundry strung between window frames. The Yu Garden in the old city is the counterweight — a Ming official's rockeries, carp pools and dragon-crested walls, wrapped in a bazaar where you queue for xiaolongbao soup dumplings and eat them far too hot.

Shanghai rewards small rituals: a breakfast of shengjianbao fried in a flat iron pan, with soy milk; a night at the acrobatics theatre; an hour with the ancient bronzes and Ming furniture in the Shanghai Museum; then Metro line 17 out to Zhujiajiao, a canal town of humpbacked stone bridges and rowing boats less than an hour from the skyscrapers. Come in late spring or October — the July humidity here is a genuine adversary — and keep one evening free for nothing but the riverside promenade.