A Reporter Revisits Shanghai

Shanghai was once the wildest city in the world, celebrated for the ubiquity and variety of its vices, from the gambling halls and opium dens of Nanshih, the old town, to the cosmopolitan attractions of the waterfront whores of Yangtzepoo Road. This was the town where sailors got shanghaied. Today, Shanghai is officially the biggest city on earth (pop. 10,820,000), but it is all rather different. TIME Correspondent Roy Rowan visited the metropolis and cabled this report:

MY last week in Shanghai in May of 1949 was spent watching the city go through its final agonies before Mao's forces swept in. A public execution of six black-marketeers, scapegoats of the collapsing economy, was held at the railroad station. To cover it, I had to accompany the victims in the police paddy wagon as it careened through the tangle of traffic on Nanking Road, the siren wailing and the doomed men screaming for mercy. At the station the victims were dumped into the street and then shot through the head, one by one, pointblank.

People's Park. Now we were moving down Nanking Road again. The city's main thoroughfare, once full of rickshas and pedicabs, was empty except for some blue-clad bicyclists. The once glittering shopwindows were covered over by giant red billboards: LONG LIVE THE GREAT UNITY OF THE PEOPLE OF THE WORLD; HOLD HIGH THE GREAT RED BANNER OF MAO TSE-TUNG THOUGHT. We passed the old racecourse, which right after World War II had been converted into a nine-hole golf course. It was then customary for each player to use two Chinese caddies, one to carry the bag and one to watch the ball. Now the golf course had been converted into the People's Park, its club house serving as the public library.

We pulled up at the elegant Cathay Hotel, where the eighth-floor dining room overlooking the Whangpoo River used to be famous for its gin gimlets and beef Stroganoff--only now it was the Peace Hotel, and the ornate front entrance had been sealed off. A great tapestry of Yenan and a red and gold Mao-thought dominated the lobby. The dim lighting, bare walls and slipcovers on the old plush furniture gave the Cathay-Peace the half-open look of a lavish summer resort trying to squeak through the winter. The reception desk, once manned by British-accented Chinese concierges in cutaways and striped pants, was staffed by men and women of the hotel revolutionary committee, identically dressed in heavy black padded jackets and pants. They take no tips.

Upstairs, thick red carpets still covered the corridors, and the highceilinged rooms had all the old British furniture and fixtures, including the archaic bathtubs with U-shaped bottoms that make it difficult to stand up and take a shower. As before, the Big Ben clock on the Customs House a few blocks away sounded the hour, though Red Guards had changed the chimes to play The East Is Red, China's national anthem.

While the center of Shanghai has added not one new building to its skyline, the outskirts have been made over completely. Row upon row of two-and three-story gray cement apartment buildings link the city with the outlying farm land. The apartments built during the past 15 years replace the vast tracts of squatters' huts of the old days.

On a guided tour of one such apartment complex, the Feng Cheng workers' residential area, I was introduced to Cheng Wei-ping, a bus dispatcher. Cheng earns 79 yuan a month ($39.50), and his wife earns an identical amount in a nearby cotton mill. Their rent, however, is under 10 yuan per month for bedroom, living room, kitchen alcove and toilet--all unheated. Twenty-five years ago, such accommodations were beyond the reach of anyone but white-collar or professional workers.

Built right into each apartment complex are clinics, schools, grocery shops and usually some light industry. Like most people in Shanghai, the Chengs enjoy telephone service of a sort. On incoming calls a messenger from the telephone service center appears at the Chengs' door. The messenger fee is 1 1/2-c-. Then, by paying another 2-c- at the service center a couple of blocks away, Cheng can connect with the calling party, provided the caller has stayed put at his own telephone center.

After 25 years there were striking changes in the people of Shanghai. In the old days, it was hard for a foreigner to walk along the Bund--the wide promenade along the Whangpoo, which has been renamed Chung Shan Road --without a procession of beggars, cripples and the just plain curious following behind. Walking to work in the old days, I had developed my own special clientele of beggars who got paid off each day, and who in return fended off the other beggars. Now the beggars and cripples were gone, but the ranks of the curious had grown.

No-Toll Bridge. One day I decided to repeat my old walk to work from the Broadway Mansions, renamed Shanghai Mansions, to my former office on the Bund. An unsmiling crowd of 200 or 300 fell in behind. We trekked over the Garden Bridge, now the "No-Toll Bridge." The Soochow Creek below smelled as bad as ever and was jammed with the same sampans that have been used to unload freighters ever since Shanghai was opened to foreign shipping in 1842 after the Opium War.

On we walked past Whangpoo Park, which until 1928 bore the sign, NO DOGS OR CHINESE ALLOWED. The main part of Chung Shan Road pulsates with exercisers: sword dancers, slow-motion shadowboxers practicing the ancient art of tai chi chuan, joggers, tumblers, wrestlers and a few elderly gentlemen who simply lean against a tree and let one leg swing free. The skilled performers draw a great collar of spectators around them. Study the faces. They are the young men and women of the new China, calm, well fed, drably dressed and always surprised at the sight of a foreigner. Only the old folks in Shanghai look at the foreigners knowingly. They have seen them before.

Finally, at No. 17 Chung Shan Road, there stood the gray stone building where TIME and LIFE had their offices on the sixth floor. I peered in through a grille and saw huge portraits of Lenin, Marx and Mao. The heavy bronze gates in the doorway of the building looked just the same. Even the faded gold mosaic of the lobby was just a shade grimier. Peering into the vestibule, I could see the rheumatic old elevators, still alive but having more difficulty than ever getting upstairs.

After 15 minutes of telephoning, the lady guarding the entry let me in. The building had two primary tenants, a silk-exporting agency and a violin factory. Up on the sixth floor I found my old office. The walls were filthy. Had they ever been repainted? To the bafflement of an old man poring over a thick ledger at a desk where mine once was, I vainly searched the walls for a familiar mark or crack. Outside, the lights along the Whangpoo River below were just coming on, but the neon glitter of old Shanghai is gone forever.

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