Barbarian Lost by Alexandre Trudeau

Author:Alexandre Trudeau
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Canada
Published: 2016-08-04T16:00:00+00:00

Saturday is wedding day. But first Viv and I meet an acquaintance of mine, Min, for lunch. Min is an intellectual that I had met once before through friends. We talked only briefly through a translator, but he had a perspective on history and Mao that was unique. He suggested we meet at a restaurant near his work. Viv is curious why he’s near his office, in the old centre by the river, on the first day of the autumn holiday.

We head down there early to visit the Bund first. The Bund was the premier boulevard of old Shanghai. Like the Malecón, the seawall that connects all Havana, the Bund has been a defining feature of development in Shanghai. The word bund comes from India by way of English seamen; it means embankment. Old Shanghai lined up against it. All things and all people showed up on the Bund at some point.

It was on the Bund that Sassoon and Kadoorie set up shop. They were both of Middle Eastern extraction, from Jewish merchant families who had built clever alliances with British imperial traders throughout Mesopotamia and up and down the Arabian and Indian shores. They were men who could get you what you wanted. Moving east with Britain as it expanded its empire and interests, these men gravitated toward Shanghai, which was fast becoming the most important trade city of the Orient.

From their stone fortresses on the Bund, Shanghai’s merchant houses commanded trade networks connecting London and San Francisco to every port between Basra and Bali. The world’s greatest banks also opened branches in Shanghai, to bankroll increasingly ambitious enterprises in the East. These too stood on the Bund.

Shanghai of the Bund era was a central node of a global community of capitalists. An original special economic zone, Shanghai was in China, yet Chinese law did not apply to foreigners here. Excepting the brief Japanese reign during the Second World War, no single power could claim absolute authority over Shanghai. It belonged to everyone and to no one. It was the kind of place great entrepreneurs loved: booming and loosely regulated.

A few old buildings of the Bund still stand, and some of the old hotels continue to operate. What was once grand now seems cramped and crummy. But the Bund is undergoing a facelift, with prestigious new buildings arising to replace what has grown soiled and inefficient. The new Bund has nothing to do with the area’s jazz-era glitz. New China has set up shop here now. Those who walk the Bund or glance at the buildings and the river are not the free operators once essential to Shanghai. Those who come here now do so at the pleasure of the people of China as represented by the Chinese Communist Party. The Chinese have also dwarfed the Bund with a city built all around it that commands attention far more than this old strip.

When we arrive on the Bund, it’s overrun with peoples from the north and west of China. They come as families or groups of old men or women.

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