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(132 Nanyang Rd; 132 ; 9.30am-2am; Jing’an Temple) Big Bamboo is a popular sports bar on two floors that serves up decent Western food, while offering pool, darts and all the big games on TV.

Shanghai’s Communist Vestiges

In its bid to totally refashion itself as a Brave New World futuropolis, Shanghai is deeply at odds with its more mundane communist heritage. The colourless residue of the communist period – still nominally the presiding epoch lest we forget – still lurks among the swell and neon of the town like a record at the bottom of the pile that no one plays any more. Nonetheless, nostalgic middle-aged Chinese on the ‘Red Tour’ (Hongse Lǚyou) of town get dewy eyed at several places of note.

China’s communist bandwagon first rolled out from the Site of the 1st National Congress of the CCP (Click here), one of communist China’s holiest places of pilgrimage, possibly on par with Mao Zedong’s birthplace at Shaoshan in Hunan province.

A palpable reverence hangs over the Former Residence of Mao Zedong (Click here), a pretty shikumen (stone-gate house) that includes his bedroom, study and photos of the ex-Chairman doing his thing. Others on the Chairman Mao trail can check out the building at 168 Anyi Rd (168) where the Great Helmsman once stayed in 1920.

Visits to Fuxing Park (Click here) turn up anachronistic statues of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, godfathers to China’s communist dry run. Astonishingly, the effigies were only carved in 1985, when Marxist dogma in Shanghai was already irreversibly pear-shaped.

The Shanghai Exhibition Centre (Click here) is a classic example of socialist bravado, and for a lavish blast of hardcore communist spin, pop into the Propaganda Poster Art Centre (Click here). Then visit another notable stop on the heritage trail (though the architecture may be concession era), Zhou Enlai’s Former Residence (Click here).

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Дата добавления: 2015-11-14