Building Shanghai

As we embark on the 21st century, Shanghai, the economic engine of China, is posed to challenge the established global economic order with its newfound supremacy. Despite the city's recent ascendancy, scant recognition has been paid to the causes of its giddy rise - history is not so much in the making, as being repeated. In Building Shanghai, the remarkably turbulent and compelling story of this illustrious trading city is revealed for the first time through its architecture, character, form and urban development. Extensively researched and illustrated, with both previously unseen archive material and new photography, the book draws together a comprehensive narrative of Shanghai's history. Stretching back to its ancient origins, it charts the impact of foreign occupation in the 19th and early 20th centuries and then the subsequent decades of virtual isolation under communism, as well as the background to the present burgeoning economy.

The central character in this story is not Shanghai's bewildered present or it fantastical future. It is the city's incomparable and extraordinary past: the Opium Wars that led to Shanghai's occupation by foreigners; China's bitter civil wars and the founding of the Republic; the insularity and greed of foreign settlers; its decadent heyday of the 1920s and 30s when sex, drugs and alcohol underpinned the city's social life; the rise of Communism in China; the Cultural Revolution; and the awakening of potentially the world's largest economy. All of these events, and many more, are etched into the urban landscape and manifested through a fascinating architectural ensemble. This has until now received no systematic scrutiny from abroad. What is, however, demonstrated here is just how extraordinary Shanghai's architecture is in terms of its variety and the interweaving of international styles and design movements.