I decided to give myself a treat….. and checked in to the Fairmont Peace Hotel in Shanghai for a couple of days on the way back home from HNC this summer. Most people familiar with Shanghai (& many who aren’t) know about this famous Art Deco hotel, built in 1927 by Sir Victor Sassoon, a member of the wealthy merchant and banking family known as the “Rothschilds of the East.” Formerly known as the ‘Cathay Hotel,’ it is located at the site where Nanjing Road meets the Huangpu River, on the Bund. Later, after the Communists took over, it was renamed the ‘Peace Hotel,’ and has such an illustrious history that it even has its own museum on-site.

Fairmont Peace Hotel

It was completely refurbished a few years ago by the Fairmont folks, and is now back in its 1920s glory – a fact readily evident in the photo above showing the octagonal rotunda (on the left) and the Bund entrance (on the right). With its lacquered parquet floors and period accoutrements, the rooms were indeed very elegant – and I can see why visitors of the time were so impressed!

I used my stay in Shanghai to check out a couple of sites I’ve been meaning to visit. Lu Xun Park is located in the Hongkou section of the city, north of the former foreign settlement area. It is named after the well-known writer Lu Xun, who wrote many short stories and other pieces about China’s difficult transition from a rural, relatively unsophisticated agrarian society under the Qing dynasty to a more modern, worldly country in the Republican era. He is probably best known abroad for his novelette The True Story of Ah Q, which presents a less-than-flattering portrayal of the China people – claiming even defeats as ‘spiritual victories,’ and having a very self-centered view of reality.

I’ve read many of his stories, and can’t claim that he is a favorite author — but he is certainly a national hero, and his grave in the Park is marked with calligraphy by Mao Zedong. A nice museum there also documents his life, and the young guide was fascinated that a foreigner had such interest. She regaled me with stories about how much China has changed since Lu Xun’s time, and how it is now taking its rightful place in the world. She loves Xi Jinping, and would like someday to visit ‘Meiguo’ (i.e., the U.S.) – but is scared about all of those people with guns.

Lu Xun Park

The Park itself had a history with armaments, since — then known as Hongkew Park — it was the command bunker for Japanese troops attacking the city in August 1937. Mortar batteries there shelled the Zhabei district just north of Suzhou Creek, forcing its inhabitants across the Garden Bridge and into the Bund area. This brutal event is documented in Paul French’s very interesting book Bloody Saturday: Shanghai’s Darkest Day. [French wrote the remarkable Midnight in Peking, and has another book coming out — & already getting great reviews! — about Shanghai]. That Saturday was an infamous one in Shanghai’s history because it was made worse by China’s own aviators — who unfortunately dropped bombs on their own citizens. One of those landed on the Palace Hotel, directly across the street from the Cathay Hotel, and a second hit the outside of the Cathay itself; considerable damage was done to both structures, and there were numerous casualties as well (150 according to one count).

Another Shanghai landmark receiving attention on this visit was the Power Station of Art, seen in the photo below. Yes, that’s right…. a former power plant on Shanghai’s Huangpu riverfront turned into a modern art museum, just like the Tate Modern on the Thames (noted in a previous London visit). I was really quite impressed with the manner in which this was done – lots of large, open display spaces housing ‘big idea’ artwork; multiple exhibits running mechanical equipment; dark room lighting displays, with hanging artwork and shimmering visual effects; and numerous videos of differing scale and impression. They even made use of the inside of the stack, with a blinking light there timed to match the artist’s heartbeat.

Power Station of Art & Personnes exhibit

The photo above shows Personnes on the right, a part of an exhibit entitled Storage Memory by the French artist Christian Boltanski. That ten-ton pile of clothes is supposed to represent both the “disappearance and absence of their long-expired owners,” and the crane’s job – lifting up and then letting go of the pieces of clothing – is “an allegory to the hand of God as well as the ineluctable fist of fate.” Well, okay; I suppose that’s a definite improvement on the piles of high-sulfur coal that used to be burned in the facility…. before it was converted to gas in 1997, and then shut down in 2007.