Shanghai's past and waxworks

Admiring the Shanghai Museum from People's Square

The Lonely Planet extolled the virtues of the Shanghai Museum so we went and looked at jade and porcelain.  I was a bit underwhelmed, perhaps because I know nothing about either and the signs didn't help much.  I was amused to note however that my Chinese co-tourists were a bit museumed out too.  Anywhere it was possible to sit was occupied.  The museum is free and numbers of visitors per day is limited.  Grant caused a bit of bother by buying a replica knife that was once used as currency in the gift shop and it showed up in the security tunnel. He wanted to give it to Fredi and Finn as a cheese knife even though they don't eat cheese. Then his fold up glasses looked horribly like a cigarette lighter.  But it was all ok in the end.

Shanghai Museum interior 

However the next museum we visited charmed and moved me and taught me so much about Shanghai.  It was located in one of the garish buildings which features a tripod and some glittery globes. This one wasn't free and I could see why.  So much care and delicacy had gone into creating a walk through time with waxwork figures, each expressive as an old master portrait.  There was a pickle trader in his shop with one hand up over the counter.  A fellow tourist posed  as though purchasing and touched the pale wax fingers.  I too touched them and was glad I did. A pulse of the past came through them to me. Dried fish hung in another shop and there was a section dedicated to the film industry with a very old film flickering on a screen.  It showed a naughty child being spanked. There was an opium den with a recumbent addict and a young girl gazing out of a window.

A wax shopkeeper in the Shanghai city history museum

 I learnt about the appalling behaviour of the British - how they drenched Shanghai with opium from India in order to trade for what they wanted.

A British opium dealer on the Bund

I want to know more about Shanghai, once monocultural, then exploited and abused and yet fertilised by the experiences brought by encroaching traders.  There was a French concession as well as a British one and also a Jewish quarter that was very hospitable to refugees from Germany in WWII.  Maybe this history of embedded alien cultures accounts for the urbane way in which we rare foreigners are ignored.  It is easier to go with the flow here in Shanghai than anywhere I have ever travelled.  Nobody seems to notice us.

Going with the flow

We had a very fiery fish soup for dinner and caught an Uber home. Ubers are called Didis here.