Some call Shanghai the Pearl of the Orient. And, in many ways, it is -- organic, iridescent, a nacreous gemstone wrapped around a suffering center stuffed into the belly button of China. Behind this glittering umbilicus, China's largest river, the great Yangtze, crawls through the fat middle of the country all the way from Tibet.
Shanghai is young as great cities go. A murky backwater for centuries, its origins as a cosmopolitan center are rooted in the 1842 Treaty of Nanjing and trade concessions won by the British in the ignominious Opium Wars, which allowed British merchants to continue to pollute the Chinese populace with opium imported from India in the name of balancing trade. Shanghai, like Xiamen, Guangzhou, Fuzhou and Ningbo, became a "treaty port" where foreign powers (the British and later the French and the Americans) were granted autonomous, self-governing settlements. Extraterritoriality -- freedom from Chinese law and a great distance from their own -- came with a license and licentiousness that lent Shanghai all the gravity of a frat party thrown in someone else's house.