Lounging on a ruby nightclub sofa scattered with pillows, smoking apple-scented tobacco through a hookah, watching the girls with glossy black hair bewitching their Chinese boys; this is the perfect position to ponder the baffling metropolis of Shanghai.In the warm midnight air of a bar called Barbarossa, the conversation is getting louder as exorbitant cocktails slide down jewelled throats. At the bar, a Belgian man with his forearm in plaster is talking about when the Armani boutique opened: "You should have seen all the rich Chinese with their pretty girlfriends buying leather jackets - but it's sad," he says, "Shanghai never used to be this hip, so hip it's starting to get annoying, you know what I mean?"
This is post-colonial, post-Mao Shanghai, elegant and filthy, open all hours, the baffling metropolis, contradictory and thrilling....more
