From Sandton to Shanghai

Straight across from our flat is a captivating view of Shanghai’s financial skyline that speaks of the city’s soaring aspirations. In many ways, these big brash concrete, iron and glass edifices are a sharp rebuff from the elegant sandstone colonial buildings they glare down at across the riverbank.

But for me, the most interesting story comes from the river itself. It is an unpretentious tale whose lead characters ply their daily trade like a silent armada answering the call of the invisible hand. As the late afternoon sun sets into smoggy haze, hundreds of barges carrying their stock of building sand, coal, timber and ore plough upstream through the muddy waters to return days later from some unknown destination - with a cargoless spring in their step as they chug towards the Yangtze River to repeat the cycle all over again.

Ship borne cargo is as popular as rail here. Almost 10% of internal Chinese freight is transported by the myriad of rivers and canals that dissect China’s south eastern seaboard. China has a proud history of navigable passage. Amazingly the world’s oldest and longest canal is not the Suez or Panama Canal, but the Hangzhou - Suzhou Grand Canal that spans a distance longer that Cape Town to Pretoria. It dates back to the 5^th century BC and was finally completed in its present form 1500 years ago - a full 1400 years before the Panama Canal!

Staring across at the daily unfolding river scene is mesmerizing. In many ways, China’s silent armada is a defiant spectacle to behold as they pass through the shadows of the city’s 100 storey skyscrapers. It juxtaposes what China is and what it wants to become - or at least the story that it wants to tell the rest of the world for now. Like so many things in China though, somehow this discontinuous affair seems so natural for a country in the throes of such a defining growth spurt.