Grand old Shanghai

Uncle Fatso has reached Shanghai and is waxing lyrical about the city. Hope he can send more pix to show the people in the bustling city, and the grandeur of the city and the Bund.

By Uncle Fatso in Shanghai

Shanghai, with a population of more than 18.8 million people, is one of the most populous and developed cities in the People's Republic of China.

The city -- situated on the estuary of Yangtze River or Chang Jiang -- had an early start. It was already the largest and most prosperous city in Asia by the 1930s.

Known as "the Oriental Paris", Shanghai is a shopper's paradise. It has also emerged as the financial capital of China. In the early 1990s, the Shanghai government launched a series of new strategies to attract foreign investments. The biggest move was to open up Pudong, once a rural area of Shanghai. The strategies succeeded, and now Pudong has become the financial district of Shanghai, with a lot of skyscrapers.

But Shanghai has become one of the the most polluted cities in the world due to rapid and unbridled industrial development in the past few years.

Nevertheless, Shanghai is still a fascinating mix of East and West. It has one of the richest collections of art deco buildings in the world, thanks to its legacy as a Western concession at the turn of the 20th century.