THE CHINESE MARKET - Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism - page 236

tional airport; 300 million people live within a two-hour drive of the site. Once the en-
tire complex is built, the developers hope attendance will surpass the 45 million annual
visitors to Disney World in Orlando. A resort of this size means tens of thousands of new
jobs—and newcomers—for Shanghai, a prospect that helped convince the Chinese gov-
ernment to sign on to the deal after a fifteen-year courtship by Disney. While we were in
the city, the Disneyland construction site was off-limits, but newspapers were filled with
reports of the new subway link under construction and the renderings of the design that
would be familiar to anyone who has visited Disney World in Orlando or Disneyland in
California.
Bill and I stayed within the traditional tourist zones in Shanghai, at a hotel in the old
French Concession in strolling distance of the Bund. On this trip we booked only hotels
that were Chinese-owned and -operated, avoiding international chains. That proved more
difficult than we had imagined. Albar was right when he said that over 90 percent of hotels
in China were now managed by chains. Shanghai, though, is blessed with beautiful Art
Deco buildings that have been preserved as hotels. Some believe they escaped the wreck-
ing ball because they are western-styled, erected by Europeans and wealthy Chinese in the
1930s.
This was the era when Shanghai gained its reputation as the Paris of Asia. The blend
of western architecture with Chinese sensibilities is the backdrop to all of those smoky im-
ages of Shanghai bankers and mobsters, traders in tea shops and women wearing the satin
Mandarin dresses, or cheongsam. Dozens of these beautiful buildings still line the Bund,
the stretch along the Huangpu River, which divides the city and empties into the Pacific
Ocean. (It was christened the Bund by English entrepreneurs using the Hindi word for
“levee” or “dam.”)
We stayed at a mansion-hotel, the Heng-Shan Moller Villa, a fantastic confection of
Swedish and Chinese architecture built in 1936 by Eric Moller, a Swedish shipping mag-
nate. The Moller family gave up the home in 1950 after China became Communist. It
served as the headquarters of the Shanghai branch of the Chinese Communist Party Youth
League throughout the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, keeping intact
the impressive stained-glass windows, staircases and paneled foyer. In 2001, the govern-
ment gave it to the Heng-Shan Group of Shanghai, which refurbished and restored it as
a hotel. Although the group added some questionable outbuildings to the garden, its ec-
centric Euro-Chinese décor was preserved, along with the large garden, an unheard-of
luxury in downtown Shanghai, where millions of cars clog the streets and fill the nights
with honking horns. We listened to birdsongs from our open windows every morning.
It was a brisk walk to the Bund, which is now the sine qua non of Shanghai tourism.
The riverside quay has been transformed into an expansive modern promenade where
Shanghai families come on the weekends and buy their children toys and snacks while