THE CHINESE MARKET - Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism - page 237

tourists climb onto sightseeing boats to view the city. Across the boulevard stand those Art
Deco buildings that have won preservation status as classic masterpieces.
To understand why the Art Deco buildings were preserved while the far older Chinese
masterpieces of Beijing were razed, as well as other puzzles of modern Chinese tourism,
we met William Patrick Cranley and his wife Tina Kanagaratnam, two of the founders of
Historic Shanghai. They were our hosts for Sunday brunch at M on the Bund, the literary
watering hole of Shanghai at the top of the old 1921 Nissan Shipping Building, now re-
stored.
It was a bright, windy day along the river. Cranley and Kanagaratnam had moved to
Shanghai fourteen years earlier and said they quickly became enamored with the city, es-
pecially the Art Deco buildings from the 1930s. In their downtime—he is an academic,
she is in public relations—they became tour guides for visiting foreigners, requiring them
to dig deep into the city's history and discover the Byzantine ways of the country's tourism
industry.
“The first visitors were often people with family ties to old Shanghai—from the foreign
concessions, Jewish families, Chinese families, French, American, British,” said Cranley.
“Some came with only one photo and said, 'this is my house, please help me find it,' ”
said Kanagaratnam. To her surprise, she did find a house or two.
Now Cranley operates several basic tours for private groups or tour companies, often
customizing them. His Art Deco walking tour takes visitors to the jewels along the
Bund—the Fairmont Peace Hotel, the Park Hotel, the Bank of China Building—and then
down the narrow lilongs of the city to see one of the greatest collections of Art Deco build-
ings in the world. Another popular walking tour covers what is left of Shanghai's once-
thriving Jewish quarter. This is not to be confused with the official Chinese tour agency's
“Jewish Historic Tour,” which is a standard two-week trip through China with an after-
noon stop at the old Jewish quarter of Zhengszhou and one day looking at Jewish sites in
Shanghai.
Cranley's tours, though, are basically illegal.
“Tourism is a state-protected business in China. Those of us foreigners who give tours
are technically illegal. We're not licensed. So that means we can't register as a business
or open a bank account under our name Historic Shanghai,” said Cranley. “So we don't
make waves and we operate below the radar.”
That doesn't mean that the authorities are ignorant. They tolerate the tours because
they bring in business, often high-end tourism. For ten years Cranley and Kanagaratnam
and their partner Tess Johnston, the doyenne of Historic Shanghai, have been sponsoring
the Shanghai Literary Festival, which is publicized in the media. The target audience
is English-speakers, which gives them the breathing space. The festival headlines some
Chinese authors like Qiu Xialolong, the author of a popular English-language detective
series set in his native Shanghai. Cranley said they sold 7,000 tickets to the festival in 2011,