The River at the Centre of the World by Simon Winchester

suburbs like Camberley or Virginia Water, or perhaps White Plains or Grosse Point – except that this was Shanghai, the most iniquitous town in the world, a cruel, mercenary city of white-hot passions and ice-cold hearts.
    Not that those who lived at Hazelwood seemed party to any obvious iniquity, nor any cruelty or passion. You could remember what they looked like: the Swires men invariably tall, with square jaws, neat moustaches, kitted out in yellow cardigans and cavalry twill; the women matronly, competent, handsome, with the deep voices of the hockey field. (The first resident was the redoubtably square-jawed N. S. Brown, known to his staff, less than kindly, as Night Soil Brown.)
    You could remember the innocent sounds, as well: the crunch of gravel as tyres pulled in under the porte-cochere, a sudden burst of laughter from the grass court, the patient clicking of the pruning shears by the matron with the trug of roses, the music drifting lazily from a wireless in the drawing room. The Chinese amah calling to the children to come inside for tea.
    But these days what once was Hazelwood is just a small hotel, the Xinguo Bingguan, the Prosperous Kingdom Guest House. It was confiscated from Swires in the 1950s, like almost all the assets and property of the city's foreigners. Nowadays there is a glossy brochure: ‘Inside the Xing Guo Hotel the scenery is beautiful and peaceful. Big trees with exuberant foliage are alive with melodious birds. Fragrant wafts of flowers in full blossom breeze about. Several villas in European style are enwrapped by the greenery…’
    What was once the main bedroom of the house, the one where the taipan slept and which had the french windows leading onto the terrace, and a view over the south lawn, has now been made into what they call a suite. The proprietors – the local government, a city ward in fact – will take sixty-five American dollars for each night you stay there, and they will charge it to your credit card. You are assured of privacy, just as the lairds of Hazelwood once were: the house is quite invisible behind the high brick walls that insulate it from the people and the traffic on Avenue Haig and Avenue Joffre and Rue Cardinal Mercier, and Bubbling Well Road, as the streets around were then known.
    It was indeed made to be quite hidden from all of the city, amid which it nestled, secretly. It had been designed as a private house for one of Shanghai's most powerful foreign figures, a man who wanted a place tucked away from the bustle and the sin, a place where you could forget the existence of the city's 668 brothels and the calls for drinks at the longest bar in the world and the assorted terrors of Blood Alley – and for all the time he lived there, and for decades afterward, Hazelwood was private indeed.
    But things have lately changed in Shanghai, and Hazelwood's splendid seclusion has gone. The privet hedges and the plane trees may still be there. But now, from another angle, an entirely new one, the house has recently become eminently and rather dramatically visible. A great new building has just gone up, one that dominates the city skyline and provides a place from which to gaze down on this and on all the old jumble of structures from Shanghai's extraordinary past.
    It is impossible to miss: I saw it the very instant that I drew back the curtains of my cabin, and I almost jumped with surprise. The boat on which I was staying was moored at the northern end of the city reach, just downstream of the old Russian Consulate, at the place where the Whangpoo makes the final turn of the S-bend that once dictated where Shanghai was first built. My cabin faced south, and so the view was impeccable – directly down the river. The huge walls of old Imperial Shanghai ran down the Bund to the right. The suspension wires of the new Yangpu bridge – the second of two – glinted ahead in the distance. But on the left, bathed in white searchlight glare and winking with dozens of