The River at the Centre of the World by Simon Winchester Page A

anti-collision lights, rose the extraordinary, unexpected, bright-red-tinted and breathtakingly ugly Oriental Pearl Television Tower, the tallest and, for the time being, unarguably the most vulgar structure in the East.
    The Oriental Pearl Tower is a mongrel of a thing, a high-technology fantasy by an architect who was commissioned merely to build something that was defiantly and symbolically Twenty-first Century. It stands, perhaps with deliberately revisionist cheek, on top of the very spot where Jardines once had their main Pudong wharves and warehouses. It is 1535 feet high, all legs and bulbs and pods and needles; it looks like an insect. It is not unimpressive: those who see it for the first time gasp, for it quite dwarfs every other building in Shanghai by both its scale and its bellowing chutzpah.
    At night it looks as though it is about to take off. (‘I wish it would,’ muttered Lily, who at first thought it a very disagreeable addition to the city's skyline.) By day it stands suspended above the hurrying crowds, looking dark and vaguely menacing, half lighthouse, half gibbet. It is of course suggestive of tomorrow, but at the same time it somehow seems to be a warning of tomorrow. Some people who see it shudder: it is so huge, it went up so quickly * and on close inspection it is so badly made. And indeed, by being so gigantic, so hurriedly done and so shoddily put together it does manage to symbolize – in more ways than its makers know – the realities of the fast-growing new city that sprawls around and beneath it. But that is not why I found it so menacing a structure: I think it was the fact that it combined its sheer ugliness with its utter domination of the view. How, I kept wondering to myself, could city fathers with any sense of civic pride have permitted such a thing?
    A deliriously proud citizen named Mr Su took me to the top of the monster. According to his thickly laminated business card, he was its Vice General Manager, and I gathered from his ceaseless chatter that his task was for him a labour of love – he adored both his building and all of new Shanghai. As we stepped from the lift, he spread wide his arms and began to point out grand and new and ever more glittering structures that were rising around the city on every side, down amid a forest of construction cranes. For a while I happily ignored him: I was content to peer down through the grey-blue haze of factory smoke and car exhausts until I found the tiny landmark patch of green that was Hazelwood, far away to the west. I spent some while gazing fondly down and across at it, getting my bearings in a way I had never imagined possible. It was infinitely more pleasurable to do this, to shut out Mr Su's unending drumbeat of statistics and notable achievements and, in a poignant sort of way, to savour the connection and reflect on the dissonance between Clough's old house down there and this new colossus on top of which we were standing.
    But eventually Mr Su became less easy to ignore. He moved away from the windows, invited me into another lift, took us up a few floors, then down a few more, along a corridor and onto an escalator until I was quite comprehensively disorientated. He had by now stopped talking of the changes that were being wrought down in the city, bubbling away instead with explanations of the specific architectural details of his own building. He did so at a great clip, shouting all the while, like a circus barker.
    ‘The symbol of this city is – what? The pearl. Pearl of the Orient, yes? Well, look at this: how many pearls you see?’
    We seemed to be standing now near one of the tower's three elephantine legs, and I saw he was waving pictures before me, jabbing at each of them with his finger.
    ‘Look at Seattle. Only one pearl at the top. Look at Moscow. Look at Toronto – bigger than us, yes – but how many pearls? One, just one.
    ‘Now look up, look at ours.’
    And I looked, and halfway up the closest leg was