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

a thirty-foot sphere of red glass, like a thrombosis.
    ‘Er – a pearl?’ I ventured, hesitantly.
    ‘Yes – exactly.’ He looked amazed at my insight. ‘And look – there's another, and another.’
    One pearl, so-called, on each of the three legs. One immense sphere – another pearl, I should say – where the three legs joined. Then five more smaller globule-pearls, each sixty feet in diameter, up along the main shaft. Another truly massive one at the top of this shaft, then a smaller one farther up on a subsidiary and narrower shaft, after which was the spire and on top of this the television antennae.
    ‘Eleven pearls. Eleven! How's that for a symbol? We wanted to be different, and we wanted to make a statement about who we are. So we truly are the Pearl of the Orient now, don't you think?’
    Lily was stifling her laughter at all of this – though I rather sensed she was changing her mind about the tower now that we had taken this tour; she had nudged me at one point and said that the building was making her feel ‘quite proud’ – but there was no stopping Mr Su. ‘Come into the elevator. We go to the topmost pearl. The most private room in Shanghai. Here you will get away from everything. You want to hold a secret meeting, you hold it here, in full view of everyone – but no one can get here. You understand?’
    Men in red uniforms stood as lift doors opened and shut, girls in red uniforms took their positions on red carpets inside the lifts, red light filtered in through the red glass. (‘Canadian, imported specially. Far too expensive. The old buildings here only ever had blue glass, or clear glass, so we are much better, yes?’) There was a fiery anger to the inside of the tower, a furnace feeling that was not much relieved when finally we arrived inside the sphere – the pearl – at the top of Shanghai. The place was still plastery with makings, workers scurrying around hammering and drilling and tightening things, and there was sawdust on the red carpet. The light that filtered in was tinted rose.
    ‘One thousand three hundred of your feet up in the air,’ announced Mr Su happily. ‘Still not quite the top, but this is as far as guests can go. Here we will have conferences, honeymoons. Who knows?’ He giggled amiably. ‘Very private.’
    As private as Hazelwood once had been, I thought. There it stood, five miles away across the hazy plain of mud over which the early Shanghai had been settled. Five miles separated us, and sixty or seventy years – which was just about all the real history that Shanghai ever had.
    Technically the city actually is quite old: there are suggestions that a fishing village existed on the site in 200 BC , and it was given its present name – which means simply ‘above the sea’ – in AD 900. But it never amounted to much, and compared with its neighbour cities – places like the then-called Soochow and Hangchow and Ningpo – it was generally ignored. It had a modest wall, three miles around, built more to protect the inhabitants from Japanese pirates than to give itself airs. The wall was unusual in that it was round – most Chinese walled cities are square – and its outline, surrounding what was once called the Chinese City, or the Native City, is still plainly visible on maps.
    At ground level, the wall is less easy to spot: the curving road can just be made out, and beyond it the streets are narrower and grubbier. The laundry hung out to dry from one house touches the clothes poles suspended from the house opposite. There are rats everywhere, despite posters advertising incentives – cash, rice, cheap radios – for carcasses handed in to the local street committee chairman. Tiny stalls sell joss sticks and spices and plastic shoes, and there are more open-air restaurants – a dignified term to describe a scurvy-looking man presiding over a wok filled with dark and ominously bubbling and hissing fat – than elsewhere in the city. Generally, though,