Shanghai Street View: Seeking History 沪经动向：追寻历史
The Chinese obsession with history has a major impact on the country’s major cities, which are constantly trying to show how old and historically significant they are to somehow prove their “value” to both local and out-of-town residents. It seems that any city with less than 500 years of history is considered “insignificant” in some ways, no matter how big the city is. That reality has given Shanghai, China’s leading city by any other measurement, a major inferiority complex that I find both amusing and also a bit distressing at the same time.
Perhaps that’s because I come from the United States, a country with just 237 years of history, or up to 500 years if you include its time as a British colony. That lack of history certainly hasn’t been a major handicap to America in the present, and many might even say the lack of a long history has even helped the country to focus on the future rather than the past.
But let’s return to the subject of Shanghai, where archaeologists have just announced their latest discovery of significant artifacts in a town near Shanghai that show the area was an important metropolis as early as the Tang Dynasty that ran from 618 AD to 917 AD. I don’t mean to belittle these latest finds, and I certainly understand the competition that Shanghai and its millions of residents must feel when they have to compare themselves to other major Chinese cities.
Metropolises like Beijing, Xi’an and Suzhou can all boast of histories that date back many centuries, and they never miss a chance to show off their history with museums, restored archaeological sites and other reminders of their long and glorious pasts. Even “newer” cities like Guangzhou seem to have more ancient history than Shanghai, and are always putting that history on display.
By comparison, Shanghai’s history is much less glorious. The city’s historical pride and joy is its Yu Gardens and City God Temple on the banks of the Huangpu River just south of the Bund. That complex, one of the city’s top tourist attractions, dates back 450 years to the Ming Dynasty — impressive by US standards but a not much for a country whose history dates back more than 3,000 years. And having a historical gardens is hardly the same as being a major historical metropolis like Xi’an or Nanjing. Other Shanghai boosters like to point out that the city of Songjiang in Shanghai’s suburbs has a longer history as a real urban center, dating back to its founding more than 1,000 years ago during the Tang Dynasty.
This latest archaeological discovery also dates back to the Tang, with the recent unearthing of more than 2,000 relics in the town of Qinglong southwest of modern day Shanghai. Shanghai archaeologists were quick to point out the discovery includes a large number of porcelain items, some of which were made thousands of kilometers away. They add that the presence of such items that traveled long distances proves that Shanghai was already a major trade hub as early as the Tang Dynasty.
While I find this latest discovery interesting, I also do think that Shanghai should take more pride in the fact that its most dynamic period and its rapid rise as a major Asian city dates back just 250 years to the colonial era. While that history is relatively new and brief compared to other major cities, it certainly contains much more color and intrigue than any other major city in China and truly reflects Shanghai’s current status as China’s most international city.
In some ways, Shanghai and its residents could also look at their relatively short history as a kind of blessing. After all, many people have argued that too much history can often be a burden since such history often produces complex traditions and ways of doing things that impede progress. As such, Shanghai should take pride in the fact that its historical burdens are relatively light, and embrace a role as China’s most forward-looking city rather than fixating on the past.
