Part 7, Shanghai and Pudong

Date: 4/3/2017

No doubt about it: Shanghai is a big city.  In terms of population within its city limits, it is the biggest city in the world at about 24 million.  By population of metropolitan area, it is #2 in the world at 34 million, behind #1 Tokyo which has 38 million.  But it’s in Pudong across the Huangpu River where it’s really happening.  Pudong was mostly farmland until the 1960s — and in 1993 it was set up as the Pudong New Area and has become a financial nerve center of China.  When we visited China in 2005, the Pearl Tower was the tallest structure in Pudong … now it is dwarfed by the skyscrapers around it.

Photo 0214 – Shanghai in smog, biggest city proper in the world, 24 million within city limits

When you see photos of Shanghai, chances are it’s not downtown Shanghai with its traditional old British colonial buildings of “The Bund”, but rather more likely you’re seeing Pudong across the river. The iconic Oriental Pearl Tower is in Pudong, as are all the new super-tall skyscrapers. Also in Pudong are the Shanghai International Airport, and the “maglev” (magnetic levitation train) to the airport.

Photo 0164 – Oriental Pearl Tower in Pudong

Three of the tallest buildings in China are all located at one intersection in Pudong — each of these buildings was the tallest in China when they were completed:

– Jin Mao Tower: 1,380′ tall, 88 stories, completed 1999
– Shanghai World Financial Center (SWFC): 1,614′ tall, 101 stories, completed 2008
– Shanghai Tower: 2,073′ tall, 128 stories, completed 2013, now #2 in the world

Photo 0166 – (clockwise) Jin Mao (top), Shanghi Tower (bottom), SWFC (left)

The views from the top of the Shanghai Tower are sensational … you can see for many miles even on a smoggy day. The Huangpu River with all its river traffic is at your feet. And the Jin Mao Tower where we stayed, is WAY down there, making it hard to imagine that the much lower Jin Mao Tower was once the tallest building in China.

Photo 2782 – C&S at the Shanghai Tower Observation Deck

The other great draw in Pudong is riding the “maglev” (i.e. magnetic levitation) train, which covers the 18 mile distance from downtown Pudong to Pudong Airport in about 8 minutes. We hopped on it to experience the ride again after riding it during our 2005 trip. This time it topped out at 187 mph, which was considerably slower than the 268 mph that it reached in 2005. The following morning, we caught a flight out of Pudong to go see the Three Gorges Dam, and even at 5 a.m., a taxi ride of roughly the same distance took nearly an hour. (The maglev was closed at that hour.) Reportedly, one of the reasons that the new Beijing-Shanghai high-speed rail line was built using conventional high-speed rail technology rather than maglev technology is that the maglev was never able to make a profit on the Pudong Airport run.

Photo 0242 – Maglev train to Shanghia International, Pudong

Incidentally, I find the roof support system at the Pudong Airport terminal to be technically and aesthetically very interesting: cables with stand-off poles that take the tension load of the very long span that would normally be borne by deep beams, and which give a much more airy look. I really like it when structural elements can be put on display as aesthetic elements too.

Photo 0248 – Tension cables in roof system at Shanghai International Airport, Pudong

We were only in Pudong/Shanghai 2 nights and one full day. It would have been nice to have another day or two to see some of the fantastic bridges in the area too. Example: there is a 20-mile bridge that leads out to the new deepwater Shanghai container port located on the Yangshan Islands, completed in only 2005, and now which is the busiest container port in the world. There’s just not enough time to do it all!

Next: off to see the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River near Yichang in Central China.

P.S. Compliments to Wikipedia for help with all the statistics here.