Our first full day in Shanghai began with a short walk around Shanghai Jiao Tong University, where we are staying. The university is almost exactly as old as Rice, but around ten times as large in population. The university is a mix of old mid-rise buildings and new high rise buildings, some of which are simply rented out to businesses to earn the university money. The university is located near two subway stops and so makes for a staging area for our trips into the city.
The first trip today was to the Yuyuan Gardens, a part of Shanghai which features traditional Chinese architecture. We first passed through several markets, where all kinds of trinkets were being sold. The entrance to the gardens was actually a bridge which zig-zagged across a large pond. The gardens were filled with buildings on stilts, bronze statues, and antique carvings. When we finished walking through the gardens (our journey slowed by a substantial amount of pictures…) we continued to a vegetarian restaurant in the market. Though the restaurant only served vegetarian food, most of the food looked exactly like meat. The “steak” in particular was deliciously uncanny.
After lunch we traveled to Shanghai library (which, like most of Shanghai’s buildings, was much taller than I expected) to meet a historian and a documentary director. The lecture on the history of Shanghai was especially interesting in the context of just having visited the Bund and seen many buildings dating back to the era of the foreign concession. The documentary director gave us interesting insights into the role which the central government plays in media creation in China. Two principles stood out. The first was that in general no research is prevented from being carried out by censorship – censorship only applies to the release of certain material to the public. The second is that the central government does not typically encourage production of certain media in order to achieve political goals, rather it acts by restricting the topics which can be broadcasted, with the intent of preventing civil unrest.
After the lectures we got back on the subway to go to another market, this one more upscale than the one we visited in the morning. I drank some delicious boba tea, and we ate a delicious Taiwanese dinner in a restaurant above the market.
