Shanghai

At the estuary of the Huangpu river, the city rightfully calls itself the gateway to China. It's a city with a million faces, sounds and smells, bustling, noisy, densely polluted; the backstreets of Shanghai are a near permanent construction site, a primordial soup that bore the first congress of the Chinese Communist Party in 1921, and now the soil from which a new China grows.

Crumbling ramshackle buildings cluster beneath colossal space-age edifices, the roads are rough and the taxi drivers rougher, ploughing an unstoppable madcap furrow, regardless of man or beast, much like the pedestrians themselves.

Shanghai carries itself with a casual, almost slovenly swagger, self-assurance, nonchalance, a seething and aggressive existence. After the clinical theme park that is Japan, Shanghai is like a different planet.