Central Shanghai Parks

Originally posted on 23rd January 2015 Fuxing Park is a good place to visit on a Sunday morning, as in Richard’s insensitive words “all the fruitloops are out in force”. The park is in the French Concession and designed by them in 1909 and laid out in the French style with many pollarded plane trees, flower beds and water fountains.

It is a place where mainly elderly Chinese gather on a Sunday morning and they bring with them traditional Chinese activities such as solo tai chi to keep them supple, card foursomes, kite flying, calligraphy (done with a big brush, a pot of water and the paving stones). Singers were competing for an audience, some had many admirers, others none. Puccini songs filled the air around the lake as they competed for attention. Huddles of men listened to what one of them had to say, a little like speakers corner, although we had no idea what about. Younger Chinese who frequent the park are mostly out walking their children in pushchairs, or

jogging, even if one of them was running backwards. The Chinese are not the slightest bit self-conscious about their exercise – one elderly woman was seen to stretch a piece of elastic at waist height across a path between a tree and a garden bench and was using it for grand rond du jamb en l’air. But the most surprising thing we saw was a man lying down meditating. He was holding bands of large beads in both hands and was working his way through each set, bead by bead, his ankles crossed, eyes closed, but he was lying on a hammock made of the single chain of garden fence - the kind where a thick chain is slung between a series of upright posts. We have definitely arrived in the Orient. Lunch - Sunday 18th Jan 2015

We had lunch at Yang’s Dumplings inside a spectacular Art Deco building with chrome bay windows rising above the shop front for 4 stories. The dumplings are made by a team of chefs in a small kitchen just inside the entrance along one wall of the restaurant and behind a glass wall so

Yangs Dumplings Kitchen that you can see the mini production line of them being filled, steamed and then fried. At the front desk you pay for your meal, turn round and get your dumplings from a hatch at the kitchen and then head inside to find a table. The dumplings are filled with a delicious combination of meat and tasty stock, and the pasta casing is both soft and crunchy because the dumplings are not only boiled, but they are also fried.

Yangs Dumplings Technique - pierce first, drink, then eat There is a definite technique to eating them. Our first attempts left the delicious stock being sprayed everywhere, but after observing the locals in action we fathomed out what we should be doing. Lift up the noodles with the chopsticks onto your Chinese spoon. Pierce the dumpling and with the chopsticks and drink the soup out of the holes, then and only then is it the time to lift the dumpling to your mouth. Delicate upright back vertical Western style eating just doesn’t hack it out here in China. You have got to get your head down and reduce the distance from bowl or plate to mouth as much as possible to avoid dropping or spreading your food all over the place. That’s one of the reasons why we westerners are not very good with chopsticks. We are just too delicate about it. Pm – Sunday 18th Jan 2015 Shanghai Peoples Park

After lunch we headed for The People’s Park, built just after the Revolution on the site of the Shanghai Racecourse. It is a charming park surround by sky-scrapers, but not over-powered by them. This park has a more tropical feel to it than Fuxing Park, and it too, had its surprising elements. As we entered the northern entrance we were welcomed by rows of opened umbrellas laid out neatly along the edges of many of the garden’s paths. Each umbrella had an A4 sheet attached to it, but as we couldn’t read the Chinese we had no idea why. As we walked past faded umbrella after umbrella I noticed that behind each one was sitting or standing a woman (although not exclusively) of late middle age. Visitors to the park would be reading the pieces of paper with interest and occasionally chatting to the umbrella owner seemingly about the notice they displayed. As we walked I noticed that sometimes there was a photograph of a young adult – sometimes a man, sometimes a girl. Often I could see a date, 1992, 1983 and so on.

A row of Umbrellas at Shanghai's People's Park It took a while for it to dawn on us what was going on, but we finally got there. The match-maker has traditionally had a very significant role in Chinese society. Although the match-making agencies have been cleared from the park in the recent past, parents with a child of marriageable age are still allowed to come. Here on Sunday afternoons in The People’s Park in Shanghai on their umbrellas the parents were displaying their wares.