A Model City

Shanghai is a city ripe with museums.  In a city that loves their Starbucks, there are possibly more museums than Starbucks.  Nobody could possibly visit all of them.  Quite frankly, nobody ought to visit a good number of them.  However, the 4th floor of the Urban Planning and Exhibition Museum is highly recommended.  The 1st floor is essentially a lobby, 2nd floor has some history of the Bund, Xintiandi, and mansions, the 3rd floor is ironically dedicated to promotion of eco-friendly cities and technologies, 5th floor shows some of the massive projects underway, 6th floor has some odd art, but the 4th floor has a massive model of this massive city.  It doesn't sound so awe-inspiring, but it'll make your jaw drop when you take in the scale and detail of the model while getting a better sense of how immense this city really is.  It feels like a big city, but this model really shows it.  And the boundaries of the model only cover maybe two-thirds of the city.

The other thing you'll note as you tour the museum, which I find fascinating about China in general, is the number of large-scale projects undertaken, underway, and planned.  The construction and development here is on a scale you can't imagine.  You seemingly can't walk four blocks in Shanghai without passing a major construction site.  Qingpu, 45 minutes outside the city, had no less than 100 high rise building under construction.  In Hangzhou, an hour fast train ride southwest, you could look up and find 10 cranes at work no matter where you were in the city.  Near the Shanghai Circuit, a 40 minute subway train ride northwest, 25 more high rise buildings under construction.  You have the fastest train in the world with the Maglev, the not so long ago completed Shanghai-Pudong airport, Shanghai Tower, the list goes on and on.  Right or wrong, and certainly not without it's drawbacks, they build, build big, build often, and build fast.  Another of those on display in the museum is the Yangshan Deep Water Port.  Haven't heard of it?  Neither have I.  It's just a 32.5km bridge (the second longest ocean bridge in the world) out to a deep water port built around a few small islands to circumvent issues with large container ships entering the shallow water of the Shanghai port.  Oh yeah, they also built a round community around a round lake where the bridge meets land just for the heck of it.  Completed in 2005, I don't think it even registered on the news or any of Discovery/NatGeo/History channel's Engineering Marvels, Build It Bigger, and whatever other shows are out there.  That's how much is going on here.

The Urban Planning and Exhibition Museum.

Model as you enter on the 1st floor

The 4th floor model

Model of Yangshan Deep Water Port

Deep water port constructed around Greater
Yangshan island and Lesser Yangshan Island