Shanghai's Pudong district, across the Huangpu river from the old foreign bank buildings on the Bund, shows just how serious China is: a Hong Kong-style skyline of towering buildings, including one housing the largest stockmarket trading-floor in the world, all of it built in just the past decade.

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Big enough to accommodate a couple of hundred dancers, the club boasts huge antique glass windows that look out on the colonial-era buildings dominating the Bund.

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My room was not one of the spacious, oversized spaces I had peaked in on during my stop here 15 years earlier, but the high ceilings and large windows overlooking the rooftops of buildings along the Bund made it appear larger.

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The centerpiece is a waterfront district known as the Bund, lined with majestic art deco buildings such as the newly restored Peace Hotel.

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Positioned at Pudong's tip, the Oriental Pearl Tower was a cartoonish totem for China's race into modernity and an emphatic counterpoint to the Bund, a strip of colonial-era buildings on the opposite Puxi bank of the Huangpu River.

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