Zone: The historic centre

Modern Shanghai is one of the world's largest cities. It's a city whose hallmarks are skyscrapers and high-tech, big business for big bucks – and it's a port city with a long and fascinating history. Yet in Chinese terms, Shanghai is a comparatively young city, with written records dating back only as far as the C12th. In those medieval days, today's bustling financial centre was just a small fishing village by the sea. Yet even then its name was the same as now, formed from two Chinese hieroglyphs, Shan and Hai – which means "by the sea" in Chinese. We're going to talk a walk along the Bund waterfront, and between the modern skyscrapers there we'll see some former British colonial mansion buildings from the C19th, and find out a little of what life was like in this colonial metropolis before communist China took control of it.