Five broad avenues feed into the Wujiaochang, or Five Corner Place[roundabout] before you, above which an elevated highway slashes through a glittering pod. This novel, dynamic crossroads looks fairly quiet at the moment, but it was clearly [designer Zhong Song] designer Zhong Song[designed] for a people on the go. Every day, tens of thousands of pedestrians ride the escalators here to shop underground. No surprise, for you are visiting the most bustling non-capitalist city in the history of global economics. Welcome to Shanghai!

Okay, we gave you one. Now the real work begins.

If you arrived in the Paris of the East by way of View Website[Pudong Airport], you may have crossed a
Yangpu Bridge, 1993[six-lane cable bridge] to enter the Yangpu[district] you are now touring (and if you got trapped behind some of the hundred thousand vehicles that do so daily, the term shanghaied probably has a whole new meaning). Or perhaps you followed the Bund[another route], winding along a Huangpu River[river] in order to marvel at the heralded towers that once housed consulates, banks, and trading companies and gave the city its pre-war buzz. In that case, you surely stopped in an Peace Hotel[eminent old hotel] for drinks and to swing to the beat of its popular septuagenarian jazz band (when you find yourself imagining former guest No‘l Coward scribbling upstairs, it's time to pay the tab).

However you arrived at this crossroads, you are a long way from the Nanshi, or Old Town[narrow lanes and alleys] that still lend the city some charm. You're also a good distance from the malls, boutiques, and posh hotels that flank a Nanjing Lu[celebrated road], as well as from an area with a French Concession[French connection]
and from a Renmin Gongyuan, or People's Park[flowery park] with a new contemporary art museum.

"The Suburbes contayne as many houses as the Citie," Purchas his Pilgrimes, 1625[observed Father Mateo Ricci] in the early seventeenth century. Indeed, this Yangpu[outer district]-one of nine that make up the city proper-has more than a million inhabitants. Until recently, it was also largely industrial, full of factories that date back to the Shanghai International Settlement[international era]. Now, in addition to shops that range from an exotic food mart to a Wal-Mart, art galleries have opened and more than a dozen universities are helping to turn the area into the city's high-tech "brain."

While the Peace Hotel[eminent old hotel] [by the same artist, see also] pod (or the egg, as it's known locally) serves as a sound barrier, its higher purpose is aesthetic: A thousand LEDs change color every ten seconds, and last year, it was lit up with videos as part of an arts program (for more by the artist, click here and here ). You might just be witnessing-dare we say it?-the beginnings of a cultural revolution.