ABSTRACT
A navy lieutenant met me at the Shanghai airfield; we drove off into the heat, humid and gritty. Sprawled over the alluvial flats at the mouth of the Yangtze river, Shanghai grew within a hundred years from a fishing village into one of the most graceless of cities. Indeed, not even Chicago can rival its shapelessness—there are no parks or impressive public buildings whatsoever. Warehouses, factories, the tightly packed workers’ quarters, and the apartment houses and villas of the foreign quarter hem in the city’s areas generously set aside for civic recreation, the deepwater port and the polo field. I was quartered in a tall hotel, American style, near the polo field. Early in the morning, I awoke to a listless breeze and the click of mallets.
