Shanghai

The Pudong district of Shanghai displays a wide range of skyscrapers, many of which rank among the tallest in the world. The most prominent examples include the Jin Mao Tower and the taller Shanghai World Financial Center, which at 492 metres tall is the tallest skyscraper in mainland China and ranks third in the world. The distinctive Oriental Pearl Tower, at 468 metres, is located nearby, and its lower sphere is now available for living quarters. Another highrise in the Pudong area is the newly finished Development Tower, standing at 269 meters.

Since 2008, Shanghai has boasted more free-standing buildings above 400m (3) than any other city. In the future, the Shanghai Tower, slated for completion in 2014, will be the tallest building in China. With a height of 632 metres (2074 feet), the building will have 127 floors and a total floor area of 380,000 sqm.

Shanghai cuisine is a popular style of Chinese cuisine. The city of Shanghai itself does not have a separate and unique cuisine of its own, but modifies those of the surrounding provinces, such as Jiangsu and Zhejiang. What can be called Shanghai cuisine is epitomised by the use of alcohol. Fish, crab, chicken are "drunken" with spirits and are briskly cooked/steamed or served raw. Salted meats and preserved vegetables are also commonly used to enhance the dish.

The use of sugar is common in Shanghai cuisine, especially when used in combination with soy sauce. Non-natives tend to have difficulty identifying this usage of sugar and are often surprised when told of the "secret ingredient". The most notable dish of this type of cooking is "sweet and sour spare ribs" (Chinese: 糖醋小排; pinyin: tángcù xiǎopái). "Red cooking" is another popular style of stewing meats and vegetables.

Because of Shanghai's status as the cultural and economic center of East Asia for the first half of the twentieth century, it is popularly seen as the birthplace of everything considered modern in China. It was in Shanghai, for example, that the first motor car was driven and (technically) the first train tracks and modern sewers were laid. It was also the intellectual battleground between socialist writers who concentrated on critical realism, which was pioneered by Lu Xun, Mao Dun, Nien Cheng and the famous French novel by André Malraux, Man's Fate, and the more "bourgeois", more romantic and aesthetically inclined writers, such as Shi Zhecun, Shao Xunmei, Ye Lingfeng, and Eileen Chang.