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By Root 1255 0

World Financial Tower, an immense cone that would scrape the sky at 1,614 feet. The designs for the tower had to be altered at the last moment when protesters noted that the huge, circular aperture at the building’s peak reminded them of the Rising Sun, the symbol on Japan’s flag, which wasn’t exactly what leaders in China wanted to see on the world’s second-tallest building. The Jin Mao Tower was a trifle shorter, but for the moment it still dominated the glass-and-steel canyons of Pudong. Twenty-five years ago, Pudong was swampy farmland. Today, it is the glittering center of finance in China and its buildings tell the story of that transition. It was here that the new China first emerged, and in its architecture you can see the early struggles with confidence. There is the Oriental Pearl Tower, reminiscent of Seattle’s Space Needle, with its mutant, galactic orbs, screaming Look at me! I’m modern too!—a sort of Space Age Sixty–ish towering architectural relic where you just know that the restaurant inside sells Rocket Burgers. Or maybe Rocket Dumplings. And then there are the early skyscrapers, the ones built in the eighties, plain inverted rectangles topped with a golden pagoda: Modernity with Chinese Characteristics. But it’s the newer buildings that suggest that China is feeling pretty cocky these days. The Jin Mao Tower is also meant to convey a pagoda, but it doesn’t at all look silly and ill-conceived. It looks really cool.

I had gotten all crazy and reserved a room at the Grand Hyatt Shanghai, the world’s highest hotel, located on floors fifty-four to eighty-seven of the Jin Mao Tower. I figured that if I was going to look for money this would be an excellent place to find it. Then, as I handed over my credit card at the check-in counter on the fifty-fourth floor, it occurred to me that this was a profoundly addled way of thinking. I wasn’t going to find money here. I was going to go broke here. I hadn’t stayed in a hotel quite so august since my days as a consultant to the World Bank, when I traveled as the Official Carrier of the PowerPoint Projector. The Grand Hyatt is the sort of hotel where, if you’re not wearing a suit, you feel a little sloppy, a heretofore unexperienced sensation in China. It is very likely that I was the first guest to wander into the lobby with a backpack. It is also the only place in China where I felt acutely self-conscious in seeking the customary 50-percent-plus discount off the listed price. And that was a very odd sensation indeed. By now I was hardwired for bargaining, and when vendors tried to overcharge me, the dumb laowai, I’d haggle with glee. But not here, deep inside the Grand Hyatt Shanghai, where everything was hushed and graceful, and guests exuded an overwhelming sense of richness that precluded them from even caring how many zeros there were on their hotel bill.

I hesitated before taking the key. There was still time to find a room a trifle less lavish than this, but then they offered an upgrade to a Super Deluxe Executive Suite at absolutely no additional cost and I thought, What the hell, go on, spend a night living like a Master of the Universe. I took the key, swiped it into the Guests Only elevator, and proceeded upward to the seventy-fourth floor, where I found my room, a sanctuary in the sky with soft woody colors and a top-of-the-line king-sized bed and a bathroom that evoked an extremely weird sensation of desire. I wanted this bathroom, this haven of chrome—no, not chrome, platinum probably—with the multinozzled immersion shower. But most impressive was the view, the kind of view that left my jaw scraping against the floor. There below me, far, far below, swirled the Huangpu River, choked with boats of every variation, and across was the Bund, evoking the Shanghai of yesteryear when the city was famed as the Whore of the Orient (now, there’s a moniker), and beyond that the thousands of buildings, the swarming immensity of Shanghai, just beginning to light up a crepuscular dusk. Even in my hermetically sealed Super Deluxe Executive Suite, I could feel the