Shanghai: Beyond the Skyline

On a recent trip to China, Boston Globe travel writer Tom Haines took the amazing architecture of Shanghai as a given, old news. He and photographer Essdras M Suarez instead took a look a how the rising buildings and economy have affected life in Shanghai, and their story—the first of a two-part series “Into a Changing China”—and a terrific audio slide show highlighting the collision of old and new, are now online. “Across the river, guests at the Hyatt rest their heads on pillows 80 stories above the city. Foreign bankers emerge from apartments in the French Concession and swing into Starbucks for blueberry muffins and venti lattes. Tom Cruise leaps from Shanghai’s real towers in the imagined world of M:i:III,” Haines writes. “It can be easy to forget that beneath it all a local culture evolves.”

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