Lawyer's letter from Shanghai

By Chris Perfect

Vast is the word that best encapsulates Shanghai.

This city is not simply big, sprawling or large, although it is all of those things. It is truly vast.

From the moment you arrive you are forced to adjust your perspective. Stepping off the plane and into the terminal at the Shanghai airport, people at the other end of the cavernous steel and glass structure appear in miniature.

The sense that you've arrived in a city of extraordinary proportions is magnified as you are catapulted towards the centre at over 250 miles per hour by the Maglev train that connects the airport with the centre.

In the eight minutes that it takes to travel the 30km from the airport, hundreds if not thousands of office and apartment blocks appear over the horizon like an army of concrete warriors. These buildings are conscripts of China's breakneck economic growth.

You step out of the Maglev terminal in Pudong on the city's eastern flank, to face a rank of buildings stretching, almost without interruption, as far as the eye can see.

These buildings mark the - current - extent of Shanghai's western growth. It is an impressive and somewhat daunting sight.

Shanghai is a city, or rather a metropolis, that sits at the entrance to the Yangtze River on China's east coast about 650 miles south of the capital, Beijing. The literal translation of Shanghai is "on the sea " or "above the sea", and comes from its proximity to the East China Sea.

The city sits at the mouth of the mighty Yangtze River, and is roughly bisected by the Huangpu River which runs north to south. As I walked beside the river on my afternoon in Shanghai ships of all types and sizes, from coastal freighters to gaudily lit tourist craft, plied their trade along the river.

The city's strategic proximity to the sea and the inland waterways has been central to its re-emergence as one of, if not the, most important commercial hubs in China. The city's container port is now the busiest in the world. Not surprisingly in a country for which recent development has been fuelled by exports, the flow of trade through Shanghai has focused commercial interest from abroad here. Maintaining the port as an international shipping hub has been made a priority by central government.

It's not just the scale of the city but also the speed of the development that is staggering.

Almost all of Pudong's high rises have gone up in the past 20 years.

The official name the eastern part of Shanghai that borders the river is, appropriately, the Pudong New Area.

Symbolic of its skyline is the Oriental Pearl Tower.

This futuristic tripod tower dominates the view from the Bund, the western bank of the river that is famous for its colonial era buildings.

More recently the Shanghai World Financial Centre has poked its square head above the Pearl Tower. As I look north-west out of my office window it dominates the skyline like a 474m cheese grater.

The pace of development has not slowed, mind.

Shanghai of October 2009 has very much the look of a city under construction. The World Expo will take place here from May to October next year.

Swathes of the city are being redeveloped in the name of "Better City - Better Life", the Expo's theme. New metro lines, a network of elevated highways and the 5sq km Expo site along the river are the most visible signs of the development. The construction has meant a certain amount of misery for the city's commuters as roads are closed or redirected.

"You don't know from one day to the next how to get to work," a colleague complained. Buildings have been torn down. It is hard to walk a block in the central city without coming across a construction site.

Despite all the building works, the city is generally clean and I have not found the pollution that one English friend warned me about.

In fact, life in Shanghai has been fairly pleasant so far. The metro gets me from my apartment in the centre of Puxi to the office on the outskirts of Pudong in 25 minutes.

In contrast to the oppressive heat of London's Tube, the Shanghai metro offers an air conditioned oasis on autumn days that can still be humid.

It is the people that give the city the feel that you are somewhere.

More than 20 million people live in or around Shanghai, a figure that has grown in parallel to the economic development. Many millions have come, both from around China and from overseas, to join the local Shanghainese in the economic boom and the opportunities it offers. The city has a cosmopolitan feel and not just because of the many foreign professionals that are employed by Shanghai's banks, investment houses and professional firms. Among my colleagues in Shanghai are young professionals who have moved to the city from the northeast and the west, along with others who have returned from careers overseas.

You would be forgiven for expecting so large a city to be impersonal.

But the people are genuinely friendly and welcoming. Strangers will make eye contact and even smile, the domain of only the bravest of people in England.

My initial impression is that they are generally happy with their lot in life. They grumble about house prices and the city's traffic, but these are universal traits of city dwellers in the modern age.

No doubt my initial impressions of this Chinese metropolis will be revised and refined during my stay. Shanghai will be my home while I am on a two month secondment to a Chinese law firm, so there will be plenty of time for me to explore the big - and perhaps the small - of Shanghai.

Chris Perfect is a solicitor from the Norwich office of law firm Mills & Reeve and is on secondment to the Chinese law firm MHP Law in Shanghai.