Tearing things down has also been a compulsion of today's Shanghai: entire neighborhoods have vanished along with countless landmarks from the past. Of the legendary Old Shanghai, only echoes and scattered artifacts survive. The famous 30-m Long Bar at the Shanghai Club, a rendezvous for secret agents and Ladies From Shanghai between the world wars, was reputed to be the lengthiest bar in the world. Mao dismantled it and turned the club into a seamen's hostel; prosperity has failed to bring it back. In the Long Bar's place sprouted a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet blowing grease into the hostel lobby. The Russian Orthodox Mission Church, a 67-year-old structure with three blue domes, later housed a securities firm on the ground floor and a disco (the St. Peter's Club) under its main dome. One of the quintessential sites of Old Shanghai was The Great World, a kind of funhouse for extremely worldly adults. Hollywood producer Josef von Sternberg visited in the 1930s to find six floors packed with gambling tables, magicians, slot machines, acrobats and midwives. There were call girls on each floor, their dress more daring with each flight you climbed. (There was also a spot on the roof where despondent gamblers could end it all with one final leap.) The Great World is still in business, its staircases tellingly worn, but few visitors pay to see its pale attractions: a Guinness Book of Records display, a kung fu movie and a rock singer in a silk shirt, receiving excited applause from crewcutted yokels in from the countryside.

Today's Shanghai offers most of the old pleasures, but in new forms. The bawd business is done in night clubs and karaoke bars. Down-and-out gamblers in the real estate market will be able to leap from giant, empty skyscrapers. Shanghai is an experiment altogether grand, risky, on the edge: qualities that have served the city in the past. Whether it succeeds on its own is but the first question. More momentous: Will resurgent China gain what every truly great country needs, an international metropolis? Deng Xiaoping knew how important that could be, and it prompted his public musing of 1992: What if he had started sooner on Shanghai? Only a decade was lost, so Shanghai still has a chance to make its role in China's future as golden as it was in China's past.

With reporting by Jaime A. FlorCruz/Shanghai

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