View From My Window - COVID Blue Skies in Shanghai

This view is from my window in Shanghai. It was taken recently during one of the days in the recent quarantine when the city was just not alive whatsoever. On the downside, I was stuck in my room on the 20th floor all alone and with nothing to do and nowhere to go. On the upside, just look at how blue the sky is! Every year or so, the Chinese government shuts down all factories, usually in Beijing, for some meetings and such. Everyone always remarks just how perfectly blue the sky is during these times, the most recent example was in 2014 when the APEC conference was in Beijing. Back then, everybody called this beautiful blue rarity APEC Blue. So I want to call this particular brand of color in the sky - COVID blue - just so we can talk about the silver lining of this pandemic. Not everything that has happened since the Wuhan Lockdown in January 23 has been bad. We've had more time to relax. Many of us get to spend more time with our families. And pollution has been way down! So let's enjoy the positive side of this global quarantine - Enjoy COVID Blue!

In the far background centered in this picture, you can see 2 of the 3 famous supertall skyscrapers that make up the famous Pudong skyline in Shanghai. The one that looks like a bottle cap opener is called the Shanghai World Financial Center and is 492 meters tall in the air, almost half a kilometer! Just to the right of that in the picture, the taller one is the tallest building in China and Asia and the 2nd tallest building in the world right now - Shanghai Tower.

In the foreground you can see the lovely ecological park known as Mengqing Gardens, built on the former grounds of the Union Brewery, a historic old beer factory designed by the incomparable architect László Hudec, who is by far my most favorite person in Shanghai history. The story of the park is a very interesting one that pits two forces that I am usually very much in support of. On the one side, you have the environmental lobby, which yearned for a green space for the neighborhood to congregate. On the other side, you have the architectural historians, fighting to preserve a sense of history and "place," something which China on the whole has done a poor job of as it hurtles forward into modernity. However, Shanghai has largely remained the best exception to this rule. The end result of this power struggle back in the late 1990s was that three of the lovely historic Hudec buildings were preserved, two of which you can see clearly in the foreground of this picture nestled amongst the greenery of the park. The rest of the grounds were converted into a green space with lots of lovely gardens and water features and plenty of public paths along the river for the public to enjoy while exercising.

Snaking around the park, you can see the Suzhou Creek, a manmade canal from many centuries ago that drained the swampy ground in between the Huangpu River and the ancient city of Suzhou, an important trade depot along the north-south Grand Canal starting in the Tang Dynasty. These days all that land, and most of what you see in this picture, is built up with lots of residential towers, where most of the 100 million people who live in this modern supercity of Shanghai-Hangzhou-Changzhou-Suzhou-Huzhou-Wuxi-Jiaxing (or however you define this enormous megalopolis) sited upon the Yangtze River Delta or YRD.

That's the view from my window, folks! I hope you enjoyed this little tour. It looks good all the time, but never as nice as it looked during the time of COVID Blue!