From the Financial Times, via the A Glimpse of the World blog (link):
In 1926, Aldous Huxley reported that Shanghai was “life itself – dense, rank, richly clotted”. Today, the adjectives – also once used for Cairo, Damascus, Bombay, Calcutta and Benares – evoke not so much a place as the prejudices and fears of the straw-hatted European traveller in the pre-war years – someone fastidiously upholding the aesthetic norms of his bourgeois civilisation that, unbeknown to him, was soon to go up in flames.
To such a traveller, defying the heat and dust in his white suit, the first sight of Shanghai’s waterfront, the Bund, dominated by the customs house clock tower and the HSBC dome, or of Bombay heralded by the Gateway of India, was usually reassuring. Here, in the heart of the bewildering Orient, was something he could hold on to.
To be an Indian in Shanghai is to know a similar sensation of familiarity, if tinged with unease. It is also to be inevitably reminded of Bombay, the city most complicit with Shanghai in 19th-century inequity.