Orient express

Travelling to modern Shanghai and expecting to find the infamous speakeasies of the 1930s replete with opium beds and hot jazz is surely a fool's errand. You might as well come to London anticipating busty orange sellers with bad teeth dressed in low-cut bombazine frocks. But having misspent at least part of my youth watching a veiled, sultry Marlene Dietrich vamp her way through Shanghai Express swathed in cock feathers, I could but hope there were echoes of this wicked old city in 21st-century Shanghai.

Travelling to modern Shanghai and expecting to find the infamous speakeasies of the 1930s replete with opium beds and hot jazz is surely a fool's errand. You might as well come to London anticipating busty orange sellers with bad teeth dressed in low-cut bombazine frocks. But having misspent at least part of my youth watching a veiled, sultry Marlene Dietrich vamp her way through Shanghai Express swathed in cock feathers, I could but hope there were echoes of this wicked old city in 21st-century Shanghai.

Time is running out. The central government in Beijing has decreed Shanghai the showcase of modern China. Already eclipsing Hong Kong, it is the world's fastest-growing city. Acres of labyrinthine longtangs (lane housing constructed at the turn of the 19th century) are being razed to make way for skyscrapers, while colonial mansions are sacrificed in the name of progress.

With only 48 hours in the city I move around with the swiftness of a ball-bearing in a pinball machine, and swear I can see skyscrapers rise overnight. The bewildering speed at which the city is sprinting away from its decadent past is hard to comprehend, as is much of Shanghai's version of futuristic architecture. The $2bn Pudong airport, with its undulating ceiling impaled by porcupine quills of white fibreglass, reminds me of the camp 1970s sci-fi film Logan's Run. I half expect to see Michael York in a Spandex catsuit on hand to check my passport.

Driving into Shanghai at sundown, I see a city far too fond of kitsch neon signage to be intimidating. Skyscrapers are topped with what look like pagodas, pineapple fronds or Doric columns. The cityscape is Wall Street in drag. The most famous high-rise, the Oriental Pearl Tower, looks like a syringe that's swallowed a pink neon disco ball, while the Jin Mao Tower (the world's third-tallest building) only needs an inflatable ape dangling from its pinnacle to complete the homage to New York's Empire State.

These amusing, if rather soulless, follies prepare me for the Nanjing Road. Dubbed "Shanghai's Fifth Avenue", this vast boulevard is disappointingly devoid of rickshaws and lacquer-lipped vamps luxuriant in red silk qipaos. The city is full of monolithic designer shopping centres that make Harvey Nichols look like a corner store, and could be found anywhere from Dubai to Melbourne. Logoed hoardings for the new Gucci, Vuitton and Dior boutiques don't even bother to use the Mandarin language, and it's a very rare luxury goods advertisement that features an Oriental model. There's the same sense of unreality about this city as Las Vegas by daylight or Sydney in the rain.

In her decadent, Art Deco glory days, Shanghai never had such an identity crisis. Christened "The Whore of the Orient", it was said: "If God allows Shanghai to endure, he will owe Sodom and Gomorrah an apology." Green Gang Godfather Du Yuesheng (Big-Eared Du) controlled the city's opium trade and cruised the city's glamorous nightclubs; The Paramount, Ciro's and The Majestic Ballroom, in his bulletproof sedan. Emigrée White Russian girls down on their luck joined the Paramount's chorus line. Those with less scruples joined Grace's at 52 Jiangsu Lu; the city's premier brothel for highly-prized Western women.

Like an Oriental Hollywood Hills, the French Concession quarter of Shanghai was a verdant enclave of estates with mock-Tudor, neo-Classical and Art Deco villas surrounded by polo fields, race tracks and tennis courts. Sadly, this Oriental whore was forced to hang up her kimono when the People's Republic of China swept away the chic nightclubs, opulent hotels and palatial villas along with the opium, tarts and foreigners in 1949.

Business, not pleasure, draws the lion's share of Westerners back to Shanghai these days, and I am no exception. Nokia had chosen Shanghai to launch a collection of fashion phones inspired by decadent Deco Chinoiserie. Smart Shanghainese girls now change their handsets as often as their handbags in the city that's been China's fashion capital since it stole Hong Kong's sash and tiara.

Vogue China will launch from Shanghai in 2005 and a look at the very few women in the lobby of my hotel, the Portman Ritz Carlton, suggests that they are in dire need of it. The Ritz - affectionately known by Shanghai's cabbies as the "Port-a-Man" (emphasis on the man) - is the kind of masculine high-rise that would make Ozymandias look self effacing. Money has been thrown at it but taste forgotten. You wonder why the city is so proud of this phallic symbol in the Shanghai Centre, yet so careless with the French colonial villas crushed to make way for it. Women are in short supply both in the designer shopping centres and the hotel. A few haunt the Long Bar but they look as if they're for hire by the hour.

I decide to spend the first evening seeking out what's left of Shanghai's most celebrated Art Deco hotel. The Peace Hotel on the Bund (the colonial riverside strip of hotels, banks and clubs) owes its fame to Noël Coward's residence in 1930, when he wrote Private Lives from its oak-panelled British Suite. Originally named The Cathay, it was built in 1929 by notorious opium and arms dealer Victor Sassoon. A contemporary of LA's Chateau Marmont, the Peace Hotel was a great favourite with the Gang of Four, the group of Communist Party leaders who masterminded the Cultural Revolution under Mao Zedong.

Though now barely half its original size, the Peace Hotel's lobby is a white marble and gilt fantasy complete with scarlet-liveried bellhops in dancing attendance. A naked marble lady stares down from the gilt balcony bar and exotic cigarettes are sold from a glass kiosk. But the guests are as dusty as the interiors and almost all Western. The Cathay's legendary Jazz Bar is in half-swing at 8pm, and the average age of the Chinese musicians providing the music is over 75. A handful of dour, mournful couples dance like lugubrious marionettes in the empty room.

For a greedy capitalist style tourist it's irresistible to think that in the hands of an entrepreneur like The Atlantic's Oliver Peyton, the Peace Hotel could be a magnet for Shanghai's bright young things. As it is, its roof terrace, ballroom and bars are seen only by very inquisitive tourists who can get past the bellhops. Mercifully, the Peace Hotel's Art Deco interiors have not suffered the botched hysterectomy carried out on the nearby Palace Hotel, but it looks neglected compared to the glitzy new restaurants nearby, such as M on the Bund.

With the aid of a "trend adviser" who looked and dressed like a character from a Japanese Manga cartoon, I booked for dinner at a jewel box of a French Concession quarter restaurant called Bar 1931. A fabulous fake, the interior evoked 1930s Shanghai with its embroidered silk wallpaper, colonial dressers heaving with jade and a glass panel depicting Shanghai vamps playing mah-jong. It's a jollier experience than the baleful Peace Hotel, if less authentic.

The waitresses in their silk cheongsams (called qipaos in Shanghai) and bobbed hair were straight out of Central Casting for an Anna May Wong movie. Though not historic like the exotic Ashanti Dome - a restaurant set in the deconsecrated Russian Orthodox Church built in memory of the Tsar - 1931 is a very cute impostor and (allegedly) popular with the city's sapphic community. Before we left, one of 1931's painted ladies suggested Face - "Shanghai's most beautiful nightclub" - for a good time after midnight.

Like La Villa Rouge and Park 97, Face is a bar housed in one of the French Concession quarter's fabulous low-rise villas. Trying to communicate with a cab driver whose chair is completely surrounded by a clear-plastic iron lung proves rather challenging, and what happens next may give you a rough idea of what Chinese cabbies think foreigners want from Shanghai after dark. Instead of lounging on gilt opium beds upholstered with red taffeta, I am dumped out on the street next to a seedy dive with "Baby Face" writ large in neon over the steel door. It's clearly a "knock three times and ask for Mr Wu" kind of joint.

Committing the cardinal sin of opening a guidebook after dark, I discover we are in the notorious Maoming Lu. Two doors down from Baby Face is Judy's Too (an infamous pick-up joint with a vast plastic Panama hat serving as a canopy above the door), and another dingy morgue called the Blue Frog. The guidebook , presumably written by Pinocchio, called the Blue Frog's artex walls "classy", and went on breathlessly about its "Martini and manicure nights". A bottle of grog and a fistfight would have been more likely, but I can see the poetic justice in being Shanghai'd at least once.

A morning walk around Old Town (Nanshi) with a Blue Frog of a hangover is a positive invitation to be Shanghai'd again. Shanghai Old Street with its Ming-to-Quing-Dynasty architecture looks like a movie set from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Quite right, as it turns out. Old Street is as phoney as the powdered jade trinkets sold within its markets. Built to attract tourists, Old Street is little more than a film set. Sneak behind the façades and you expect to see the bamboo scaffolding with which Shanghai infamously props up its flats. There's about as much chance of finding colonial tchotchkas in this market as stumbling across Fabergé in the flea markets of St Petersburg. High-quality pearls and jade now reside in the city's antique shops.

Even the nearby 16th-century Yu Garden and its Mid-Lake Pavilion teahouse has been airbrushed to please the tourists. Image, not authenticity, is the modern preoccupation. Disneyland doesn't need to open in Shanghai in 2010 - it's already here. And yet you only need lose your bearings slightly to see enough authenticity to turn a delicate Western stomach among the longtangs off Henan Road. Wearing a pinstripe suit that prompted two Chinese schoolgirls at the Yu Garden to say, eyes-wide: "Oh, you are real English gentleman", I feel distinctly alien as the only Westerner walking down a stinking alleyway lined with plastic buckets of eels, wizened old women emptying chamber pots and old men playing poker.

It is here, not the main streets, that you see women in tattered silk pyjamas and men stripped to the waist performing tasks unchanged for centuries. Shanghai's is a tale of two cities. The jazz-hot 1930s palace of sin has almost vanished, but many Shanghainese still live an 18th-century existence in the longtangs. This life is besieged by the skyscraper city and will inevitably be pushed out into the suburbs by the government. Even now, you turn the corner and it vanishes.

Experiencing a city at full gallop is thrilling but somehow unsatisfactory. It's like listening to the greatest hits of a band you love; all the major themes are there but the subtlety and shading is missing. From the squalor of the longtangs I visit the jewel in colonial Shanghai's crown: the Shanghai Pudong Development Bank, opened in 1923, the bank's architects were told: "Dominate the Bund". Palmer & Turner met their brief.

The former HSBC building is a symphony of green marble and mahogany. Four pillars that frame grand staircases are hewn from solid marble. Only six such pillars exist in the world, and the other two reside in The Louvre. The building dubbed "Queen of the Bund" has a justifiably famous mosaic dome, and you can't help imagining three-dozen Busby Berkeley chorines in sequin cheongsams tap-dancing on the vast gold coins that decorate the floors of this temple to Mamon. Will any of Shanghai's high-rises be so admired 100 years hence?

I follow in the footsteps of the jazz-age taipans from the HSBC building to lunch at the exotically named YongFoo Elite, housed in the former English Press Club. This French Concession villa has been expertly renovated with imported DeGournay silk wallpaper, intricately carved wooden filigree panels and turquoise glass lampshades to evoke the club's colonial past. The ashtrays are vast goblets of jade.

No 12 and The YongFoo Elite can stand the scrutiny of daylight. But much of Shanghai's Art Deco is like Tennessee Williams' brittle heroine Blanche Dubois. She needs nightfall to veil the decay; only then does she recapture some of her allure. By day the old Paramount nightclub looks distinctly down-at-heel. The hallway is tatty and the façade badly in need of a wash. But when the blue-and-white neon glows over the YuYuan Road and the limousines pull up to the velvet rope, the Paramount sparkles like the nights when Charlie Chaplin danced here in 1933.

In 2001, a Taiwanese entrepreneur spent £1.7m tarting up the chandeliers, gilt furniture and parquet ballroom floor of Shanghai's answer to the Moulin Rouge. Now the ballroom groans under the weight of mirror balls and crystal chandeliers. Velvet banquettes flank the dance floor and copies of Otto Dix images of Berlin line the private boxes. This pleasure palace contains a casino, the compulsory karaoke bar and a thumping disco. A Vegas-style sequin-and-feathers floor show performed by Western dancers will, according to The Paramount's hilarious blurb, "make your life become more exciting and interesting".

After tea and a waltz at The Paramount, I am summoned by Nokia for the main event of the tour. The company had chosen the Shanghai Exhibition Centre to launch its Chinoise-Charlston handsets, a gleaming sepulchre built in the 1950s as a symbol of Russian and Chinese solidarity. Imagine Julius Caesar, Mao Zedong and Liberace putting their heads together over the blueprint and you're halfway towards the ludicrousness of this colonnaded palace topped with a gold-plated steeple.

Gathered in one of the courtyards of the exhibition centre dressed in cocktail wear, the assembled guests were addressed by a Nokia spokesman standing Peron-like on a high balcony flanked by columns. Were the phones sympathique with their host city? Did they justify a 48-hour dash round the world to see them first? A jazzy black-and-white lacquered number no bigger than a compact and featuring a mirror certainly wouldn't have looked out of place in The Glamour Bar on the Bund, the current "it" joint dripping with Swarovski crystal curtains. This little handset is a rather neat combination of retro glamour and technology. It's a design brief the town-planners of Shanghai could only dream of meeting with such style.

On my last night, I decide to cease wallowing in nostalgia for Shanghai's past and look insteadd for joints where old-school glamour and 21st-century techno meet. Where do the young privileged classes of Shanghai go to enjoy their privileges? An obvious first choice is Cloud 9 in the Jin Mao Tower; the world's highest bar on the 87th of 88 floors. Once accustomed to the low-lit gloom that seems to emanate wealth, you see the clientele are an East/West axis, but mostly male. Cloud 9's tables are gingerly placed between vast floor-to-ceiling steel girders that make one feel as secure (and as liberated, one imagines) as the concubines who resided in a house once called The Gilded Cage across the river. Having ascended three different lifts to reach it, the atmosphere is replete with new money but lacking in glamour.

Pudong may be Shanghai's future but for the present, the beautiful people are flocking to the old-world elegance of the Bund. Two landmark developments have opened there in the past year: M on the Bund and Three on the Bund. M on the Bund, the restaurant on the seventh floor of the former Nissin Kisen Kaisha Shipping building (built in 1925) is currently the darling of Shanghai's socialites, although affections may shift when the old Shanghai Club on the Bund is refurbished. Built in 1916 as the Union Assurance Building, Three on the Bund is a seven-storey temple to haute cuisine, contemporary art and high fashion. Its architect, Michael Graves, has sliced a sliver through the top four floors, revealing layer upon layer of Shanghai's smart set being seen where they should be seen. A decked roof terrace flying the Chinese flag serves the most spectacular view of Pudong and a vodka tonic to make your eyes water.

One more vodka and I might have taken up the Chinese girl's offer to attend "party where free drinks for men all night". In flat shoes, 40-denier tights and a straight-from-the-office grey skirt-suit, she was dressed like an estate agent; hardly an invitation to Shanghai at its sinful best. Had she looked like Anna May Wong, nostalgia would have triumphed. I would probably still be languishing in Fat Mary's Tart Shop on the Fuxing Road, rather than recovering in London having been well and truly Shanghai'd.

TRAVELLER'S GUIDE

GETTING THERE

Only Virgin Atlantic (08705 747747; www.virgin-atlantic.com) and China Eastern Airlines (020-7935 2676; www.ce-air.com) fly direct to Shanghai, both from Heathrow. Returns start at £400.

STAYING THERE

The Garden Hotel (00 86 21 6415 1111; www.gardenhotelshanghai.com) has doubles from $403 (£237). The Peace Hotel (00 86 21 6321 6888; www.shanghaipeacehotel.com) has doubles from $150 (£88). Both rates are for rooms only.

EATING AND DRINKING

For decadent eating try: Bar 1931 (00 86 21 6472 5264) at 112 Maoming Lu M on the Bund (00 86 21 6350 9988; www.m-onthebund.com)

at 20 Guangdong Lu T8 (00 86 21 6355 8999) at 8 North Block

La Villa Rouge (00 86 21 6431 6639) at 811 Hengsham Road TMSK (00 86 21 6326 2227) at House 11 North Block

Late-night bars include:

The Glamour Bar at M on the Bund

Club La Belle (00 86 21 6247 9666; www.labelle-shanghai.com) at 333 Tong Ren Road

The Face Bar (00 86 21 6466 4328; www.face-shanghai.com) at the Ruijin Guest House Park 97 (00 86 21 6318 0785) at 2 Gaolan Lu Cloud 9 (00 86 21 5049 1234; www.shanghai.hyatt.com) at the Grand Hyatt Hotel, Jin Mao Tower.

MORE INFORMATION

China National Tourist Office (020-7373 0888; www.cnta.gov.cn); Shanghai Tourist Information Centre (00 86 21 6252 0000)

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