Waking early on my first morning in Shanghai's Astor House Hotel, I hear a banging noise. I turn over and cover my head with the pillow. Any minute, I'm thinking, they'll come in to change the water in the Thermos flasks and set about cleaning the floors with a huge pail and dirty mop. But nothing happens. Opening my eyes, I realise why. It's because this is 2006 and I am in a comfortable bed in a grand guest room - not on the hard metal and thin mattress of the dormitory sleeping arrangement I had experienced in this same hotel 20 years ago.
I have returned to Shanghai to drink in the new city, with its heady high-rises and breathless speed of development. Since my first visit, the transformation has indeed been astonishing. In 1986, the city consisted almost entirely of colonial buildings and Pudong was little more than mudflats, the odd textile factory and a few container terminals. However, on this trip, I am rediscovering the Bund, the grand sweep of ambitious architecture that rose on Shanghai's waterfront in the early 20th century to tell the world "the foreigners are here to stay".
My original encounter with this dazzling demonstration of wealth and power was arriving - bleary-eyed after a long train journey from Beijingin "hard sleeper" class - at theAstor House Hotel. Located at the north end of the Bund across the Waibaidu steel bridge, this august establishment was then known as the Pujiang Hotel.
Then, my only option had been a bed in one of the dormitory rooms, cavernous spaces where 20 or more travellers slept - frequently disturbed by the cleaners or simply by a new staff member curious to see what a bunch of somnolent foreigners looked like.
In this respect, the Pujiang had been no different from any of the other dorms I had occupied during my tour round China. However, a casual inspection of the place had told me that this was a very different kind of hotel from theones China usually had to offer. Instead of communist concrete and strip lighting, here were vast corridors lined with Victorian wood panels and ranks of doors to what had been the original guest rooms.
Today, cleaned-up and restored, it is easier to see what the hotel must have once looked like. While much of the current décor is tacky and modern intrusions such as the lifts fail to fit in with the 19th-century design, the hotel's owners have done a reasonable job of maintaining the integrity of most of the spaces and of restoring a set of guest rooms with their original wood floors, gloriously high ceilings and generous proportions.
The Astor House Hotel, as we are told in a series of placards, was the oldest and grandest of the foreign hotels in Shanghai. Established in 1846 it moved to its present location in 1857 and welcomed figures such as Albert Einstein, Charlie Chaplin and Bertrand Russell. It was here that the first electric lights in China were illuminated. More recently, in the early 1990s, the Shanghai Securities Exchange occupied its grand Peacock Ballroom, a magnificent space that is being restored to its former glory.
The renovation project is just one among dozens that, in recent years, have been transforming the old banks, trading houses and hotels of the Bund. All that is chic and hip is busy moving into these vast spaces. At Three on the Bund, renovated by Michael Graves, the French-born chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten has opened one of his celebrated restaurants. At ground level, the building houses an Emporio Armani store and a Giorgio Armani boutique.
At Bund 18, a more recentaddition to the street's designer line-up, Cartier, Aquascutum, and Patek Philippe boutiques sit around anelegant atrium with marble floorsand classical columns restored by Venetian architect Filippo Gabbiani, who installed a 3m-high red glasschandelier at the building's entrance.
The area is a flashy reflection of Shanghai's commercial mood but 20 years ago I remember wandering around there in curious amazement. Where Armani suits now hang and Cartier necklaces glisten, cavernous interiors used to house dingy offices in which a handful of workers and communist bureaucrats sat slumped over wooden desks, often asleep.
But perhaps in this respect, things aren't so different today. After all, these minimalist shrines to modern luxury are still woefully underpopulated. The shop assistants may be better dressed than the officials stationed here in the 1980s but they still hang around with little to do since most of the boutiques - which seem to be pure exercises in brand building - remain largely empty.
Given the prices of what they're selling, it's hardly surprising - and the contrast with life for most Chinese is stark. Outside Bund 18, I watch a man wearing plastic sandals and trousers fastened with a piece of string stride past the Ermenegildo Zegna boutique carrying a plastic bag from which pokes the head of a live chicken - no doubt destined for dinner. If he was to pop inside, this Shanghai resident would find that a leather jacket costs more than Y18,000 - enough to buy him at least 700 live chickens.
But price tags are not the only reason the new Bund emporia are devoid of shoppers. Most visitors to this historic waterfront are outside on the promenade, the elevated concrete walkway that replaced the old British park (still there when I visited in 1986). Now separated from the Bund itself by an eight-lane highway, this is where crowds of tourists from across China jostle to view Pudong, the new city on the other side of the Huangpu River.
It is a preposterous sight. The Jin Mao Tower - loosely based on a Chinese pagoda - is relatively elegant but the celebrated Oriental Pearl Tower looks like a makeshift rocket constructed from a couple of giant disco balls skewered by three enormous knitting needles. Nearby, the top of another building has become the permanent resting place for what looks like a flying saucer.
It is a far cry from the stylish deco of the Peace Hotel (once Shanghai tycoon Victor Sassoon's Cathay Hotel), the imposing former Hongkong and Shanghai Bank (whose architects were instructed to dominate the Bund with an image of financial strength) or the customs house, built in 1927 and topped by a vast clock. And while the latest developments in Pudong tower above these structures, there is a gravitas to the older buildings that gives them an equally powerful presence.
On the Huangpu River, the armies of workhorse barges loaded with mounds of cement destined for construction sites plough up and down, oblivious to the battle of wits taking place as old and new skylines gaze on each other in astonishment - perhaps dismay.
Curiously, however, even Pudong brings back memories of my 1986 trip. At that time, notice boards in many of China's cities would announce the latest public executions, displaying photographs of the criminal and of the bullet used to dispatch him (which would have had to be paid for by the family).
Beside these grim reminders of the country's brutal system of capital punishment there would often be an artist's rendering of what the city would look like in the future - hilarious exercises in fantasy, like something from a Jetsons cartoon, with tower blocks topped by spheres and shimmering pyramids, and elevated driveways encircling a forest of skyscrapers. It was a vision that, in 1980s China, seemed utterly unattainable. But, standing on the Bund and gazing across at Pudong's skyline, I have to admit that, for better or for worse, the mad vision has actually been realised.
