Shanghai, China

After forty years of stagnation, the great metropolis of SHANGHAI is currently undergoing one of the fastest economic expansions that the world has ever seen. While shops overflow and the skyline fills with skyscrapers, Shanghai now seems certain to recapture its position as East Asia's leading business city, a status it last held before World War II. And yet, for all the modernization Shanghai has retained deep links with its colonial past.

Shanghai is still known in the West for its infamous role as the base of European imperialism in mainland China – its decadence, illicit pleasures, racism, appalling social inequalities, and Mafia syndicates. The intervening fifty years have almost been forgotten, as though the period from when the Communists arrived and the foreigners moved out was an era in which nothing happened. To some extent this perception is actually true: for most of the Communist period into the early 1990s, the central government in Beijing deliberately ran Shanghai down, siphoning off its surplus to other parts of the country to the point where the city came to resemble a living museum, frozen in time since the 1940s, and housing the largest array of Art Deco architecture in the world.