Siheyuan: Heavy Industry Revitalizes the Country

It has been more than ten years since I last came to Shanghai.

When he came to the Shanghai Stock Exchange again, Fang Xiang found that although there were some changes compared with more than ten years ago, they were not that big either.

Walking on Beijing Road, the ground is already a mixture of asphalt and gravel. You can tell that it is newly built because the white lines on the ground look particularly new.

There are actually guardrails on the roadside. The three-section guardrails painted white separate many pedestrians on the roadside is placed on the sidewalk.

Although it is working hours, there are still many people walking on the road. Occasionally, you can see a few young girls who look like college students, walking by hand in hand with their silvery laughter.

Speaking of which, it's spring now that the New Year has passed, and the temperature in Shanghai is above zero, but I don't know why my cotton-padded clothes can never block the wind.

A slight chilly wind kept blowing into his body through his collar and cuffs. Except for his stomach and armpits, Fang Xiang could hardly feel any warmth on his body.

It seems that I have gotten used to living in Chengdu and Guangzhou in the past few years, and I feel uncomfortable when I suddenly came here.

Although it is already 85 years ago, the way people dress on the streets is not much different from past years.

Looking around, it's all a sea of ​​blue and black, basically all liberation suits.

Occasionally, you can see a few young girls wearing red cotton-padded jackets and pigtails walking by, which will attract a lot of attention.

There are many more cars on the road than the last time Fang thought about it.

Trams with white top and blue bottom or white top and red bottom made ding-dong sounds as one passed by from time to time.

Peugeots, SH760s and jeeps were running on the road, and there were also many small trucks with tailgates in between.

Many trucks have a military green quilt hanging on the front of them, blocking the air inlet.

There is even a duty booth at this intersection. The ground is elevated, and the lower half of the booth is made of welded racks and ladders. On the top is a cylindrical, glass-covered duty room with 360-degree coverage, almost the same as in Kung Fu movies.

The outside of this iron-barrel-like duty room was painted white with red lines. A policeman wearing a police hat was looking around.

Next to the traffic light, there is a small door with several wires connected to it.

Fang Xiang was very suspicious whether the traffic light was manually controlled by the police officer in the duty room.

In addition to this duty booth, there is a concrete electric pole about ten meters in the middle of the road, with densely packed electric wires on it.

Especially at the intersections, they are intertwined like a spider web.

Some were connected to the dilapidated transformer boxes, some were hung directly on the wall, moving crookedly, and some were constantly hitting the wall under the attack of the cold wind.

The houses on the roadside come in all kinds of styles.

The first few intersections were still in the white classical style and yellow Baroque style of foreign countries. The next few intersections turned into Soviet-style two- or three-story buildings from the early days of the founding of the People's Republic of China. After a few more intersections, it turned into a messy urban village style.

Looking to the east, there are almost no buildings higher than four stories high. Instead, from a distance, you can see the chimney of a power plant in the north emitting black smoke.

Turning my head and looking to the west, I saw a pointed iron tower that looked like a TV tower. It was very tall, and there were many tall buildings scattered around it.

The shorter ones have seven or eight stories, the taller ones look to have more than ten stories, and some even have more than twenty stories. There are even Chinese characters written vertically on the rooftops, but unfortunately they are too far away and there is some haze, so they can't be seen clearly.

Somehow, there were long and short bamboo poles on the roadside walls and outside the windows, hung with washed clothes, bed sheets and other things that were drying in the sun.

It seems out of place in this metropolis.

After walking a few steps, there is a sunny fork in the road. Under a big tree that has long been dry, a group of old men and women are sitting around, looking up at their faces to bask in the sun.

He was speaking in a dialect that Fang Xiang couldn't understand, and he probably was talking about trivial matters in his family.

Occasionally, the sounds of children playing and bicycle bells can be heard from the roadside.

Following the road sign, I turned into an alley. The place that looked more or less like a big city just now immediately turned into a rural area.

The narrow alleys are lined with two-story buildings, which are no different from the urban villages left over in later metropolises.

But the style is more ancient.

The trees on the roadside also looked a lot thinner, and with the cold wind, a rustling sound could be heard.

Passing by a yard with an open door, a woman was washing something at the faucet in the yard, maybe vegetables, maybe clothes.

After walking a few more steps, there was a room with a door carved out of the wall. On the whitewashed wall next to it, "20 cents for a haircut" was written crookedly.

I took a quick glance and it was a little dark inside. There was no light and I couldn't see anything clearly.

Going further ahead, there is a bicycle repair shop.

I don't know if it was a makeshift rectangular shed made of black cloth or some other material. There was a wooden blackboard placed diagonally against the wall, with the words "CAR REPAIR" written on it, which looked much neater than the words "BARBER CUT".

An old man with dirty, greasy hands, which even looked like they were cracked, squatted on the ground and connected the chain.

There were more than a dozen bicycles parked in a row under the shed, some of which obviously didn't have their chains on. But when Fang Xiang walked past, the old man didn't even raise his head.

A few steps further ahead is a temporary illegal building that protrudes half a meter and has a sloping roof made of tile felt. It seems to be a bicycle shed, or a place to store coal briquettes and sundries.

After turning a corner, a local dog was standing at the gate of a courtyard. When it saw Fang Xiang coming, its eyes were full of vigilance, and it stood straight with its tail down.

Fortunately, the dog just watched and didn't do anything extreme.

When I passed the gate, I saw a man inside, pumping air into a bicycle tire.

At this time, a motorcycle with a broken exhaust, with thick blue smoke coming out of it as if there was fire behind it, passed by Fang Xiang.

The man on the bike didn't wear a helmet, his eyes were narrowed, and he had a cigarette in his mouth. But he was wearing a leather jacket, which instantly set him apart from the crowd of people wearing liberation suits.

Continuing walking, I actually found a small department store on the side of the road. It was also a temporary building, but the protruding part was made of wood and painted light green, while the part facing the street was almost all glass with red words on it, selling wine, candy, cigarettes, food, air-conditioned soda.

On the glass, there were colorful cigarette boxes and snacks. Fang Xiang even saw glass bottles of Coca-Cola and various other brightly colored drinks.

After passing this small department store, the houses in front became sparse and you could even faintly hear the rumbling sound of engines.

Fang wanted to know, that was the sound made by an old-fashioned fishing boat on the Huangpu River.

Sure enough, after walking a few hundred meters, the view ahead suddenly opened up. There were no houses, only grasslands, sparse trees, and concrete embankments.

After crossing the road and standing on the embankment, the turbid Huangpu River came into view.

Looking east, you will see Pudong, which is basically like a wilderness now.

No, it cannot be said to be the wilderness; it would be more appropriate to describe it as a large rural area.

There will be the largest and most successful new district in Asia in the future.

But the famous pearl landmark is now just a wasteland.

But now Fang Xiang is thinking, is it possible to make this new district appear a few years earlier?

After all, Great Wall Industrial is now on the verge of withdrawing from Hong Kong Island because of John's awesomeness, but Great Wall Industrial once again has nearly 100 billion in cash, and this does not include the cash in Yin Qingqiu's hands.

Such a large sum of money has to go somewhere, right?