Hooked on speed
It may be not quite the vision of the future it seems, but Shanghai is fast becoming one of the world’s coolest cities
WHEN I first saw the sleepy city of Shanghai 15 years ago, it was from the deck of a slow boat from Japan, laboriously churning up the Yangzi and Huangpu rivers after three days meandering across the East China Sea. Today, Shanghai is a city hooked on speed, and smart visitors enter it that way—eschewing its suicidal taxi drivers in favour of the world's fastest train, the Maglev, which whisks them the 18 miles or so from the international airport to downtown in a little over seven minutes, at a thrilling 270mph.
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