China: Shanghai's famous Huxinting Chashi or Huxinting Tea House

Shanghai's Huxinting Tea House sits in the middle of a lake filled with goldfish on the edge of the Yuyuan Garden by Nanshi, the old Chinese City. Shanghai began life as a fishing village, and later as a port receiving goods carried down the Yangzi River. From 1842 onwards, in the aftermath of the first Opium War, the British opened a ‘concession’ in Shanghai where drug dealers and other traders could operate undisturbed. French, Italians, Germans, Americans and Japanese all followed. By the 1920s and 1930s, Shanghai was a boom town and an international byword for dissipation. When the Communists won power in 1949, they transformed Shanghai into a model of the Revolution.