Day 15 - Tuesday 17 April – Shanghai Museum

Normally I can take or leave a museum of historical artefacts, so the one hour we’d been allowed for the Shanghai Museum visit seemed about right. However, after nearly three hours we had to re-arrange our plans and head straight to the acrobat show.

It’s a beautiful museum in every sense. The building itself is modelled on a 15-13th Century BC Shang Dynasty bronze ‘ding’ pot - I make that a 21st Century construction in the form of a 3,700 year old design. Inside the displays are well laid out and high-tech lighting makes it very enjoyable to stroll around.

On one floor, jade artefacts tell a 3,000 year history of Chinese artistic development and trade.

The magnificent displays of Ming and Quin vases, the lines of calligraphic scripts showing the evolution of the styles and the paintings of exotic ladies and of misty mountains are wonderful to view.

The acrobatic show was interesting with some dramatic stunts but somehow never really got going for me. I did enjoy the lady twirling brollies with her feet and the troupe of artistes spinning sets of four plates above their heads. One set was dropped which was convincing and actually added to the effect.

The Mystic Lady did the swords-through-box-with-lady-in trick and the “not the old” lady-lying-flat-levitation trick – which we could still not work out – and the Strong Men were, well yes, Strong and fantastically toned and controlled. The finale was a kind of Rollerball meets Evil Kineval as, one by one, five nut cases on motorcycles belted around a spherical enclosure like caged tigers. All pretty spectacular, but given the way they drive on the roads anyway, probably only a normal Sunday afternoon’s outing for them.

After the show we ate in the hotel and watched the tennis.