Shanghai

Shanghai is China's great duet with the world. The Bund's granite parade of banks and trading houses faces the Pudong skyline across the river — 1920s ambition eye to eye with 2020s ambition, the whole history of the city in one exchanged glance. The treaty-port century made Shanghai Asia's most cosmopolitan address: art deco apartment blocks, the lilong lane neighbourhoods, the jazz that filled the Paramount ballroom and still plays nightly at the Peace Hotel, performed with the authority of a city that considers the Jazz Age local heritage.

Its Western-music pedigree is the deepest in Asia: the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra descends from the Public Band of 1879, making it the continent's oldest orchestra, and the Shanghai Conservatory of 1927 was China's first. The city's founding concert venue had the most Shanghainese of adventures: the Shanghai Concert Hall, built in 1930 — the first hall in China erected for symphonic music, and the venue documented in the concert record — stood in the path of an elevated expressway, so in 2003 the city simply picked up the building and moved it sixty-six metres, restoring it note-perfect in a garden. Add the Grand Theatre and the riverside Poly and Oriental Art Center stages, the museum mile of the West Bund, xiaolongbao eaten standing — and Shanghai's self-image holds: the city where China rehearses the future, with the band playing.