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About Shanghai
Shanghai is seen as the centre of finance and trade in mainland China. Since1992, Shanghai quickly took the lead in economic development and developed into business centre in mainland China. Shanghai also hosts the largest share market in mainland China.)
Agreeable Climate of Shanghai Shanghai enjoys a humid subtropical climate and experiences four distinct seasons in a year. In winter, cold northerly winds from Siberia can cause nighttime temperatures to drop below freezing, although most years there are only one or two days of snowfall. Summer in Shanghai is hot and humid, with usually 8.7 days of the year exceeding 35 °C (95 °F). with occasional downpours or freak thunderstorms. The city is also susceptible to typhoons in summer and the beginning of autumn, none of which in recent years has caused considerable damage. The most pleasant seasons are Spring, although changeable and often rainy, and Autumn, which is generally sunny and dry. The city averages 4.2 °C (39.6 °F) in January and 27.9 °C (82.2 °F) in July, for an annual mean of 16.1 °C (61.0 °F). Shanghai experiences on average 1,878 hours of sunshine per year, with the hottest temperature ever recorded at 40.2 °C (104 °F), and the lowest at −12.1 °C (10 °F). The average number of rainy days is 112 per year, with the wettest month being June. The average frost-free period is 276 days.
Culture of Shanghai Because of Shanghai's status as the cultural and economic centre of East Asia for the first half of the twentieth century, it is popularly seen as the birthplace of everything considered modern in China. It was in Shanghai, for example, that the first motor car was driven and the first train tracks and modern sewers were laid. It was also the intellectual battleground between socialist writers who concentrated on critical realism, which was pioneered by Lu Xun, Mao Dun, Nien Cheng and the famous French novel by André Malraux, Man's Fate, and the more "bourgeois", more romantic and aesthetically inclined writers, such as Shi Zhecun, Shao Xunmei, Ye Lingfeng and Eileen Chang.
Languages of Shanghai
Most Shanghai residents are descendants of immigrants from two provinces: Jiangsu and Zhejiang where dialect wu is spoken. In the past decades, many migrants from other areas of China have come to Shanghai to work. Most of them cannot speak the local language and therefore Mandarin is used as a lingua franca. The vernacular language is Shanghainese, a branch of dialect Wu, while the official language nationwide is Standard Mandarin. The local language is mutually unintelligible with Mandarin, and is thus an inseparable part of the Shanghainese identity. The modern Shanghainese language is based on the Suzhou dialect of Wu, the prestige dialect of Wu spoken within the Chinese city of Shanghai prior to the modern expansion of the city, the Ningbo dialect , and the dialect of Shanghai are usually spoken within Hongkou, Baoshan and Pudong districts, It is less influential than languages of other nearby regions from which large numbers of people have migrated to Shanghai since the 20th century. |
