Shanghai is well known as one of China's most multicultural cities. I had been standing on the embankment next to Suzhou Creek, blankly staring out across the water, wondering where I would go next.

　　I had woken up especially early that morning so that I could see as much of the city as possible and had already admired the view from the Bund (Waitan) across the choppy Huangpu River to the tower blocks of Pudong, had visited old Shanghai recreated at Yuyuan Park and been for lunch at Xintiandi, the highlight of which for me had been visiting the building where the Chinese Communist Party had been founded way back in 1921 - around the time my mother was born. Now, here I was by Suzhou Creek, wondering how and why I was there.

　　'Ya look lost,' he said. I turned around and was surprised by the fact that I hadn't noticed this person come up beside me. He definitely stood out from the crowd, at about six foot three tall, with orange/ brown hair like a weathered carrot.

　　It turns out that Victor, my Australian companion, was something of an amateur photographer, taking shots of almost anything, all the time. One of his favourite topics, it transpired, was Suzhou Creek. He was walking around looking for a new feature or angle to snap.

　　When I told him that I was looking for something else that was interesting to see in the city, he recommended that I walk up the creek for a hundred metres or so and visit the place where boats are loaded up for their journey down stream.

　　'You can see right into the boats where the people live, they do their cooking and wash their clothes there - it's really interesting.'

　　What was more interesting for me was the fact that Victor had travelled half way around the world to spend his time peeping into houseboat windows to see how people washed their clothes. Everyone has to have their own hobbies, I suppose.

　　Victor seemed to have an artistic eye for the everyday. I walked up with him to see the boats and watched as he took a few snaps of washing lines and the boats against the skyline. I had a look at the photos that he took on his digital camera.

　　When you have a good camera, it seems that anything you take a picture of looks good. The washing looked almost majestic when framed against the out of focus buildings across the river.

　　Victor started telling me his idea about Suzhou Creek and why he was always going there to take pictures. It was something about capturing a moment - a moment in the development of Shanghai. The peaceful and easy life of the boat people was slowly disappearing as modernisation and internationalisation swept through the city.

　　He wasn't saying that the boat life was ideal, because it obviously seemed to lack a lot of the luxuries that we landlubbers take for granted. But if you don't have some recording of where things stand now, how are you going to know how far you are moving forward.

　　Victor is hoping that one day he can put on an exhibition of his works, if he can get enough good photographs of Shanghai. But he thinks that only when the old life that he is recording has gone will anyone be interested in the photographs that he has taken.

　　It was eight years since I had last been in Shanghai - a long time to be away from a place that is developing as fast as Shanghai. The city that I visited eight years ago was fast disappearing and instead a glitzy city of glass, steel and concrete is rising up to replace it. The small, old houses that used to be everywhere have all but been replaced by modern development and the last remaining patches of run down buildings along Suzhou Creek are set to be redeveloped in the next few years.

　　Victor told me about the relationship between the early development of Shanghai and Suzhou Creek. The Bund, which was the piece of land first allocated to foreign businesses in Shanghai, was outside of the old city that had been there for hundreds of years, now marked out by Renmin Road near Yuyuan Park. Shanghai wasn't the only place to have a Waitan, there is also one at Ningbo, and the same sort of thing can be seen at Deshima in Nagasaki, Japan.

　　However, unlike many other places, Shanghai's Bund was established at the mouth of Suzhou Creek which provided the foreign businessmen with a safe harbour for ships and fresh water for drinking. In fact, the best real estate in the city was given to the foreigners - one wonders why such generosity - and for that reason among others, Shanghai's reputation as a city that welcomed foreigners grew.

　　Today, Shanghai is still one of the most welcoming cities for international travellers and businesspeople and that is one of the reasons that it has been able to attract so many foreign companies to set up operations there or to base their Chinese and in some cases Asian regional business in the city.

　　In the short time that I was in Shanghai, I found the city a very neighbourly place, all the way from the helpful taxi drivers who seem to always try to take you to your destination by the shortest route, right up to the friendly policemen who invited me inside the station for a cup of tea.

　　Some things change and some stay the same, even in a city that is changing as quickly as Shanghai. Victor told me that Suzhou Creek is now cleaner than it has been for years, and the strong smell that it once had is now gone. However, I think the days when foreigners would have been delighted to be drinking from the river are over for good.

　　Flying back to Beijing after an all too brief visit to Shanghai, I look out the window of the plane and think back to my brief encounter with Suzhou Creek and the man who sought to capture its changing history and silently toast them both with a glass of sparkling gin and tonic.

　　By Rainer Thomm