B efore the Europeans got their hooks into it, Shanghai had been a walled 
village on the Huang Pu River, a few miles south of its confluence with the 
estuary of the Yangtze. Much of the architecture was very sophisticated Ming 
Dynasty
stuff, private gardens for rich families, a shopping street here and there 
concealing interior slums, a rickety, vertiginous teahouse rising from an 
island in the center of a pond. More recently the wall had been torn down and a 
sort of beltway built on its foundations. The old French concession wrapped 
around the north side, and in that neighborhood, on a corner looking across the 
ring road into the old city, the Theatre Parnasse had been constructed during 
the late 1800s. Miranda had been working there for five years, but the 
experience had been so intense that it often seemed more like five days.