Shanghai Exhibition Centre

This guide to the Shanghai Exhibition Centre traces what stood on this Nanjing Road block before the building itself: a private garden so vast that residents called its owner, a penniless Baghdad immigrant turned real-estate magnate, the richest man in Asia. You'll hear how war and fire ended that garden by the mid-1940s, and how the new Communist government cleared the site for something entirely different in the 1950s, styled after a hall in Moscow. The guide follows the workers who raised it and the alliance it was built to declare.