I am standing looking at a couple of chairs and a bed on Saturday afternoon and the uniformed guard near me is watching warily as if I might make off with them. As well he might, because the horseshoe armchairs and the three-sided bed on display in the Shanghai Museum are examples of rare 17th century Ming furniture.
The four-poster canopy bed would fetch half a million dollars in a New York auction house; indeed not long ago bidders paid $11 million at Christie's in New York for a collection of Ming furniture pieces. Over the years many of China's historic treasures like the Ming chairs found their way to the West, but the Shanghai Museum is now steadily buying back artefacts from international dealers and has mounted the first permanent display in communist China of the elegant and sophisticated hardwood Ming furniture.
This is but one example of how Shanghai is trying to establish itself not just as China's financial capital but as its pre-eminent cultural centre. After an intense burst of construction the city now has a cultural infrastructure which surpasses that of Beijing. Apart from the new and exciting Shanghai Museum, a new art museum housing traditional and contemporary Chinese paintings was opened in August, a huge modern library was completed around the same time and a $200 million science centre will be ready next year.
On Saturday evening I attended a baroque music concert given by the German Das Neue Orchestra in the French-designed Shanghai Grand Theatre, a shimmering white edifice with three auditoriums, in another of which a full orchestral performance was being given. Contrast this with the scene when the Chieftains came to Shanghai in 1997, and the only suitable venue was a small auditorium in the Portman Shangri-La Hotel, or when the Cleveland Orchestra came in 1998 and had to play in a Shanghai gymnasium.
As part of an evident plan to enhance the image of Shanghai as the New York of China, the city is this month holding its second Shanghai Biennial and its second annual arts festival. They have attracted big names such as the Philharmonic Orchestra, the Mariinsky Ballet Theatre and the Joaquin Cortes Ballet, and the programme includes a spectacular one-night staging of the opera Aida with a cast of 2,117 and elephants, lions, tigers, camels and pythons. The perception that there is a cultural revival happening in this city alongside the explosion of neon-lit flyovers and post-modern towers of glass and steel has attracted much attention overseas, including Ireland.
The new chairman of the Arts Council, Mr Patrick Murphy, is currently on his first visit to Shanghai along with a small cultural delegation, and the managing director of the National Theatre, Mr Richard Wakely, will arrive soon to explore the possibility of an Abbey Theatre presentation.
Conspicuously absent from the Shanghai festival, however, are contemporary drama and inventive local productions. The city still lacks a strong local arts scene. Every planned cultural event, local and international, has to be approved by the notoriously conservative Shanghai Culture Bureau.
Officials of the bureau were responsible for an embarrassing incident two years ago when they banned a Shanghai opera company from performing The Peony Pavilion at a festival in the US, because it was "pornographic" and "superstitious".
All international performances in Shanghai are also subject to vetting by the Ministry of Culture in Beijing, which can also be obstructive. For example, when Chinese-American cellist Yo-Yo Ma was invited to perform at the China premiere of Tan Dun's The Gate at the Shanghai Grand Theatre, the Ministry had still not given permission with only two weeks to go, and the cellist had to pull out because of other commitments. The tardiness in giving approval was almost certainly due to bureaucratic Beijing rivalry than ideological hang-ups.
As in pre-revolutionary days, wealthy patrons have emerged to play a big role in reviving Shanghai's arts scene. Mr Bonko Chan, a flamboyant businessman in his 30s who runs a state freight-forwarding company, is almost single-handedly responsible for introducing Shanghai to Aida, La Traviata and other operas. His next major project is the Chinese premiere of Tan Dun's new opera, Tea, in 2002.
The most optimistic artists and promoters in Shanghai hope that the naked desire of the city to make itself a great cultural metropolis, and the abundance of cash and glitter to attract big names and innovative performers from around the world, will steadily erode the influence of Shanghai's cultural tsars.
The way the city thinks of itself was expressed clearly by Chen Xiejun, executive director of the Shanghai Museum. "Shanghai's museums and cultural centres don't just aim to be the best in China," he said recently. "We're competing to be among the best in the world."