Ye Olde Shanghai

Just a couple of years ago, the vegetable patches of Anting, a hamlet west of Shanghai, yielded some of the sweetest spinach this side of the Yangtze River. Now, out of farmers' fields, an entire German-style town has sprouted, its brightly hued gingerbread homes modeled on those of Weimar in Germany. The new town, which will soon house some 30,000 distinctly un-German people, was designed by Albert Speer, son of Adolf Hitler's favorite architect. Forty kilometers away in Songjiang, barefoot migrant workers are building another massive satellite city, this time a vision of ye olde England with tidy Tudor cottages, cobbled...