Yu Garden After Dark

Last stop, Shanghai, and I spent the final evening where the city keeps its lacquered past: the garden bazaar, every pavilion floodlit gold, roofs upturned like the whole quarter is about to take off. The pond does the doubling, and the reflections are, if anything, more composed than the originals.

It is unapologetically for visitors and I was unapologetically one, at the stone railing with the crowds thinning, watching gold shiver on black water. After five weeks of bunkers, passes and reactors, an evening of pure ornament felt like dessert.

Tomorrow the airport and the long hop home over the mountains I crossed by rail. The trip ends as it began, beside water and old architecture, with a woman at a railing doing the only thing this blog has ever really documented: looking, at length, on purpose.