I was not ready for the Bund.People had told me what to expect, of course, but in that vague traveler way. "You have to go to the Bund! There's nothing like it!" Which is sort of the opposite of the point with the Bund. There *are* things like it. Ju
st—nothing like it is supposed to be *there*. Enormous squat Londonesque buildings stand rank upon rank at the edge of the Huangpu river, palaces built by merchant princes and colonial empires to approximate the glory their efforts, and rapacity, made possible at home.How did something like this happen?The real answer's too long for writer's notes, but, basically, Shanghai was one of the few Chinese cities opened to Western settlement following the Opium Wars. Foreign traders rushed in. Embassies and banks were built. Shanghai became a center of financial power, and grew a criminal underbelly to match. Over a century, the city grew more fragmented and chaotic as foreign powers asserted extraterritorial rights, dividing the city into tracts of foreign territory—"Concessions" with their own governments and police forces. Which didn't help the criminal underbelly part, since all one had to do in order to escape one bunch of cops was run across a border!1920s Shanghai is a fantastic, rapidly changing world of assassins, civil resistance, and rampant colonialism, a new nation striving to form itself on the brink of war. In the same city you had a budding Communist movement, ardent Nationalists, ranks upon ranks of businessmen, and a sort of floating world of foreign nationals who found even basic comprehension of the Chinese language entirely unnecessary in their day to day life.It's a fascinating period of history, of course, and a juicier setting for a Bookburners episode I could not possibly imagine. My huge challenge was culling the amount of history I wanted to pack into Grace's adventures in time, and making sure the detail fit the emotional arc.Because this is an emotional story, at root—Grace and Sal both struggling with betrayal and history, and the possibility of change. That work takes time, and it involves a lot of missteps along the way—Sal's assumption that she can just stumble into Grace's secrets and it'll be fine, for example. Grace has spent a long time closing herself off. She'll have an interesting time trying to open back up in the next several episodes.
