Pudong

Pudong is the rapidly transformed eastern district of Shanghai, represented in the novel as both the city’s commercial future and the setting of a disturbing criminal discovery. Its new towers rise from land once described as desolate marsh, while the district’s building projects turn an immense landscape of economic ambition into part of the investigation. The contrast is central to Pudong’s significance: the same place that displays Shanghai’s growing wealth also contains evidence of violence hidden beneath construction.

The Construction Site and the Investigation

The case begins with an extraordinary count: eighteen torsos had been recovered at a Pudong building site, although only sixteen heads had been found, and investigators were still trying to match the remains. The site was due to be covered in concrete, leading Li Yan to conclude that whoever left them there knew the construction schedule. The discovery therefore tied the investigation to the site’s imminent transformation: its foundations were not merely the backdrop to the crime but a means by which the remains might have been concealed.

The condition of the remains complicated identification and the reconstruction of events. Dr Lan said decomposition made visual matching nearly impossible, so investigators compared the cut ends of bones and sent muscle samples for DNA analysis. The bodies were to be assembled and stored separately at the mortuary once the pieces had been matched. Their unusually cold interiors and signs of freezer damage suggested that they had been frozen before burial; because the remains lay only two or three feet underground and appeared to have been buried four or five days earlier, the burial date could be estimated more readily than the time of death.

Margaret Campbell’s examination established a further distinction between the cause of death and the subsequent treatment of the bodies. The amputations were clean and bloodless, indicating that the victims had not died from being dismembered; the cutting had occurred after death. Her findings instead pointed to a sterile surgical procedure carried out while a victim was still alive, with removal of the heart identified as the likely cause of death. She also noted that the remains had been frozen for at least three months before being dumped across the river, while thawing accelerated their decomposition. The investigation thus treated Pudong as the final stage in a sequence of killing, dismemberment, storage, and concealment, even as the motive remained unknown.

When Margaret later re-examined a woman’s remains, a blue polypropylene suture linked that case to the Shanghai victims, but other differences qualified the comparison. The woman had also been alive when the procedure began, yet her lungs, one kidney, and eyes remained, unlike the corresponding organs in the Pudong victims; her bones had been sawn rather than chopped. Margaret judged that the same perpetrator could have been responsible, with the differences arising from the circumstances. Pudong consequently became a point of comparison as well as a crime scene: its evidence supplied a pattern against which another case could be tested.

Economic Transformation and Symbolism

Pudong’s transformation is presented on a scale that makes its recent past difficult to reconcile with its skyline. Land described as desolate marsh became a special economic zone, and towers rose across it where the city’s growth had once seemed unlikely. The Jin Mao Tower, its peak lost in cloud, stands among buildings that register both the speed of this change and its distance from the communist ideal invoked by the landscape’s earlier history. From across the river, Shanghainese watch the development with wonder, while the towers’ rising presence gives the district a new horizon.

The opening scene ties this urban change to international finance. An American executive arrives at a Pudong construction site to celebrate a Chinese-American joint venture: the New York-Shanghai Bank, planned as the tallest building in Asia. Steel rods already rise from concrete foundations, but the site remains muddy and unfinished. The executive’s confidence rests not on the appearance of the ground beneath him but on the future power promised by the project and his position as its chief executive officer.

For him, the towers resemble ancient standing stones, yet their purpose is not religious devotion: he recognizes money as the force honored by those who built them, and takes satisfaction in sharing that allegiance. This perspective makes Pudong more than a symbol of urban progress. Its skyline links local redevelopment to global capital, while the construction site places that immense ambition beside the concealed criminal discovery that will drive the investigation.

The River Boundary and the Investigation

Pudong’s position across the Huangpu River from The Bund gives the district a visible place in the novel’s contrast between Shanghai’s older urban face and its new development. Seen from the river, the two banks appear as opposing versions of the city, with Pudong identified with the new. For Li Yan, however, the district’s significance is not reducible to that contrast: after crossing back through the city, he remains focused on the women whose remains were found at the construction site. The emerging skyline and the investigation occupy the same urban landscape, but the crime gives the image of progress a concealed human cost.