The terrible news of the Chernobyl accident reached me when I was staying at the Peace hotel, this was in April 1986 and it was my first time in Shanghai. In those days little had changed in that City since the Japanese occupation and the Communist take-over. Once this Paris of the Orient had the second tallest skyscrapers in the World, now it was drab, poor and faded - even the players in the hotel's famous Jazz Band had not changed their Glenn Miller tunes and their white hair somehow had remained black.

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