A taxi picked me up outside the house at half past eight in the evening, and the next morning I woke up in Shanghai.
There is a technical term for that: To be shanghaied properly is to be drugged, or beaten, or simply got drunk enough, and then carried aboard a ship you never agreed to board. You wake at sea. The coast is gone. The word comes from the American Pacific ports in the middle of the nineteenth century, San Francisco and Portland and Astoria, where the Gold Rush had emptied every vessel of its crew, because no sailor stays at sea when there is gold in the hills. Captains still needed men. So they paid boarding house keepers a flat rate per body delivered, and the boarding house keepers, who were called crimps, delivered.
Shanghai lent its name to the practice because it was the far end of the world. The voyage was months. You could not walk back from it, and you could not jump ship halfway and expect to see home again. Being sent to Shanghai meant being sent somewhere you could not undo.
My own version differed in a few particulars. I paid China Eastern, rather than being sold to them, which reverses the direction of the money entirely. Nobody drugged me, although the cabin lights went down somewhere over Siberia and the effect was much the same. The voyage was ten hours rather than four months.
The crimps took men who did not want to go. I have wanted to go for a while. Same city, same long night, same business of waking up somewhere the previous day had not prepared you for. The only difference is consent.
Stockholm to Shanghai, good to know
- China Eastern flies Stockholm Arlanda to Shanghai Pudong overnight — departing 22:40 and arriving 14:35 the next day, about ten hours eastbound, with a six-hour time difference in September.
- Pudong airport reaches central Shanghai by Maglev in eight minutes — transfer to Metro Line 2 at Longyang Road, and Line 2 runs direct to East Nanjing Road, a four-minute walk from the Bund.
- Chinese high-speed rail tickets go on sale fifteen days before departure — at a fixed hour, and popular routes sell out the same day. Conventional trains often open later, sometimes only on the day of travel.
- A foreign passport works as the train ticket itself — you scan it at the gate, and there is no paper ticket to lose.
- Alipay and WeChat Pay are the working payment rails on the mainland — both accept foreign cards now, but they fail together whenever a phone or a VPN misbehaves, so carry cash in small notes.
- Two national holidays fall inside a six-week autumn trip — Mid-Autumn Festival on 25 September 2026 and National Day on 1 October, both affecting train availability and crowding.