Wu

Shanghainese is actually a kind of pidgin, based on Wu dialects, Lower Yangtze Mandarin, and English loanwords.

I can speak Standard Chinese (Putonghua), Southwestern Mandarin, Wu Chinese, and Spanish.

Wu opened his shoe manufacturing business about 15 years ago and it had been doing well until now, he said.

Emperor Qin Shi Huang and Emperor Wu of Han, though remarkable in their achievements, somewhat lacked in literary grace; Emperor Taizong of Tang and Emperor Taizu of Song, though commendable in their elegance, still fall slightly short in their brilliance. The proud conqueror, Genghis Khan, knew only how to bend the bow and shoot great eagles. All of them are now bygone, and if you want to count the truly remarkable figures, look to the present age.

Linguists say the Wu dialect widely spoken in Shanghai, to take one prominent example, shares only about 31 percent lexical similarity with Mandarin, or roughly the same as English and French. The encounter at the Datian market began when the dumpling seller approached the foreigner with a phrase that sounded like "goodbye" in the Wu dialect. Knowing it must mean something else, the foreigner guessed she was asking his name, and provided it, producing a laugh from the woman who explained, switching to Mandarin, that she had asked if he had eaten lately.

The finest private gardens were built in Suzhou, a graceful old city with a network of canals and a cultured ambiance. It was founded in the sixth century B.C. as the capital of the kingdom of Wu and flourished as a center of trade and scholarship under successive dynasties.

I deeply regretted having to miss seeing Hsing-ping, a very old town built by the ruler of the Wu Kingdom in the Three Kingdoms period of the third century.