The story
Shanghai Rowing City Elite Regatta in Suzhou Creek/Shanghai
Elite rowing crews race down Suzhou Creek in central Shanghai, a once heavily polluted industrial canal now reclaimed for recreation, with old warehouses and new apartment towers framing the course on opposite banks, drawing spectators who come as much for the reflected city as for the technical rowing itself.
Suzhou Creek carried some of the heaviest industrial pollution of any waterway in twentieth-century China, closed to recreational use for decades, and this regatta stages elite rowing directly on that same reclaimed water as a deliberate statement about what the canal has become.