As the saying goes, music is a mobile art, while building a still one. Shanghai in the 1930s was referred to as one of Asia's most artistic cities for its night life, still absorbing in contemporary society.

  Proud for nearly a century of the Medieval-style "Bathing Chamber", the Baroque-style "Green House", the city's tallest Renaissance-style building "Shanghai Park Hotel", and so on, Shanghainese, including many experts and scholars in urban construction planning, failed to realize that the urban construction designers nevertheless were from Hungry, a small Central European country.

  The then Shanghainese, or rather rich men’s sons with small capitals wore western-style suits, dwelled in western-style houses, drove occidental cars, smoke foreign cigarettes, saw foreign films, and spoke pidgin English (based on the syntax of Chinese). All this epitomized the life of the urban middle class. Are people ever aware that those urbanites, faddists for the western lifestyle, were truly inspired by these varied houses of western style!?

  I remembered that a few years ago I received a delegation of top-ranking city planning experts from Shanghai, and we were amazed during the banquet upon hearing for the first time about the architectural achievements by Hungarian Hudec, and seeing the related press clippings of Hongkong’s Ta Kung Pao issued in 1920, still treasured up by his nephew.

  Hungarian architect Hudec, unheard of before, got to be known by Shanghainese due to media crusade in recent years and an achievement exhibition on his architectural designs held at the JinMao Skyscraper in Shanghai.

  The master’s design achievement created the soul of the city. Since 1920, he had designed the top-ranking high-rise of the Far East -- Shanghai Park Hotel on Nanjing Road (a landmark building in Shanghai 50 years ago), the No. 1 luxury house in Asia -- Shanghai Green House, the first nightclub in Shanghai -- Parliment Casino, the first theater in Shanghai -- Shanghai Grand Cinema, and hundreds of state-of-art constructions. He stood out among counterparts for his unique works, such as the US City Club, the Hui Zhong Hotel, the Bathing Chamber, the British Association, the Normandy Apartment on Middle Huaihai Road, and the Shanghai Water Works, which I later learned that my father once worked in before Liberation. These works by Hungarian Hudec, highlighting the various Western-style schools of function construction, have impressed generations of Shanghai people.

  Only after living in Hungary for several years did I find, after a stroll among buildings of Budapest baroque style and neo-classical style, that the nation's oriental feeling was so strong. Walking through the crowd in the Bund, I felt like in a large vegetable market in the Five Area designed by Eiffel, savoring the origin of the trend of thought that the urban Shanghainese adored the West. Then let me surprise you one more time! Do you know that a few tons of the red-painted door of "Qin Terracotta Warriors and Horses Exhibition", erected in the Budapest Heroes Square, was actually designed by a contemporary descendant of a nephew of Hudec?

  It shows that cultures go beyond borders in the epitome of good marriage of both artistic styles and forms,. For all the changing times and varied social systems, the architectural art will live forever. Artistic style will not be casted aside because of the eras, as the standard of human art is eternal!

Editor's Note: Zhang Guozhi, Board Chairman of the Hungary Foundation of Culture without National Boundary and also Chairman of the Hungarian Council for Promotion of China's Peaceful Reunification, is now residing in Hungary. He had been a music conductor in China, and a student in Austria before he came to Hungary, where he devoted himself in cultural exchange between China and Hungary. He has organized for several years a series of shows in Hungary performed by such Chinese choruses as Black Duck and Chinese Juvenile as well as the Performance Group of Shaolin Kung Fu Monks. The Foundation joined in the Shanghai Baoshan International Folk Arts Festivals in 2004 when Dunaújváros Art Ensemble from Hungary participated in the 4th festival thanks to the introduction by Zhang, and won high praises from the local people. In August 2009, Zhang brought in Baoshan the Hungary Youth Military Music Dance Troupe, which gave an exhilarating performance, also the debut of its Chinese tour, to the local residents.