There are big expensive shopping malls, giant office buildings and, tucked in between, small shops and beautiful old houses. Above all this billows colourful laundry on clotheslines or on long bamboo poles. Outer-garments or underwear are not only exposed to the public in the many little side-roads. Trousers, bras and T-shirts are also drying above the heads of thousands of pedestrians, cyclists and taxi drivers passing along one of Shanghai's major roads daily. Just take the double-decker bus No 911 for the best view.

I love seeing hanging laundry, it tells so much about people. Well, there must be something in the expression about "airing your dirty laundry". It seems very intimate. Some photographers discovered long ago that hanging laundry is a genre of art. Pictures of clothes lines from all over the world entered artbooks decades ago. It would be nice to see a special edition on laundry hanging in China.

In Italy for instance the hanging of laundry is not only a necessity - it is an art in itself. Many Venetian casalinghe, or housewives, consider hanging laundry to be an ancient and important ritual that is passed on from a mother to daughter.

Each family has its own tradition of hanging up laundry to dry, some will hang by colour or by type of clothing. And so, the simple clothing line becomes the signature of the individual housewife.

I also try to read the laundry lines in Shanghai. Here bamboo poles are threaded through one trouser leg or through both sleeves of a T-shirt which makes the drying laundry look like the owner's flag. Whereas clothes lines with underwear look like prayer flags. I wonder what the Venetian housewives would think of laundry-hanging Shanghai style.

Obviously the local authorities regard this laundry as a hanging offence. Just recently I watched a report on the city's efforts to ban hanging laundry from the streets or from balconies overlooking the streets. Though people are facing fines now, they still continue the hanging of clothing outdoors.

They have good reason to do this. They like the way the T-shirts feel and smell. No fabric softener can match the summery smell of open-air-dried laundry even closely. Jeans do not shrink and wear out so quickly, as they do in a dryer. Plus you save a lot of energy when using environmental-friendly resources like wind and sun to dry your laundry.

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