SHANGHAI - Liu Qingmo stood where his old home once was. He surveyed the area around him, looking for any traces of the past. He could not find any.

Liu, 82, was looking for potholed roads, dilapidated houses and putrid public toilets from the shantytown on the east side of the Huangpu River, where he had lived for a decade.

Instead, what he saw took his breath away. The ramshackle neighborhood he once knew became a modern, beautiful place and the embodiment of state-of-the-art architecture - the Expo Garden.