2026

Here's a neighbourhood truth: in central Shanghai, your gym is a bigger daily-life decision than your metro line. The FFC and Jing'an pack more fitness options per square kilometre than almost anywhere in Asia — mega-gyms, boutique studios, 24-hour budget chains, yoga in heritage villas — and the right choice depends entirely on how you actually train. Here's the honest map, from people whose...

Ask ten long-term expat families in west-central Shanghai to name the compound they'd move to tomorrow, and Central Residences (嘉里华庭) will come up more often than any other. It's the compound with the waiting-list reputation — the one where "a three-bed just came up" travels through school WeChat groups like breaking news. Here's why, and what the reputation gets right and wrong. Where and...

If you've spent any time apartment-hunting in the Former French Concession, you've seen the word. Hengfu (衡复). It's in listings, on heritage plaques, in the name of the area's own museum. But most people — including plenty of long-term expats — couldn't tell you exactly what it means or where its edges actually are. Here's the real answer, with the numbers checked. What Hengfu Actually...

Every city has a soundtrack. Shanghai's is jazz — and unlike most cities that borrowed the genre, Shanghai can claim it as autobiography. This was Asia's jazz capital when the music was new: the 1920s and 30s city of ballrooms and taxi dancers, where American bandleaders took residencies, where Chinese composers fused jazz with folk melodies and invented shidaiqu — the pop music of old Shanghai —...

Ask visitors to name a Shanghai temple and they'll say the Jing'an Temple or Jade Buddha Temple — coach parks full, incense smoke and selfie sticks. Meanwhile, a few metro stops south in our own Xuhui District stands something older, larger, and somehow still under-visited: Longhua Temple (龙华寺), the oldest and biggest ancient temple complex in Shanghai, with a pagoda that has watched over the city...

Here is the single most important practical fact about life in Shanghai: the city runs on two apps, and until they're on your phone, you can't easily buy a coffee, catch a taxi, rent a share-bike, order lunch, or pay your landlord. The good news — and it is genuinely good news, because this used to be a nightmare — is that in 2026, setting up Alipay and WeChat Pay with a foreign Visa or Mastercard...

Every week, someone sits across from us with the same beautiful dilemma. Open on one phone: a 1930s lane house off Anfu Road — high ceilings, a private terrace, plane-tree light through original windows. Open on the other: a bright 2015 two-bed in a Jing'an compound — gym downstairs, underfloor heating, an elevator that always works. Same budget. Completely different lives. We rent both, we love...

We've now written full guides to three of Jing'an's most-asked-about compounds — Top of City, Ladoll International City, and City Castle — and ever since, the same message keeps arriving: "OK, but which one?" Fair. All three sit in the Jing'an sweet spot, all three court the same professional-and-couple demographic, and on a listing site their photos blur together. In person, they're three distinct...

Some neighborhoods have date spots. The Former French Concession is one — a district seemingly designed by a committee of hopeless romantics: plane-tree tunnels lit gold at dusk, lane-house doorways glowing with candlelight, and a density of wine bars, bistros and late-night corners unmatched anywhere in China. At the centre of it all: Anfu Road and its orbit — Wukang, Wulumuqi, Fumin, Changle —...

Every neighbourhood has a living room. The Former French Concession's is Fuxing Park (复兴公园) — ten hectares of plane trees, rose beds and gravel paths where, every single morning, the whole opera of Shanghai life performs: tai chi at dawn, ballroom dancers by nine, chess players holding court, a choir somewhere behind the fountain, and a man writing poetry on the pavement in water that evaporates...