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...

If you have spent any time in Shanghai, you have heard the name. Ju Fu Chang (巨富长). It rolls off the tongue. It appears in every Citywalk guide. It is mentioned in conversations about where to live, where to eat, and where to find the city's most authentic street life. But what exactly is Ju Fu Chang? The name is a shorthand. It refers to three parallel streets in the heart of the...

Somewhere around your second month in Shanghai, a colleague will mention their ayi. Then you'll notice everyone has one — the single guy in the Jing'an loft, the family in the Pudong villa, your most frugal teacher friend. And you'll ask the question every newcomer asks: should I get an ayi, and how does this actually work? Short answers: probably yes, and much more easily than you think. Here's the...

We're a Puxi agency — Old Xuhui, Jing'an, Changning, that's home. But one Pudong name keeps coming up in client conversations year after year: Shimao Riviera Garden (世茂滨江花园). Relocating families hear about it from colleagues; finance arrivals want river views near Lujiazui; and renters comparing both sides of the river ask us, honestly, how it stacks up. So here's the honest, Puxi-eyed...

Shanghai's skyline exists to be drunk in front of. Two skylines, technically — the 1920s stone Bund on one bank, the neon supertalls of Lujiazui on the other — and a whole industry of rooftops built around the view between them. But the rooftop scene turned over hard in recent years, and half the internet's recommendations now lead to closed doors. So here's the 2026 state of play — what's gone,...

At some point in your Shanghai apartment hunt, a PDF lands in your WeChat: ten-plus pages, Chinese on the left, English on the right, and a landlord who would quite like it signed by Thursday. Most tenants skim it, check the rent figure, and sign. Most of the time, nothing goes wrong. But every clause in that contract exists because at some point, for someone, something did go wrong — and the...