City Attractions

Sooner or later, every Shanghai resident goes to Disneyland. Your kids demand it, your visitors expect it, or — no judgment — you just want to ride TRON. And the difference between a magical day and an expensive queue-management exercise comes down to knowing how this particular park works. Tourists plan Shanghai Disneyland like a pilgrimage. Residents plan it like a heist. Here's the resident...

Stand at the junction of Wukang Road and Huaihai Middle Road on any weekend and you'll see them: hundreds of people, phones raised, photographing the same building. The Wukang Building (武康大楼) — that magnificent flatiron-shaped prow of brick and concrete — has become Shanghai's most photographed address, the face of the entire Former French Concession. Our office sits a few minutes up Wukang...

Every Shanghai resident eventually faces the water town question. Visiting relatives want canals, stone bridges and lanterns; the internet offers a confusing menu — Zhouzhuang, Wuzhen, Tongli, Xitang — all hours away by bus or train. Meanwhile the correct answer sits at the end of a metro line: Zhujiajiao (朱家角), 1,700 years old, genuinely beautiful, and reachable from central Shanghai for the...

Every visitor to Shanghai walks the Bund. Almost none of them know what they're looking at. That kilometer and a half of stone facades along the Huangpu — the Bund (外滩, Wàitān) — is the most concentrated museum of early 20th-century commercial architecture on earth: banks, trading houses, hotels and clubs built when Shanghai was Asia's financial capital the first time around. Here's how to...

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...

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...

Let us start with a confession. When the Oriental Pearl Tower was first proposed, many people thought it would never work. The design was too strange. The location was too remote. The construction was too difficult. Thirty years later, it is impossible to imagine Shanghai without it. Here is everything you need to know about the tower that changed Pudong forever – from its unlikely birth to what...

Let us be honest. Before you moved to Shanghai, someone told you about the fake markets. A friend whispered about a secret building where you could buy a "luxury" bag for the price of a nice dinner. A colleague bragged about their "totally real" watch that cost ninety percent less than the one in the mall. Those days are mostly over. But the markets are not dead. They have just changed. This guide...

There is a corner of Shanghai where grey brick Shikumen walls meet glass shopfronts. Where an alley that once led to a family kitchen now leads to an Italian restaurant. Where the past was not torn down. It was redesigned. Xintiandi is not the oldest part of Shanghai. It is not the quietest or the cheapest. But no other neighborhood tells the story of the city‘s transformation quite like this...

Some places feel like they belong on a movie set. Yuyuan Garden is one of them. Tucked away in the middle of Shanghai‘s busiest tourist district, this 400-year-old garden is a time machine. One minute you‘re pushing through crowds near the City God Temple, surrounded by neon signs and souvenir shops. The next minute, you step through an ancient gate and suddenly the noise fades. You‘re standing...