City Attractions

Shanghai finally has its own Legoland. After years of waiting, the resort opened in July 2025 in Fengjing Town, Jinshan District—and it's already become a go-to for families living in the city. It's the eleventh Legoland globally and the first in China. Within its first year, it welcomed over two million visitors, making it the fastest Legoland in the world to hit that milestone . That's not...

There is a golden building on Gonghexin Road that locals call the "Golden Pineapple." It has a distinctly retro-futuristic roof, and for two decades, it has been home to one of the most successful live shows in China's entertainment history. The show is ERA – Intersection of Time (时空之旅), performed at Shanghai Circus World in Jing'an District. It premiered in September...

There's a moment when you're walking through Shanghai's Expo Culture Park (世博文化公园) that you forget you're in a city of 25 million people. The breeze comes off the Huangpu River. The trees are dense. And if you've just climbed the 48-meter Twin Hills (双子山), you're looking down at a panorama that includes both Lupu Bridge and the Lujiazui skyline. This isn't a park you stumble upon by...

Ask a Shanghai resident where the Bund is and they'll point northeast, toward the stone banks and neon skyline everyone photographs. Ask where the West Bund is, and you'll get a different answer entirely: a few kilometres south along the same river, in Xuhui, where a stretch of former industrial waterfront has quietly become one of the best contemporary art districts in Asia — and one of our own...

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...