Shanghai: what to see, where to stay and how to get around

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Shanghai was a walled county town of perhaps 200,000 people when Britain won the First Opium War, and the Treaty of Nanking in 1842 opened it as a treaty port. What followed has no real parallel: the British got a settlement in 1843, the Americans one in 1848 and the French one in 1849, and the first two merged in 1863 into the International Settlement — a self-governing foreign city inside China, with its own council, police force, courts and militia, in which foreign residents were not subject to Chinese law at all. By the 1930s this was the fifth largest city in the world and the financial centre of East Asia, and the river frontage was where its banks put their headquarters. Fifty-two of those buildings are still standing in one row. Two hours on the flat. Go at four: the buildings face west and they are lit from dusk.

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A short history of Shanghai

For centuries Shanghai was a fishing and cotton-trading town at the mouth of the Yangtze. In 1842, after the Opium War, its port was opened to foreign trade, and the British, French and Americans set up concessions under their control, and banks and offices were built along the Bund. Jewish families from Baghdad, such as the Sassoons and the Kadoories, were among the city's most important financiers, and between 1938 and 1941 about 20,000 Jewish refugees from Europe found refuge here and were later confined to the Hongkew Ghetto. In 1921 the Chinese Communist Party was founded in Shanghai. From 1990 the Pudong district was built opposite the Bund, and today it holds the tallest skyscrapers in China.

The ten best sights in Shanghai

1
The Bund
Fifty-two buildings from 1870 to 1937 — the financial centre of East Asia, built on extraterritoriality
2
The HSBC Building
1923, the largest bank building in Asia; its mosaic dome was plastered over in the fifties and found intact in 1997
3
The Customs House
1927; its clock was the largest in Asia and played the Westminster chimes, then The East Is Red, then Westminster again
4
Fairmont Peace Hotel
The Cathay Hotel of 1929, built by Victor Sassoon; Noël Coward wrote Private Lives here in four days with flu
5
Waibaidu Bridge
1907, the first all-steel bridge in China; the wooden one before it charged Chinese a toll and foreigners nothing
6
Huangpu Park
The famous no dogs and no Chinese sign never existed in that form — the two bans were real and separate
7
Broadway Mansions
A 1934 brick slab over the creek; it housed the foreign press corps and later the Red Army’s officers
8
Shanghai Post Museum
In the 1924 General Post Office with a roof terrace nobody knows about; free, and the view is the creek
9
Shanghai Museum
Free and no booking needed since September 2025 — walk up with your passport. Verified 10/2026
10
Urban Planning Exhibition Hall
A 1:500 model of the whole city on one floor. Free, 09:00–17:00, closed Wednesdays, passport required. Verified 10/2026

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A guide in your headphones: open the walk on our site, walk from stop to stop, and at each one your phone tells its story. No guide, no group, and free. This is the first walk in Shanghai:

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The Bund: a city that was not China

Huangpu Park · The oldest park in the city, opened by the Municipal Council in 1868, and the place to settle one famous story. The sign reading “No dogs and no Chinese” is remembered everywhere and did not exist in that form: the park regulations did bar dogs, and separately barred Chinese except for servants accompanying foreigners, and they were posted as a numbered list. The distinction does not soften the policy — the exclusion was real and it ran until 1928 — but the single combined sign is a later composite, and Chinese historians have said so.
Waibaidu Bridge · The 1907 steel bridge over Suzhou Creek was the first all-steel bridge in China. Its predecessor is the point: a wooden toll bridge built by a British company in 1856 that charged Chinese pedestrians to cross and let foreigners pass free, which caused enough anger that the Municipal Council eventually bought it out and made the crossing free — hence the name, which means roughly the outside free-crossing bridge. The whole bridge was floated away in 2008 for restoration and floated back.
The Peace Hotel · Victor Sassoon built the Cathay Hotel here in 1929 — he was from the Baghdadi Jewish family that had come to Asia through Bombay, and he had moved his fortune from India to Shanghai in the 1920s because the tax was lower. The green pyramid roof is his. Noël Coward wrote Private Lives in a suite here in four days in 1930 while ill with influenza, and the hotel’s jazz band, formed in 1980 from musicians who had played before 1949, still performs.
The HSBC Building · Finished in 1923 and at the time the largest bank building in Asia and the second largest in the world. Walk into the entrance hall and look up: a mosaic dome of eight panels, one for each of the cities where the bank had a major branch, in Venetian glass. In the 1950s the building became Shanghai city government and the dome was plastered over — the account is that it was covered to protect it rather than to destroy it. It was uncovered in 1997 and found undamaged.
The Customs House · 1927, and the clock in the tower was the largest in Asia — the bells were cast in England and modelled on Big Ben, and from 1928 they played the Westminster chimes every quarter hour. In 1966, at the start of the Cultural Revolution, the mechanism was altered to play The East Is Red instead, and loudspeakers were added. In 1986 the Westminster chimes were restored, reportedly ahead of a visit by Queen Elizabeth II. You can hear it from the whole waterfront.
Lujiazui across the water · Stand on the Bund promenade and look east, and understand what the date means: in 1990 everything you are looking at was warehouses, shipyards and farmland. Pudong was opened for development that year, the Oriental Pearl went up in 1994, Jin Mao in 1999, the World Financial Center in 2008 and Shanghai Tower — 632 metres, the second tallest building in the world — in 2015. Twenty-five years, four towers, one skyline that is now the image of China.

The old town and the French Concession

Before the treaty port there was a walled Chinese town, roughly circular, built in 1554 against pirates from the sea. The walls came down in 1912 and the ring road that replaced them still traces the circle exactly — you can see it on any map, and once you know it is there the geography of the whole city makes sense: the foreign settlements were built around the outside of a town they were not allowed into at first. North of the old town is the former French Concession, which was not a business district but a residential one — plane trees, villas, lane houses and the quietest streets in central Shanghai. Two and a half hours and it is all walkable. Go in the morning for the old town and the late afternoon for the plane trees, or split it.

Yu Garden · Pan Yunduan, a Ming official, spent eighteen years from 1559 building this two-hectare garden for his retired father, and he reportedly ruined himself doing it. What makes it worth the ticket is what happened to it afterwards: British troops were quartered in it in 1842 during the First Opium War, the Small Swords Society used it as a headquarters in 1853 and the French shelled them out of it, and the Japanese damaged it in 1942. Every rockery and pavilion you see is a restoration, most of it after 1956.
City God Temple · Every walled Chinese town had a chenghuang miao, a temple to its city god — a deity who was usually a deified local official and who was understood to administer the town’s dead as a magistrate administers the living. This one dates from 1403. The bazaar that surrounds it looks like a Ming street and almost all of it was built in the 1990s, which is worth knowing before you photograph it; the temple itself is working and the incense is real.
Confucian Temple · The old town’s Confucian temple, where the imperial examinations were administered locally — the system by which, in theory, any man who could memorise the classics could enter the civil service, and which ran until 1905. The courtyard now hosts a second-hand book market on Sunday mornings, which is a decent joke at its own expense. There are almost no visitors here on any other day.
The site of the First CPC Congress · On 23 July 1921 thirteen men met in the back room of a shikumen lane house at this address, representing about fifty members, and founded the Chinese Communist Party. Mao Zedong was one of them and took the minutes. The meeting was broken up by a French Concession police agent and finished on a boat on a lake in Zhejiang. The house is now a national museum — and it stands in the middle of Xintiandi, a luxury retail development built in 2001 by a Hong Kong developer around the preserved lane houses.
Tianzifang · The other way of doing the same thing. These are 1930s lane houses and small factory blocks, and from 1998 artists began renting the empty workshops cheaply; the district was due for demolition and the tenants and artists together got it reclassified. The result is narrower, messier and less profitable than Xintiandi, and crucially a lot of the original residents are still living above the shops — you will see their washing. Which of the two models is better is an argument Shanghai is still having.
Wukang Road and the Normandie · The flat-iron block at the fork is the Normandie Apartments of 1924, and its architect is the best story in Shanghai: László Hudec was a Hungarian-Slovak who was captured on the Russian front in the First World War, escaped from a prison train in Siberia and walked and rode into Shanghai in 1918 with nothing. He stayed twenty-nine years and built around sixty-five buildings, including the Park Hotel of 1934, which was the tallest building in Asia until 1952. Wukang Road was Route Ferguson and the plane trees are French.

Hongkou: the port of last resort

Between 1938 and 1941 somewhere between eighteen and twenty thousand Jews fleeing Germany, Austria, Poland and Lithuania reached Shanghai, and they came for one reason: because of the way the treaty port worked, Shanghai required no entry visa of anybody, and by 1939 it was effectively the only significant port on earth that did not. Most of them settled in Hongkou, north of Suzhou Creek, in a poor district that had been bombed flat in the 1937 battle with Japan. In February 1943 the Japanese authorities ordered all stateless refugees who had arrived after 1937 into a designated area of about two and a half square kilometres in Tilanqiao — the Shanghai ghetto. Conditions were very bad and almost all of them survived. This walk is that district. Two hours, and the museum needs an hour of it.

Ohel Moishe Synagogue · Built in 1907 by Russian Jews and rebuilt on this site in 1927, and during the refugee years it was the centre of the community’s religious life. It is now the Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum, and the exhibit to look for is the wall of names: a list, compiled since 2007 and still being added to, of refugees who were in Shanghai. It currently holds well over ten thousand. One figure the museum documents: Ho Feng-Shan, the Chinese consul-general in Vienna, issued thousands of visas to Shanghai in 1938–40 against the instructions of his own ambassador, and Yad Vashem named him Righteous Among the Nations in 2000.
Huoshan Park · A small park inside what was the designated area, and it was the refugees’ meeting place — the one patch of open ground in a district where families were living eight and ten to a room. A memorial stone was put up here in 1994 recording that around thirty thousand Jewish refugees lived in this part of Hongkou in the war years. The park is now used by the neighbourhood for cards and exercise, as it was then.
Changyang Road · The main street of the designated area, and the lane houses along it are the actual buildings — they have not been rebuilt, they have been lived in continuously for ninety years and are now occupied by Chinese families. Several carry small plaques. The refugees called this area Little Vienna and ran cafés, a newspaper in German, a theatre company and a school in it, under Japanese administration and with almost no money.
Broadway Mansions · The brick slab at the mouth of Suzhou Creek, finished in 1934 as luxury apartments, and in 1937 and again from 1945 it housed the foreign press corps — the top floors looked straight down on the battle of Shanghai, and journalists reported the fighting from the balconies. The Japanese requisitioned it in 1941 as an officers’ club. It was taken over by the Communist Party in 1951 and is still a hotel.
Duolun Road · Six hundred metres that were the centre of Chinese literary life in the 1930s: Lu Xun, Mao Dun, Guo Moruo and Ding Ling all lived on or near this street, and the League of Left-Wing Writers was founded here in 1930. Several of the houses are marked and one is a museum. The street was restored as a cultural district in 1999 and the restoration is heavy-handed, but the houses are the ones they lived in.
Lu Xun Park · Lu Xun is the founder of modern Chinese literature — he abandoned classical Chinese for the vernacular and wrote the stories every Chinese schoolchild still reads — and he spent his last nine years in Hongkou, a few hundred metres from here, because the district was outside the Chinese city’s jurisdiction and he was under threat from the Nationalist government. He died in 1936 and was reburied in this park in 1956. At seven in the morning it is choral singing, ballroom dancing and water calligraphy on the paving.

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Getting to Shanghai and getting around

Pudong International Airport · Thirty-two kilometres east; the maglev covers the first thirty of them in eight minutes
Hongqiao Airport · Fourteen kilometres west and mostly domestic; it shares a station with the bullet trains
The Maglev · 431 kilometres an hour, the only commercial high-speed maglev in the world — and it stops short of the centre
Hongqiao Railway Station · Beijing in four and a half hours at 350 km/h; thirty platforms, and you need your passport
Shanghai Railway Station · The older main station north of the centre; the slower trains and the sleepers leave from here
People’s Square Station · Three lines cross here; the metro opened in 1993 and is now the longest network on earth
Bund Sightseeing Tunnel · A tunnel under the river with a light show in it; it is absurd, it is cheap, and it is a genuine crossing
Cruise Terminal · On the north Bund; the river ferries that locals use cost a fraction of the tourist cruises

Cheap eats in Shanghai

Shanghainese cooking — benbang cai, local-style food — is the sweetest and soy-heaviest of the Chinese regional cuisines, and it is a city food rather than a provincial one: it absorbed Ningbo, Suzhou, Cantonese and Western influences in the treaty-port decades and kept all of them. The two things to eat are the dumplings and the braises. One practical rule that matters more here than almost anywhere: the famous shops sell one item, open at six or seven in the morning and shut when it runs out, usually by early afternoon. Twenty to fifty yuan, three to seven dollars. And cash is nearly dead — almost everything is paid by phone.

Xiaolongbao · Soup dumplings; a basket is three dollars. Bite a hole first, drink, then eat — do not put it in whole
Shengjianbao · Pan-fried pork buns with a crisp base and soup inside; four for two dollars, and morning only
Hongshao rou · Red-braised pork belly, the dish the city is built on; five dollars, and it is very sweet
Cong you ban mian · Scallion oil noodles; a dollar and a half, four ingredients, and the city’s best cheap dish
Hairy crab · The season is late September to November and it is short; the females are prized in October, the males in November
Breakfast: you tiao and doujiang · A fried dough stick and warm soy milk from a street window; under a dollar, and gone by nine
Coffee · Shanghai has more coffee shops than any city in the world — over nine thousand of them
Drunken crab and cold dishes · A Shanghai meal starts with cold dishes; drunken crab is raw crab cured in rice wine
Yunnan Road food street · Old restaurants from several provinces in one block near People’s Square; cheap and not for tourists
Qibao old street · The snack street of the canal town inside the city; on the metro, and best before noon

Museums in Shanghai

Shanghai has more museums than anyone expects and the state ones are free. Two of them are genuinely world-class: the Shanghai Museum for Chinese bronzes and painting, and the Urban Planning Exhibition Hall for understanding what has happened here since 1990, which no other city offers in that form. Beyond those, the interesting ones are small and specific — a basement of propaganda posters, a synagogue, a converted power station. Note two practical things: the big museums dropped advance booking in 2024 and 2025 and you now walk up with your passport, and the Shanghai Museum has split between two buildings since 2024.

Shanghai Museum · Free and no advance booking since 2025; the bronzes are the reason, and the building is shaped like the vessel they are
Urban Planning Exhibition Hall · A 1:500 model of the entire city filling one floor; free, and closed on Wednesdays
Jewish Refugees Museum · In the 1927 synagogue in Hongkou; the wall of names holds over ten thousand
Shanghai History Museum · Free, in the 1933 Race Club building; the clearest telling of the treaty-port century
Propaganda Poster Art Centre · In a residential basement; several thousand posters 1949–79, and the owner will show you round
Power Station of Art · In an 1897 power station; free, enormous, and the Shanghai Biennale is held here
Long Museum West Bund · Private, built around a 1950s coal wharf; the concrete vaults are the reason to go
Shanghai Post Museum · Free, in the 1924 post office, and the roof terrace is the best unknown view of the creek

Holy places in Shanghai

Shanghai is not a religious city in the way that Chinese cities with imperial history are, and what it has instead is a set of communities that each built one building: Buddhist temples that long predate the treaty port, a Catholic cathedral built by Jesuits who had been in the area since the seventeenth century, synagogues built by Baghdadi and then Russian Jews, and a mosque in the old town. All of them closed between 1966 and 1979 and all of them reopened. Religion in China operates through five state-recognised associations and the temples and churches you can visit are registered ones; that is worth knowing rather than guessing at.

Jade Buddha Temple · Two Burmese jade Buddhas brought in 1882; the whole hall was moved thirty metres in 2017
Longhua Temple · The oldest and largest temple complex in the city; the brick pagoda dates from 977
Jing’an Temple · Rebuilt in the 2000s in gold and Burmese teak; it gave the district its name
Xujiahui Cathedral · 1910, and the district is named after the family of a Ming official who converted in 1603
City God Temple · 1403, the Taoist temple of the walled town; working, and the bazaar around it is not
Confucian Temple · The old town’s examination temple; a second-hand book market in the courtyard on Sundays
Huoshan Park memorial · The 1994 stone recording that some thirty thousand Jewish refugees lived in this district

Nature and day trips near Shanghai

Shanghai sits on the flat silt delta of the Yangtze and there is not a natural hill in the municipality except one hundred-metre lump at Sheshan — the whole place is alluvium, which is also why the ground is soft, the towers need deep piles and parts of the city have subsided measurably. What passes for landscape here is water: the Huangpu, Suzhou Creek, the canal towns west of the city, and the Yangtze mouth itself, where Chongming Island is made entirely of silt and is still growing. The plane trees of the French Concession are the city’s real green and they were planted by the French.

The plane trees · Planted by the French from the 1880s; the canopy over Hengshan Road is the best in the city
Century Park · 140 hectares in Pudong, laid out by a British firm in 2000; the largest in the city
Zhongshan Park · A 1914 English-style park with a plane tree planted in 1866 still standing in it
Suzhou Creek · The creek bank has been opened as a continuous walk; mills, bridges and the back of the city
Chongming Island · The third largest island in China, made entirely of Yangtze silt, and it is still growing
Zhujiajiao · Forty-four kilometres west; thirty-six stone bridges and a Ming street, and go on a weekday

Things to do in Shanghai with kids

Shanghai is one of the easiest big cities in the world with children: the metro goes everywhere and is cheap, clean and air conditioned, the museums are free and often built for children, and the city is extremely safe. Two practical warnings. Almost nothing is paid in cash any more — you need Alipay or WeChat Pay with a foreign card linked, and that is worth setting up before you fly. And bring passports: the big free museums dropped advance booking in 2024 and 2025, but the passport at the security desk is what gets you in.

Natural History Museum · A 2015 spiral building in Jing’an; built for children and genuinely good. Bring passports
Science and Technology Museum · Enormous, in Pudong on the metro; allow a full half day and skip the basement markets
Shanghai Ocean Aquarium · A 155-metre underwater tunnel in Lujiazui; expensive and reliably indoors
The Maglev · 431 kilometres an hour for eight minutes; a child will talk about this and not about the Bund
Shanghai Disney Resort · Opened 2016 and the busiest Disney park outside the United States; book dated tickets
Astronomy Museum · Sixty kilometres out in Lingang; the largest planetarium building in the world, and worth the ride

Nightlife in Shanghai

Shanghai’s night is spread across four or five districts and the metro stops running between about eleven and half past, which shapes the whole evening — after that it is a taxi, and the apps work but need a Chinese phone number or a hotel to call. The Bund rooftops are the expensive postcard and worth one drink. The former French Concession is where the bars people actually use are, in converted houses on Yongkang, Julu and Anfu. And the city has a serious coffee culture by day and a serious jazz tradition that goes back to the 1930s.

The Bund rooftops · Expensive and worth exactly one drink; the view is Lujiazui and you are paying for it
Julu Road · The bar street of the former French Concession; converted houses, and it changes every two years
Yongkang Road · The street the residents got shut in 2016 after one complaint too many; now coffee by day
Anfu Road · Where the city’s young middle class actually spends an evening; wine bars and small plates
The Peace Hotel jazz bar · The band was reassembled in 1980 from players who had worked before 1949; two sets a night
Pecenongan of Shanghai — Shouning · The late food streets near People’s Square; crayfish in season and open past midnight

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Frequently asked questions about Shanghai

What is there to see in Shanghai?

The top sights in Shanghai are The Bund, The HSBC Building and The Customs House. The full list on this page has 10 sights, each with a photo and a short note.

How many days do you need in Shanghai?

Three to four days are enough to see the best of Shanghai without rushing, including at least one walking tour.

Is there a free walking tour in Shanghai?

Yes. sleepntrip has 3 free audio walks in Shanghai, with no guide and no group: your phone tells the story at every stop. The first one: The Bund: a city that was not China.

How do you get to Shanghai and get around?

The main ways are Pudong International Airport, Hongqiao Airport and The Maglev. Full details are in the transport section on this page.

Where to stay in Shanghai, and for how much?

sleepntrip shows only rooms in Shanghai that meet nine conditions: a good location, high guest scores, cleanliness, and a price of up to $80 a night for two. Pick your dates and see what is free.

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