Shanghai

Why Shanghai works

Shanghai stages its own history as a nightly spectacle: the Bund's 1920s-30s bank buildings, built when the city was Asia's financial capital under foreign concession rule, face Pudong's skyline of glass towers across the Huangpu River, both banks floodlit after dark for a river of tour boats and promenade crowds. The Oriental Pearl Tower's pink spheres, the Jin Mao Tower's pagoda-inspired setbacks, and the spiralling Shanghai Tower — the world's second-tallest building — anchor the Pudong side; the Bund's stone facades, several now luxury hotels and restaurants, anchor the other. Inland, the former French Concession keeps a different register: plane-tree-lined streets, Art Deco villas turned into cafes and boutiques, and Tianzifang's lane-house workshops threading through what was once a residential quarter. Yu Garden, a Ming-dynasty classical garden beside a bazaar of soup-dumpling stalls, adds a pre-colonial layer amid the surrounding modern city. Shanghai's metro reaches most sights easily, and a river cruise at dusk remains the clearest way to read the city's central argument — old money and new ambition, lit up and facing off across the water — in under an hour.

Trip Snapshot

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