Shanghai Travel Guide
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If you simply count heads, Shànghai is the biggest city in the biggest country on Earth. If you simply scan statistics, this is China's capital of commerce, industry, and finance. But numbers don't tell the whole story. Shànghai has a colonial past more intense than that of any other city in China, save Hong Kong, and this legacy gives it a dramatic character, visible in the very facades of its buildings. But the city is not only a museum of East meeting West on Chinese soil. Overnight, Shànghai has become one of the world's great modern capitals, the one city that best shows where China is headed at the dawn of the 21st century.
Shànghai was not always much of a delight to tour, but that has changed. After the building boom of the 1990s tore the city apart, new roads, highways, tunnels, and bridges, not to mention new hotels, restaurants, and sights now make Shànghai a city that a visitor can once again comfortably enjoy and explore. Today there are large neighborhoods of foreign architecture, wonderful for a stroll, where Europeans, especially the French, once resided. Shànghai's great river of commerce, the Huángpu, a tributary of the mighty Yángzi River, is lined with a gallery of colonial architecture, known as the Bund, grander than any other in the East, much of it recently refurbished and beckoning the curious visitor. The mansions, garden estates, country clubs, and cathedrals of Westerners who made their fortunes here a century ago pepper the city. Even a synagogue exists, dating from the days of an unparalleled Jewish immigration to China. These are not the typical monuments of China, but they are typical of Shànghai.
At the same time, creations of a strictly Chinese culture prevail. A walk through the chaotic old Chinese city turns up traditional treasures: a teahouse epitomizing old China; a quintessential Southern-Chinese classical garden; active temples and ancient pagodas; and even a section of Shànghai's old city wall. If Shànghai's primary architecture and avenues recall 19th-century Europe rather than old Cathay, this is still a Chinese city to the core.
Shànghai is a haven for shoppers -- Nánjing Lù is the number-one shopping street in all of China -- but perhaps even more importantly, Shànghai represents the future of China. Across the mighty Huángpu River, which served as old Shànghai's eastern border, Pudong, serving as the face of new Shànghai, now boasts the tallest hotel in the world, Asia's largest shopping mall, China's largest stock exchange, and one of the highest observation decks in Asia, the Oriental Pearl TV Tower. Not to be outdone, old Shànghai has its own legions of new skyscrapers, too, and a booming collection of fine international restaurants, several of them taking over the rooftops of the colonial gems lining the Bund and the mansions that went to seed in Shànghai's French Quarter.
Shànghai is also reestablishing itself as a leading trendsetter for fashion, design, culture, and the arts. New theaters and cultural centers attract top performers from China and abroad, while designers of every stripe are taking advantage of the mix of the East, West, past, and future by blazing their own unique styles.
Herewith I present a list of Shànghai's highlights, both the obvious and the more offbeat choices that make the most of all that is unique about the city. Shànghai is fast regaining its footing in a country in the midst of rediscovering its own. This sense of possibility imbues Shànghai with a palpable energy unmatched anywhere in the world, once again attracting legions of visitors to its shores.
