No city in China looks to the future as much as Shanghai. At dusk, the lights of the Pudong skyscrapers come on and reflect in the Huangpu River, and it feels like standing on the set of a science-fiction film: the Shanghai Tower twisting skywards, the Oriental Pearl with its pink spheres, the Jin Mao lit up. And yet, turn 180 degrees and the stately buildings of the Bund line the opposite bank, with facades like 1920s European banks. That contrast between colonial Shanghai and 21st-century Shanghai, separated by nothing more than a river, is the essence of the city.
Shanghai doesn't carry Beijing's imperial weight or Xi'an's ancient monuments, but it has something no other Chinese city offers: a dizzying, modern, cosmopolitan urban energy, mixed with pockets of nostalgia. This is the China of cafés in the French Concession under the plane trees, of alleyways (the lilong) where laundry hangs between art deco buildings, of the classical Yuyuan Garden tucked away in the Old City, of food markets and teahouses. It is also the China of luxury shops, contemporary art galleries and nightlife that never stops.
This guide covers the best of Shanghai from a practical angle: how to split your days between the Bund and Pudong, what to see in the Old City and the concessions, how to make the most of the world's largest metro, how to pay by phone and what you need to know about VPNs before you arrive. For many travellers, Shanghai is the easiest gateway to China: modern, well connected and surprisingly easy to get around. It is also a perfect base for exploring the gems of the Yangtze Delta, such as Suzhou and Hangzhou.
Although there were fishermen and a small walled town here for centuries, Shanghai was a minor port until the First Opium War and the Treaty of Nanjing of 1842 forced it open to foreign trade. Within a few decades it became China's great port and a city divided into concessions: the British and American ones (merged into the International Settlement) and the French one, each with its own laws, police and architecture. In the early 20th century, Shanghai was the 'Paris of the East' and the 'whore of Asia': a metropolis of bankers, gangsters, revolutionaries and refugees, where the Chinese Communist Party was secretly founded in 1921. The Japanese occupation, the Second World War and the arrival of communism in 1949 snuffed out that cosmopolitan splendour for decades. Only with Deng Xiaoping's reforms and, above all, the development of the new Pudong district from the 1990s did Shanghai rise again as the financial capital of the new China. The full story, from fishing village to 'Paris of the East' to global megacity, is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓China's economic engine for a thousand years: the fertile Yangtze Delta, with the Hangzhou of the Song, the Suzhou of silk and gardens, and the Shanghai of the foreign concessions and skyscrapers.
Read the history of The Yangtze Delta (East) →A local guide tells you in half an hour what no sign at the site will ever explain. We look ours up on Civitatis: guided in Spanish and booked online with no fuss. They have 14 activities in Shanghai. And there are free tours here: you book without paying and tip the guide whatever you think at the end, so trying one costs you nothing. Three are below so you get the idea: tap any of them and they all open.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
It's hard to picture today, looking out over the forest of skyscrapers in Pudong, but for almost all of its history Shanghai was a place of little importance. The Yangtze delta, where the great river spills into the sea, has been inhabited since ancient times, but the settlement that would become the city only shows up clearly in the Middle Ages. The name itself, Shanghai ('upon the sea'), is recorded from the 11th century, when the area held a modest village of fishermen and traders on the Huangpu River, a tributary of the Yangtze.
Under the Song and Yuan dynasties, the town grew as a river port thanks to the trade in cotton and textiles, and in 1292, under the Yuan dynasty, it was given the administrative rank of city. Even so, it remained a secondary place, in the shadow of the great, wealthy and cultured cities of the delta, such as Suzhou and Hangzhou, which were the real centres of the region. In the 16th century, under the Ming dynasty, Shanghai surrounded itself with a circular wall to defend against the Japanese pirates (the wako) who were ravaging the coast; the layout of the Old City dates from that period, and its outline still follows the line of the old walls.
That is how Shanghai reached the early 19th century: a medium-sized walled city, prosperous from the cotton trade and from its position at the mouth of the Yangtze, China's great river highway, but with nothing to hint at the extraordinary destiny that awaited it. That destiny would not come from China, but from the cannons of the Western powers.
The decisive turn in Shanghai's history came through colonial violence. By the early 19th century, Britain had built up a lucrative and devastating trade: it shipped huge quantities of opium grown in India into China to balance its trade deficit and pay for its purchases of tea and silk. When the Chinese imperial government tried to stop a traffic that was destroying its population, the First Opium War (1839-1842) broke out, ending in a humiliating Chinese defeat at the hands of Britain's military superiority.
The Treaty of Nanking of 1842, the first of the so-called 'unequal treaties', forced China to open five ports to foreign trade, cede Hong Kong to Britain and pay an enormous indemnity. Shanghai was one of those five ports. From 1843, British merchants, soon followed by French and American ones, settled in the city and won the right to run their own districts, the concessions, governed by foreign laws and outside Chinese authority. The seed of modern Shanghai had been planted.
Shanghai's position, at the mouth of the Yangtze and with access to the vast market of China's interior, quickly made it the country's great port. Within a few decades, the walled village was surrounded and overtaken by a new, Western city, built by foreigners on the banks of the Huangpu. On the mud of the riverbank rose the first buildings of what would become the Bund, the monumental waterfront of a colonial Shanghai that kept growing unchecked.
In the first decades of the 20th century, Shanghai lived through a dazzling and contradictory era that made it one of the most fascinating cities in the world. The city was split into three parts under separate administrations: the International Settlement (a merger of the British and American concessions), the French Concession and the Chinese city proper. Each zone had its own laws, police, courts and architecture, which created a unique urban patchwork and a peculiar legal limbo.
This cosmopolitan Shanghai was nicknamed the 'Paris of the East' for its glamour, its art deco architecture, its department stores, its cabarets and its nightlife, but also the 'Whore of Asia' for its dark side: it was a city of huge inequality, of opium, prostitution, gambling dens and powerful gangs such as the feared Green Gang, which controlled much of the underworld and of local politics. Foreign and Chinese millionaires lived side by side with refugees from half the world —including thousands of White Russians who had fled the revolution and, later, Jews escaping Nazism, for whom Shanghai was one of the few refuges that required no visa—, factory workers toiling in harsh conditions and a bustling Chinese middle class.
It was also a political hotbed. In 1921, in a house in the French Concession, a small group of intellectuals secretly founded the Chinese Communist Party; among those present was a young Mao Zedong. The city was China's great industrial and working-class centre, and therefore a focus of unrest. In 1927, during the war between Nationalists and Communists, the Kuomintang leader Chiang Kai-shek, allied with the Green Gang, unleashed a bloody purge of communists and trade unionists in Shanghai. The city glittered and seethed at the same time, in a balance that history was about to break.
Shanghai's splendour was snuffed out by war. In 1937, after the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War, the city was the scene of one of the fiercest battles of the conflict: the Battle of Shanghai, which lasted three months and left tens of thousands dead before Japanese troops took the Chinese city. For a while, the foreign concessions held out as a neutral 'solitary island' in the middle of occupied territory, but after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Japan also occupied the international settlements and the cosmopolitan dream came to an abrupt end.
Under Japanese occupation, Allied foreigners were interned in camps and the Jewish refugee community was confined to the Hongkou ghetto. The old Western powers, weakened by the world war, gave up their concessions in 1943, along with the extraterritorial privileges they had imposed a century earlier: the era of the concessions, which had made Shanghai what it was, formally came to an end.
When the world war ended in 1945, Shanghai briefly returned to the Chinese Nationalist government, but the country was sinking into civil war between the Kuomintang and the Communists. Hyperinflation and corruption wrecked the city's economy. In May 1949, Communist troops entered Shanghai. Many businesspeople, bankers and foreigners fled, a large share of them to Hong Kong, taking their capital and know-how with them. The frivolous, cosmopolitan Shanghai of cabarets and concessions vanished for good.
Under the People's Republic, Shanghai changed its face completely. The new Communist regime shut down the cabarets, gambling dens and brothels, nationalised businesses and turned the frivolous city into a great industrial, working-class centre serving the state. Shanghai, which had been the symbol of foreign penetration and capitalism in China, became a productive, grey city, yet it still supplied a huge share of the country's tax revenue. During the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) it was a stronghold of the radical Maoist left: this is where the so-called 'Gang of Four' came from, the leadership group that steered that period of fanaticism and chaos.
The great revival came with the economic reforms. Although Deng Xiaoping opened China to the world from the late 1970s, Shanghai was slow to take off; the decisive push was the decision, in 1990, to develop Pudong, the area of rice paddies and warehouses east of the Huangpu River, as a new special economic zone. In barely three decades, that marshy land became the most spectacular financial district in Asia: up went the Oriental Pearl Tower, Jin Mao, the World Financial Center and, finally, the Shanghai Tower, the tallest in China. The city regained its role as the country's great economic and cosmopolitan capital.
Today Shanghai is a megacity of more than 24 million people, the world's largest container port, the most important stock exchange in mainland China and a global centre of finance, trade and culture. The three layers of its history live side by side: the walled Old City of the fishermen, the colonial Shanghai of the Bund and the concessions, and the futuristic Shanghai of Pudong. Few cities tell their past, their present and their ambitions for the future just by crossing a river, and that is perhaps Shanghai's greatest fascination.
