Shanghai travel guide

Top 10 sights in Shanghai

Ranked by Wikipedia language editions — proven fame.

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   Shanghai World Financial Center

   A 492-metre tower of 2008 in Lujiazui whose trapezoid opening at the top — a wind aperture, originally designed as a circle until the resemblance to the Japanese flag was objected to — gives it the nickname the bottle opener. The 100th-floor Sky Walk has a glass floor.

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   2© https://www.pxfuel.com/en/free-photo-ovozr · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Shanghai Tower

   At 632 metres and 128 storeys, the tallest building in China and the third tallest in the world, finished in 2015. Its twisted double skin creates an atrium spiralling up the outside, and the lift to the 118th-floor deck runs at eighteen metres a second.

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   3

   Jin Mao Tower

   Jin Mao Tower renders the proportions of a Chinese pagoda in modern form across eighty-eight storeys, and is famous for the spiral atrium of its Hyatt hotel. Of Lujiazui's three towers, it wears the most classical face.

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   4© Dottie Day · CC BY 2.0

   Oriental Pearl Tower

   A television tower of 1994 in Lujiazui, of eleven spheres threaded on three columns, and the tallest structure in China until 2007. Its lower level holds the Shanghai History Museum, which is better than most visitors expect.

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   5© Hanjiang 2009 (寒江2009) · CC BY 2.0

   Shanghai Museum

   A municipal museum of ancient Chinese art on People's Square, in a 1996 building shaped like a bronze ding vessel, with world-class bronze, ceramic and calligraphy galleries. It is free, and the much larger East Building opened in Pudong in 2023.

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   6© Melvin Loi · CC BY-SA 2.0

   Nanjing Road

   The main shopping street of Shanghai, running 5.5 kilometres from the Bund to Jing'an, of which the eastern stretch is pedestrianised. It was named after the 1842 treaty that opened the city, and a sightseeing train shuttles along it under the neon.

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   7© Chainwit. · CC BY 4.0

   Yu Garden

   Yu Garden is the essence of the Ming-era gardens of the lower Yangtze, with its dragon walls and Taihu rockeries as the highlights. It comes as a set with the dumpling houses of the surrounding bazaar — Nanxiang's soup dumplings — and the City God Temple.

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8. 

   8

   Shanghai Ghetto

   A district of about 2.5 square kilometres in Hongkou where Japanese-occupied Shanghai confined some twenty thousand stateless Jewish refugees from 1943. The city had admitted them without visas when almost nowhere else would; the Ohel Moishe Synagogue there is now a museum.

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   9© Baycrest · CC BY-SA 2.5

   People's Square

   The civic centre of Shanghai in Huangpu, laid out on the site of the colonial-era racecourse, with the museum, the Grand Theatre and the urban planning centre around it. Every metro line of consequence meets underneath.

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    10© Hermann Luyken · CC BY-SA 4.0

    Jade Buddha Temple

    A temple founded in 1882 to house two jade Buddhas brought from Burma — a seated figure nearly two metres high and a reclining one. The whole main hall was moved thirty metres in 2017 on rails to make room, without interrupting worship.

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Popular tickets & tours in Shanghai

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   1© King of Hearts · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Lujiazui

   The financial district on a bend of the Huangpu, farmland until 1990 and now the site of the three supertall towers. The best view of it is from the Bund across the water; the best view of the Bund is from inside one of them.

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   2© Chainwit. · CC BY 4.0

   Jing'an Temple

   Jing'an Temple, an old monastery with golden roofs standing in the middle of a luxury shopping street, is Shanghai's contrasts made visible. Once the evening lighting comes on, it turns into a photo spot.

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   3© azureisle · CC BY 2.0

   Xintiandi

   District of Shanghai rebuilt in 2001 from shikumen lane houses of the 1860s. The house where the Communist Party was founded in 1921 stands one block away.

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   4© Chainwit. · CC BY 4.0

   City God Temple of Shanghai

   A Taoist temple to the city gods in the old walled town, founded in 1403, whose surrounding bazaar became the Yuyuan shopping quarter. Incense smoke and shopping crowds fill the same lanes, which is the character of the old city.

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   5© MNXANL · CC BY-SA 4.0

   50 Moganshan Road

   A contemporary art district in converted mills and warehouses on the Suzhou Creek, known as M50, with over a hundred galleries and studios open to the public. It grew from the late 1990s as artists took cheap space in a closed textile complex.

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   6© ScareCriterion12 · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Site of the First Congress of the Chinese Communist Party

   The house in Xintiandi where thirteen delegates held the founding congress of the Chinese Communist Party in July 1921, now a museum. The room is reconstructed with the delegates' places set out; the surrounding lanes were redeveloped as a luxury retail quarter.

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   7© Sitomon · CC BY-SA 2.0

   Old City of Shanghai

   The traditional walled core of Shanghai, whose circular boundary is still traceable in the ring of streets that replaced the wall when it was pulled down in 1912. The county magistracy stood here, and the lanes inside remain on the old street pattern.

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   8© Ctny · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Shanghai Zoo

   One of the city's two main zoos, in Changning near Hongqiao, on the site of a colonial golf course and still often called Xijiao Park. It holds giant pandas and South China tigers on seventy-four hectares of lawns and old trees.

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   9© 钉钉 · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Saint Ignatius Cathedral

   The Catholic cathedral of Shanghai at Xujiahui, built between 1906 and 1910 in French Gothic with twin brick spires of about fifty-six metres. The Jesuit compound around it included an observatory, a library and an orphanage workshop that trained Chinese painters in Western technique.

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    10© DavidXiaoDaShan · CC BY-SA 3.0

    China Art Museum

    The municipal art museum of Shanghai, which moved in 2012 into the China Pavilion of the 2010 World Expo — an inverted red timber-frame crown. It shows Chinese art since 1900 and is free.

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