About - Access Shanghai

The Pudong skyline across the Huangpu river in daylight — the Oriental Pearl tower and the cluster of supertall towers behind it, with the water in the foreground — Photograph by King of Hearts, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

What this site is

Access Shanghai is a guide to the practical half of visiting Shanghai: what to set up before you fly, what has to be reserved, what is genuinely free, and when the trains stop.

The argument it makes

Everything works, once your phone does. Shanghai has the largest metro network on earth, national-standard museums that charge nothing, and a waterfront that never closes. Eleven of the sixteen sight pages here cost nothing to enter. But the city runs on two payment apps and a set of Chinese-only services, and a visitor who has not set those up in advance is locked out of a place that is otherwise almost frictionless.

The gap between a good trip here and a miserable one is not money and it is not language. It is preparation, done before you land.

A lane-house alley with motorbikes parked along it in warm afternoon light — Photograph by Basheer Tome, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0

How it is written

Pages are drafted with the help of AI and are checked and edited by a person before they are published. Facts that change are checked against official sources, and every page carries the date it was last checked.

⚠️ Where a number would date quickly, the page describes the mechanism and sends you to the operator. That matters more here than on most destinations: China’s entry rules have changed repeatedly in the last two years, and a guide with a confidently wrong visa rule in it is worse than a guide with none. Nothing on this site states a visa duration as fact.

An ancient bronze ritual vessel on display in the museum — Photograph by viatorimperi, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0

Photographs

Every photograph here is a freely licensed image from Wikimedia Commons, credited to its photographer with its licence on the page it appears on. None are generated. Where a picture could not be verified as showing the place it claims to show, in the present day, it was not used — which on this build meant rejecting night shots, two nineteenth-century archive scans, photographs of identifiable private individuals, and a good many pictures of the right subject in the wrong city.

Money

Some pages carry affiliate links, marked as such, and we may earn a commission if you book through one. It costs you nothing extra and does not influence what appears here or in what order. Pages that rank or compare things carry no affiliate links at all.

Corrections

If something here is wrong or has changed, we want to know — particularly an entry rule, a booking requirement or a last train.

The former Italian consulate building behind its garden wall — Photograph by Livelikerw, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0

Last checked 6 September 2026.