Neighbourhoods

The river splits the city, and the halves are different ages

Puxi, west of the Huangpu, is everything historic — the Bund, the old walled city, the concessions, the lane houses. Pudong, east, is the towers, and it was farmland in 1990. Almost everything a visitor comes for is in Puxi.

Where to spend your time

⭐ The former French Concession is the best walking in the city — plane trees, villas, low lane houses, and the only central district that is genuinely pleasant in summer heat. Wukang Road and Anfu Road are the spine of it.

Jing'an is the modern commercial centre with a temple in the middle of it. Huangpu holds the Bund, Nanjing Road, People's Square and the old city around Yu Garden. Xuhui runs south from the Concession toward the riverside museums.

Hongkou, north of Suzhou Creek, is the least visited and holds the Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum — this was the district where some twenty thousand Jewish refugees from Nazi Europe lived out the war, and it is the most affecting historical site in the city.

The lane houses, which are the real subject

⭐ Whatever district you are in, look for the gated lanes off the main street. Lilong housing is what most of Shanghai lived in for a century and a great deal of it survives as ordinary homes. Walking through is accepted; photographing into windows is not.

Xintiandi is the restored version, Tianzifang the occupied one, and the blocks around Laoximen the unimproved one. Seeing all three in a day is the best architecture walk in Shanghai.

Pudong, briefly

Worth crossing for: the towers up close, the riverside promenade looking back at the Bund, the China Art Museum and Shanghai Museum East. ⚠️ It is built at motorway scale — distances that look walkable on a map are not.