街区 · JIĒQŪ
The river splits Shanghai by age. Plane trees and lane houses in the Concession, the towers in Pudong, and the district nobody visits.
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.
⭐ 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.
⭐ 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.
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.
Xintiandi and Tianzifang are both built from the same unit of housing — the shikumen (石库门) lane house — but neither is lived in the way the surrounding blocks still are. Xintiandi kept the facades and rebuilt what was behind them; Tianzifang kept its lanes and filled them with shops. The version people actually still … Read more
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