The Former French Concession

Not a sight but a district — several square kilometres of low villas, lane houses and shopfronts under an unbroken canopy of plane trees, laid out when this was French-administered territory between 1849 and 1943.

⭐ The trees are the reason to come. They were planted by the French municipal council, they now form a tunnel over roads like Wukang Road and Hengshan Road, and they make this the only part of central Shanghai that is genuinely pleasant to walk in August.

What it costs

⭐ Free — it is a set of public streets. A handful of the villas are museums with small admissions; the rest are apartments, offices, consulates and restaurants.

When to go

Any daylight hour. The plane trees are at their best in late spring and in the last half of October.

⚠️ It is residential. The lanes off the main roads are people’s homes and gardens, and the quieter you are in them the longer they stay open to visitors.

Getting there

Shanghai Library or Hengshan Road on line 1, or Changshu Road on lines 1 and 7. There is no single entrance — pick a station and walk outwards.

If you only have an hour

⭐ Walk Wukang Road end to end. It is about a kilometre, it is the densest concentration of concession-era architecture in the city, and the Wukang Mansion at the north end — a 1924 apartment block on a sharp corner, shaped like the prow of a ship — is the single most recognisable building in the district.

Then east along Anfu Road or Ferguson Lane for the cafés, or south to Hengshan Road.

What people get wrong

Trying to see it as a list of addresses. The district is the experience; the individual houses mostly are not open.