Shanghai Museum

The best collection of Chinese art in the country outside Beijing, in a building on People’s Square shaped as a ding — a round-topped ancient bronze vessel on a square base — which is a joke about the collection inside it, since the bronzes are what the museum is most famous for.

Ritual bronzes from the second millennium BC, ceramics, painting, calligraphy, jade, furniture and seals, arranged by material rather than by dynasty.

What it costs

⭐ Free.

⚠️ But not walk-in. Entry requires an advance reservation and your passport, and slots for the popular days go. This is now normal for major Chinese museums and it is the commonest way visitors lose a morning here.

⭐ Set your phone up before you land. Alipay and WeChat both now take foreign cards, and between them they pay for the metro, taxis, tickets, museums and almost every shop and stall. Booking a museum slot, hailing a car or buying a train ticket without one of them is genuinely difficult. See Money & Your Phone.

When to go

Closed one day a week — check which before you build a day around it.

⭐ There is now a second, much larger building in Pudong, Shanghai Museum East, which opened in 2024. They are different museums with different collections on show and separate reservations; make sure you have booked the one you mean to visit.

Getting there

People’s Square station — lines 1, 2 and 8, and one of the busiest interchanges in the network. The museum is on the south side of the square.

If you only have an hour

Two hours, and spend most of it on bronzes and ceramics. The bronze gallery is the one that would be the headline collection in any other museum on earth; the ceramics run from neolithic pots to imperial porcelain in one continuous room.

If you have longer, the painting and calligraphy galleries are dimly lit for conservation and rotate frequently — worth a look but not worth planning around.

What people get wrong

Turning up without a reservation. It is free, which makes people assume it is open-door, and it is not.