Four days in Shanghai: the Bund on one side, the future on the other

Three nights in the centre: the waterfront and Nanjing Road on arrival, the old city and Xintiandi, a museum and the tallest building in China, and the plane trees of the French Concession before you go.

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Length
4 days, 3 nights
Where you stay
Shanghai
Places
11 across 4 days
OpenFreeMap © OpenMapTiles Data from OpenStreetMap

Stand on the Bund at dusk and Shanghai makes its argument in one view. Behind you, a curve of stone banks and trading houses built by foreigners who thought they were staying. In front of you, across eight hundred metres of brown river, a skyline that did not exist in 1990.

The city is enormous but the interesting part is not. Almost everything below sits within a few kilometres of People's Square, and the metro handles the rest in minutes for the price of a coffee.

Shanghai is also the easiest large Chinese city for a first visit. Signage is bilingual, the metro is obvious, and many nationalities can enter for up to ten days without a visa if they are transiting onwards. Set up Alipay or WeChat Pay before you arrive and the rest looks after itself.

Highlights

  • The Bund from the Huangpu Park end at dusk, when the banks light up and the towers opposite switch on
  • Yuyuan Garden, a Ming scholar's garden hidden behind the busiest snack streets in the city
  • The bronzes on the ground floor of the Shanghai Museum, which are the best in China outside Beijing
  • Crossing to Pudong on the two yuan commuter ferry rather than through the tunnel
  • Ballroom dancing and mahjong in Fuxing Park on a weekday morning

Where to stay

Shanghai, three nights

Stay in Huangpu or Jing'an. The Bund end of Huangpu puts you inside walking distance of the waterfront, the old city and the museums, which is most of where you will be going.

Pudong is the skyline you look at, not the place to sleep. Hotels there are excellent and the view from them is remarkable, but the streets outside are eight lanes wide and there is nothing to walk to. The French Concession is the other good option if you would rather have leafy streets and small restaurants than a river view.

Day by day

Day 1 in Shanghai

The waterfront, and the street behind it

The Bund is a mile of banks, hotels and shipping offices, most of them put up between 1900 and the late 1930s, when this was the financial centre of Asia and none of it was under Chinese control. Walk it from the north end southwards, on the raised promenade rather than the road.

Come back after dark if you can. The buildings are floodlit, the towers opposite run their light shows, and the promenade fills with families and wedding photographers. It is the one genuinely crowded sight in the city.

Nanjing Road runs inland from the middle of the Bund and is the obvious way to finish the day, though the good eating is one street off it in either direction.

  1. 15:30

    Huangpu Park

    Leisure

    The garden at the northern tip of the Bund, where Suzhou Creek meets the Huangpu. The small Bund Historical Museum inside is worth ten minutes, and the view south down the whole curve of the waterfront is the one to arrive at first.

  2. 16:40

    HSBC Building

    Architecture

    The grandest thing on the Bund, built for the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank in 1923 and now a Chinese bank. Walk into the lobby, which nobody stops you doing, and look up at the mosaic dome the bank plastered over during the Cultural Revolution and rediscovered intact in 1997.

  3. 18:00

    Nanjing Road

    Landmark

    China's best known shopping street, running west from the Bund to People's Square, and busy in a way that has to be seen once. The chain stores are unremarkable. The 1930s department store facades above them are not, so look up.

With more time: The Customs House stands a few doors from the HSBC building with a clocktower that Shanghai still calls Big Ching, and the tower opposite runs its light show from around seven.

Day 2 in Shanghai

The old Chinese city, then the alleys where the Party started

Before the foreigners arrived, Shanghai was a walled town of lanes and canals about a kilometre across, and the old city is what is left of it. It is heavily rebuilt and full of snack stalls, and it is still the most enjoyable morning in the city.

Go into Yuyuan Garden early. The garden is small, the bazaar around it is not, and by eleven the crowd around the zigzag bridge is shoulder to shoulder.

Walk west afterwards into Xintiandi, where the shikumen lanes have been rebuilt as an upmarket dining district around one small brick house that changed the country.

  1. 09:00

    Yuyuan Garden

    Nature

    A Ming dynasty scholar's garden of rockeries, ponds and dragon-topped walls, laid out in the 1550s and squeezed into two hectares in the middle of the old city. Buy the ticket online and go at opening.

  2. 11:00

    City God Temple

    Religious

    The Taoist temple the old city grew around, still working, and surrounded by the busiest snack streets in Shanghai. Come out of the garden into it and eat your way along rather than sitting down.

  3. 12:30

    Soup dumplings in the bazaar

    Eat

    The queues by the temple are for xiaolongbao, the soup dumplings Shanghai is known for. Pick the queue of local families rather than the one with the English menu, and let them cool before you bite.

  4. 14:30

    Site of the First National Congress of the CPC

    Culture

    A grey brick terrace house in Xintiandi where thirteen delegates founded the Communist Party in July 1921, now a museum with the meeting room laid out as it was. Free, small, and strange to visit inside a luxury shopping district.

With more time: Tianzifang, ten minutes south, is a denser and scruffier version of the same shikumen conversion, with more workshops and fewer flagship stores.

Day 3 in Shanghai

Bronzes in the morning, then 552 metres up

Start on the museum side of the river and end on the tower side, using the commuter ferry rather than the metro to get across. It takes fifteen minutes and costs two yuan, and it is the cheapest way to see both skylines at water level.

Book the Shanghai Tower deck for late afternoon and time it so you go up in daylight and come down in the dark. Clear days are not guaranteed, so if the forecast gives you one good afternoon, spend it here.

The tower's lift accelerates to eighteen metres a second, which is enough to make your ears pop before you have finished reading the sign about it.

  1. 09:30

    Shanghai Museum

    Culture

    Free, and one of the great museums of China. Skip most of it and give the ground floor bronzes a proper hour, then the ceramics upstairs. The building is shaped like a ding, the three-legged ritual vessel the collection is built around.

  2. 15:00

    Huangpu River ferry

    Visit

    The commuter ferry from the Bund to Pudong, two yuan, fifteen minutes, and still used by people going to work. Board at the Jinling East Road wharf and stand outside.

  3. 17:00

    Shanghai Tower

    Architecture

    China's tallest building, twisting through 120 degrees over 632 metres, with the observation deck on the 118th floor. Book a timed slot online. On a clear evening you can see the river bend twice and the airport beyond it.

With more time: If the sky is grey, the Shanghai Urban Planning Exhibition Center by People's Square has a room-sized model of the whole city and makes better sense of what you would have been looking at.

Day 4 in Shanghai

Plane trees, ballroom dancing and a wedge-shaped block of flats

The former French Concession is the part of Shanghai people fall for. Low villas, London plane trees planted a century ago, cafes in old garden houses, and lanes that go quiet fifty metres off the main road.

Get to Fuxing Park early. Between seven and nine the paths belong to ballroom dancers, mahjong players and men walking songbirds in cages, and by mid morning they have all gone home.

Wukang Road is a twenty minute walk or one metro stop west, and it ends at the building everyone photographs. Both airports are reachable from here in under an hour, so this fits comfortably before an afternoon flight.

  1. 07:30

    Fuxing Park

    Leisure

    Laid out by the French in 1909 and still arranged like a Paris park, with formal beds and gravel walks. Come between seven and nine for the dancing, the card games and the tai chi, which is the reason to be here rather than the flowerbeds.

  2. 10:00

    Wukang Mansion

    Other

    A wedge of French Renaissance flats from 1924, built where two roads meet at a sharp angle, and the most photographed corner in Shanghai. The walk to it along Wukang Road, past low villas and coffee shops, is the actual attraction.

With more time: With a spare hour, the Jade Buddha Temple keeps two Burmese jade Buddhas brought upriver in the 1880s, and it is a working monastery rather than a museum.

Before you go

Getting around

The metro reaches every sight below and costs a few yuan a ride. Foreign Visa and Mastercard now work at the gates through Alipay or Apple Pay, so you do not need a separate transport card.

Taxis are cheap by any international standard but drivers do not read Latin script. Show the destination in Chinese characters, or book through DiDi inside Alipay.

Central Shanghai is unusually walkable for a Chinese city. The Bund to the old city is twenty minutes on foot, and the French Concession is best seen at walking pace under its plane trees.

When to come

Spring and autumn are the two good windows. April to May and late September to November give warm days without the summer humidity, which from July to August is punishing and comes with typhoon season.

Winter is cold and damp rather than freezing, and Shanghai buildings are often unheated, so it feels colder indoors than the thermometer suggests.

Avoid the first week of October and Chinese New Year unless you enjoy queues. Domestic tourism at those times fills every sight in the city.

Money and connectivity

Alipay and WeChat Pay run everything, and both take foreign cards once you register a passport. Do it at home, not in the arrivals hall.

Google, WhatsApp and Instagram are all blocked. Sort out international roaming or a VPN before you land, and download offline maps.

Cash is still legal tender and museums and taxis will take it, but small stalls may not have change. Keep a couple of hundred yuan as a backup rather than a plan.

Shanghai has been rebuilt twice in a century, once by foreigners who were thrown out and once by a government that put a financial district on farmland in ten years. Neither project finished the job, which is why the city still reads as several places at once.

That is what makes it a good first stop in China. Nothing here needs translating, and everything here is an argument about what the country is going to be.

Or make it a longer trip

These trips pass through here on the way somewhere else.

Make it your trip

Every stop, day and place here lands in your account as an editable trip. Move the days around, swap a city, add your own bookings and costs, and share it with whoever is coming.

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Common questions

Is four days enough for Shanghai?
For the city itself, comfortably. Four days covers the Bund, the old city, the museum, Pudong and the French Concession without rushing. What it does not leave room for is a water town like Zhujiajiao, a day in Suzhou or Hangzhou, or the art galleries out at West Bund. Add a night for each of those you want.
Shanghai or Beijing?
They are not substitutes. Beijing is imperial, monumental and historic, and it has the Forbidden City and the Great Wall. Shanghai is commercial, twentieth century and much easier to travel in, with better food and better bars. If you only have one, take Beijing for the history and Shanghai for the city. If you have ten days, take both and the train between them.
Do I need a visa?
Many nationalities can enter visa free for up to ten days when transiting to a third country, which for Shanghai allows travel through Shanghai, Jiangsu and Zhejiang but no further. Several countries also have ordinary visa free tourist entry now. The rules change often, so check yours against the current list rather than an old blog post.
How much is a day trip to Suzhou or Hangzhou?
Both are under an hour from Shanghai Hongqiao on a high speed train and cost about the same as a taxi across the city. Suzhou is gardens and canals, Hangzhou is a lake and tea hills. Neither is worth doing as a rushed day if you can spare two nights instead.
Can I change this plan?
Yes. Copy it into the planner, move the tower to a different evening if the weather turns, or swap the last morning for a water town.