The river that made everything
Stand on the Bund at dusk and you'll see the most instructive view in Asia. On your side of the Huangpu River: the old waterfront of the International Settlement, a solid wall of neoclassical and Art Deco buildings running for nearly two kilometers — the Customs House, the HSBC Building, the Fairmont Peace Hotel. On the other side: Pudong, a skyline of towers so vertical and glittering it looks like the future as imagined in 1990s science fiction. Between them: 400 meters of brown river and a hundred years of history.
A century ago, the Pudong bank was mostly farmland and warehouses. When Deng Xiaoping designated it a Special Economic Zone in 1990, there was almost nothing there. Within thirty years it became one of the densest concentrations of skyscrapers on earth. What you're looking at across the water is not a gradual accumulation — it's a deliberate act of will, the most dramatic urban transformation of the twentieth century, compressed into a single generation's memory.
The Bund itself carries a different kind of compression. Those neoclassical facades were built between roughly 1880 and 1940 by the colonial trading houses — British, American, French, Japanese — that turned Shanghai into the commercial capital of Asia. HSBC had its largest branch here outside London. The Sassoon family, Baghdadi Jewish merchants who became fabulously wealthy on opium and real estate, built what is now the Fairmont Peace Hotel, still the grandest address on the waterfront. The buildings were designed to project permanence and financial authority. They succeeded. The regime that replaced them found them useful enough to keep.
The city foreigners built
Shanghai is unique among Chinese cities in one important way: its modern character was largely invented by outsiders. After the First Opium War, the 1842 Treaty of Nanjing forced China to open five ports to foreign trade. Shanghai was one of them. What the foreign powers established here — first the British and Americans in a joint International Settlement, then the French in their own Concession to the south — were essentially self-governing enclaves, subject to foreign law and immune to Chinese jurisdiction.
This arrangement, which the Chinese rightly regard as one of the deepest humiliations of the imperial decline, accidentally produced something remarkable. The French Concession — the neighborhood west of the old city center, around Huaihai Road and Fuxing Road — became a dense, cosmopolitan, tree-lined urban environment unlike anything else in China. The French planted London plane trees along every street, and they're still there, forming a canopy that turns the whole neighborhood gold in autumn. The architecture is Art Deco and Shanghainese shikumen — the peculiar stone-gate lane houses that evolved specifically here, combining Chinese courtyard housing with European terraced rowhouses. Nowhere else in China looks like this.
The International Settlement gave Shanghai something else: a tradition of absorbing outsiders. In the 1930s, when Europe was collapsing under fascism, Shanghai was one of the few places in the world that accepted Jewish refugees without requiring a visa. Twenty thousand Jews — from Germany, Austria, Poland — arrived between 1933 and 1941 and concentrated in Hongkew (now Hongkou), the area north of Suzhou Creek. There is a Jewish Refugees Museum there now, in a building that served as a synagogue. The community is gone, but the building remembers.
The old city underneath
The Yuyuan Garden and the surrounding Old Town are Shanghai's reminder that there was something here before the foreigners arrived. The garden was built in 1559 by a Ming dynasty official named Pan Yunduan as a retirement project for his aging father, which is one of the more elaborate ways anyone has ever said "I love you, Dad." It took nearly twenty years to complete and includes fifteen acres of rockeries, pavilions, ponds, and covered walkways designed according to classical Chinese landscape principles.
The surrounding commercial streets — Fuyou Road, Chenghuang Temple market — have been heavily restored for tourism, which makes them easy to dismiss. Don't. The spatial organization of the Old Town, the way the streets curve and the buildings crowd together around the zigzag bridge over Lotus Pond, gives you a legible sense of what Shanghai looked like before the foreign concessions imposed their grids and grand boulevards. This was a prosperous trading city long before the British arrived. The opium trade didn't create Shanghai — it just changed its scale and its ambitions.
What the revolution did to the city
When the Communist Party took Shanghai in 1949, they inherited a city that was simultaneously the most modern and the most decadent in China — a place associated with foreign exploitation, capitalist excess, and what Mao called "imperialist poison." The nightclubs closed. The foreign banks nationalized. The Art Deco apartment buildings on Huaihai Road that had housed wealthy merchants were subdivided into workers' housing. The city that had called itself "the Paris of the East" spent forty years trying to forget that it had ever thought of itself that way.
The Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) hit Shanghai particularly hard. The Gang of Four, whose radical faction led the most destructive phase of the revolution, was Shanghai-based. Jiang Qing — Mao's wife and the Gang's ideological enforcer — spent those years systematically destroying whatever remained of the city's cosmopolitan culture. The French Concession lane houses were divided and subdivided until families were living in spaces designed for storage. The plane trees stayed, because nobody had a good reason to cut them down.
What changed everything again was a single train journey. In 1992, Deng Xiaoping — already retired, eighty-seven years old, and formally out of power — traveled by train through the southern provinces and gave a series of speeches that became known as the Southern Tour. The message was unambiguous: economic reform would continue, and the opening of China to market forces was not reversible. The Pudong Special Economic Zone, designated two years earlier, now had the political cover to become what it is. The skyline you see across the river from the Bund was built in the decade after that train ride.
What the food tells you
Shanghai cuisine is sweeter and richer than what most Westerners associate with Chinese food. The cooking here relies heavily on soy sauce, Shaoxing wine, and sugar — a combination called "red braising" that produces the deep mahogany glaze on pork belly and fish that defines the local table. Hongshao rou, red-braised pork belly, is comfort food here the way carbonara is in Rome: not fancy, but what people actually want to eat.
The xiaolongbao — the soup dumplings that have become Shanghai's most exported food — deserve more attention than they usually get. The correct technique is to lift the dumpling gently from the bamboo steamer with chopsticks (not a spoon, no matter what anyone tells you), place it on the flat ceramic spoon, bite a small hole in the side, let the soup escape into the spoon, drink it, and then eat the rest. The sequence matters. Done wrong, the dumpling explodes. Done right, you understand why people fly to Shanghai specifically to eat these things.
Every autumn, hairy crabs arrive from the lakes west of Shanghai, and the city goes slightly mad. The crabs — small, muddy, intensely flavored — are steamed and served with Shaoxing wine and black vinegar. Eating them requires the patience of a jeweler: cracking and extracting the meat with tiny picks and scissors, working toward the roe, which is the point of the whole exercise. This is slow, deliberate eating in a city that is not otherwise known for patience.
The city underneath the city
Shanghai has one of the most extensive metro systems in the world — twenty lines, nearly 800 kilometers of track, built almost entirely since 2000. The stations are clean, the trains are frequent, and the signage is bilingual. For a city of this size, it is absurdly navigable. But navigating it efficiently is exactly the wrong way to use it.
The neighborhoods worth your time are the ones that reward walking: the French Concession laneways, where you push through a low stone gate into a world of washing lines and grandmothers on folding chairs and the smell of whatever is being cooked for lunch; the streets around M50, the art district in old factory buildings on Suzhou Creek; the backstreets of the old Hongkou district, where you can still find the narrow longtang lanes that have survived every decade of Shanghai's transformation. Shanghai has been rebuilt so many times that its surviving old fabric is genuinely rare. When you find it, slow down.
The city is also, increasingly, a museum of its own recent past. The former gangster mansions in the French Concession — built in the 1920s and 30s by the criminal enterprises that ran everything from gambling to protection rackets — have become boutique hotels and private clubs. The Cathay Cinema on Huaihai Road, built in 1932 and still operating, screens new Chinese films in a lobby of original Art Deco tilework. The Fairmont Peace Hotel runs jazz every night in its ground-floor bar, played by musicians who have been doing this since the 1980s. Shanghai does not throw things away. It repurposes them.
What to carry with you
Here is the thing to keep in mind when you arrive: Shanghai has been, for nearly two centuries, the place where China negotiates with the outside world. That negotiation has taken different forms — forced concession, strategic opening, experimental zone — but it has been continuous. The city that absorbed twenty thousand Jewish refugees in the 1930s is the same city that absorbed a trillion dollars of foreign investment in the 1990s. The instinct is the same: take what is useful, adapt it, build with it.
When you stand on the Bund and look at Pudong, what you're seeing is the most recent expression of something Shanghai has been doing since 1842. The city is not intimidated by the outside world. It has never been. It has always assumed that whatever is happening out there can be imported, modified, and made more Shanghai than wherever it came from. Once you see that, you see it everywhere — in the Art Deco facade of the old Canidrome (a former greyhound-racing track, now a conference center), in the xiaolongbao that has become a global icon while remaining something specific and local, in the skyline across the river that looks like the future and was built in less time than it takes to grow a forest.
Shanghai's ambition is not about size. It's about the confidence that the world can be absorbed and remade here. That belief is the city's oldest and most durable characteristic. The foreigners had it first. The city kept it.