BUND AND THE HUANGPU RIVER
A combination of Liverpool and 1920s Manhattan , the most impressive street in Shanghai has always been the Bund , but better known among locals as Wai Tan (literally "outside beach"). During Shanghai 's riotous heyday it was not only the city's financial centre but also a hectic working harbor.
Named after an old Anglo-Indian term, bunding (the embanking of a muddy foreshore), the Bund was in every sense old Shanghai's commercial heart, with the river on one side, the offices of the leading banks and trading houses on the other. In recent years, the Bund has taken on an entirely new aspect, with the construction, just across the river, of the dramatically conspicuous Oriental Pearl TV Tower, so high its antenna is often shrouded in mist.
The northern end of the Bund starts from the confluence of the Huangpu and the Suzhou Creek. Bund itself is a popular place for locals to stroll after dinner or to exercise in the early morning, while tourists from all over China patrol the waterfront taking photos of each other against the backdrop of the Oriental Pearl TV Tower.
Right on the corner of the two waterways, Huangpu Park was another British creation, the British Public Gardens , established on a patch of land formed by chance when mud and silt gathered around a wrecked ship. These days the park (daily 5am-9pm ; free) contains a stone monument to the "Heroes of the People", and is also a popular spot for citizens practicing tai ji early in the morning; but it's best simply for the promenade which commands the junction of the two rivers. Underneath the monument lurks a small museum ( 9am-4pm ; free) with an informative presentation on Shanghai 's history that is worth a few minutes of your time.
Walking down the Bund you'll pass a succession of grandiose Neoclassical edifices, once built to house the great foreign enterprises. Just south of here, straddling the eastern end of Nanjing Lu, is one of the most famous hotels in China , the Peace Hotel , formerly as the Cathay Hotel. The main building (on the north side of Nanjing Lu) is a relic of another great trading house, Sassoon's, and was originally known as Sassoon House. The Peace today still caters to the rich, but it's well worth a visit for the bar with its legendary jazz band, and for a walk around the lobby and upper floors to take in the faded Art-Deco elegance. The smaller wing on the south side of Nanjing Lu was originally the Palace Hotel, built around 1906; its first floor now holds the Western-style Peace Café, a much used city-centre rendezvous.
Next door to the Peace, at 19 Zhongshan Lu (the Bund), the Bank of China was designed in the 1920s by Shanghai architectural firm Palmer & Turner, who brought in a Chinese architect to make the building "more Chinese" after construction was complete. The architect placed a Chinese roof onto the Art-Deco edifice, creating an odd juxtaposition of styles that delights to this day.
Carrying on down the Bund, the Customs House is one of the few buildings to have retained its original function. And its distinctive clock tower, which was modeled after Big Ben, was adapted to chime. You can step into the downstairs lobby for a peek at some faded mosaics of maritime motifs on the ceiling.
Right next to this, and also with an easily recognizable domed roofline, the former headquarters of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank (built in 1921) is one of the most imposing of all the Bund facades. Each wall of the marble octagonal entrance originally boasted a mural depicting the Bank's eight primary locations: Bangkok , Calcutta , Hong Kong , London , New York , Paris , Shanghai and Tokyo .
NANJING LU AND AROUND
Stretching west from the Bund through the heart of Shanghai lie the main commercial streets of the city, among them one of the two premier shopping streets, Nanjing Lu , with its two major parallel arteries, Fuzhou Lu and Yan'an Lu. In the days of the foreign concessions, expatriates described Nanjing Lu as a cross between Broadway and Oxford Street . Even after 1949, Nanjing Lu remained a centre for theatre and cinema as well as one of the most crowded shopping streets in the world.
NORTH OF SUZHOU CREEK
North across the Waibaidu Bridge from the Bund, you enter an area that, before the War, was the Japanese quarter of the International Settlement, and which since 1949 has been largely taken over by housing developments. The obvious interest lies in the Hongkou Park area (also known as Lu Xun Park), with its monuments to the political novelist Lu Xun, although the whole district is a lively and architecturally interesting residential quarter.
Lu Xun Park (daily 6am-7pm ; ￥1) is one of the best places for observing Shanghainese at their most leisured and relaxed. Between 6 and 8am in the morning, the masses undergo their daily work-out session of tai ji and other sports. Later in the day, amorous couples frolic on the paddle boats in the figure 8-shaped lagoon in the middle of the park and old men teach their grandkids how to fly kites. The park is also home to the grandiose and rather pompous Tomb of Lu Xun , complete with a seated statue and an inscription in Mao's calligraphy, which was erected here in 1956 to commemorate the fact that Lu Xun had spent the last ten years of his life in this part of Shanghai . The tomb even went against Lu Xun's own wishes to be buried simply in a small grave in a western Shanghai cemetery. The novelist is further memorialized in the Lu Xun Memorial Hall (daily 9-11am & 1.30-4pm ; ￥5), also in the park, to the right of the main entrance. Here, newly expanded exhibits include original correspondence, among them letters and photographs from George Bernard Shaw.
A block southeast of the park on Shanyin Lu (Lane 132, House 9), you can also visit Lu Xun's Former Residence (daily 9am-4pm ; ￥4). It's definitely worthwhile going out of your way to see this place, especially if you have already visited the former residences of Zhou Enlai and Sun Yatsen in the French Quarter. Lu Xun's sparsely furnished house offers a fascinating glimpse into typical Japanese housing of the period - on the outside, its staid brick facade, tightly packed in among similarly designed houses, bly resembles the Back Bay District of Boston. Japanese housing of the time was a good deal smaller than European, but still surprisingly comfortable with balconies overlooked by palm trees. Lu Xun lived in this house with his wife and son from 1933 until his death in 1936.
OLD CITY
The Old City never formed part of the International Settlement, today it covers an oval-shaped area of about four square kilometres, circumscribed by Renmin Lu (to the north) and Zhonghua Lu (to the south) and coming to within a couple of hundred metres of the southern Bund on its northeastern side. In modern times it has been slashed down the middle by the main north-south artery, Henan Lu. The easiest approach from Nanjing Dong Lu is to walk due south along Henan Lu or Sichuan Lu.
Tree-lined ring roads had already replaced the original walls and moats as early as 1912, and sanitation has obviously improved vastly since the last century, but to cross the boundaries into the Old City is still to enter a different world. The twisting alleyways are a haven of free enterprise, bursting with makeshift markets selling fish, vegetables, cheap trinkets, clothing and the appetizing smells of cooking food. Two of Shanghai 's best antique markets are also located in or near the Old City . Ironically, for a tourist entering this area, the feeling is indeed a little like entering a Chinatown in a Western city.
The centre of activity today is an area known locally as Chenghuang Miao (after a local temple) surrounding the two most famous and crowded tourist sights in the whole city, the Yu Yuan and the Huxinting Tea House, both located right in the middle of a new, touristy bazaar which caters to the rapidly swelling numbers of Chinese tourists who pour into the area. "Antiques", scrolls and various kitschy souvenirs feature prominently, and there are also lots of good places to eat dian xin, Shanghai dim sum, some more reasonable than others. The Yu Yuan ( Jade Garden ; daily 8.30am-5pm ; ￥15) is a classical Chinese garden featuring pools, walkways, bridges and rockeries, created in the sixteenth century by a high official in the imperial court in honour of his father. During Lantern Festival, on the fifteenth day of the traditional New Year, 10,000 lanterns (and an even larger number of spectators) brighten up the garden. The Yu Yuan is not more impressive than the gardens of nearby Suzhou , but given that it pre-dates the relics of the International Settlement by some three centuries, the Shanghainese are understandably proud of it.
After visiting the garden, you can step into the delightful Huxinting (Heart of Lake Pavilion; downstairs daily 5.30-noon & 1.30-5pm; upstairs daily 8.30am-5pm & 8.30-10pm), where practically every visitor who has ever been to Shanghai, including the Queen of England, has dropped in for tea. The tea house is reached across a zigzag bridge spanning a small ornamental lake, just across from the entrance to Yu Yuan. In the downstairs section, you buy a ticket for ￥10 and can then enjoy endless refills while watching the elderly locals, who sit for hours amid the wood panelling, playing cards, chatting, or dozing to the traditional music of a venerable Chinese orchestra that occasionally plays here. Upstairs, during the daytime the cost is ￥25, but you get air conditioning and quails' eggs with your tea, while in the evening (￥65), the waitresses perform traditional tea ceremonies wearing qipao, the long tight silk dresses with high slits up the sides. Whenever you come, though, the tea is excellent and the china used is the dark and distinctive Yixing ware.
If you're in Chenghuang Miao early on Sunday morning ( 8-11am is the best time though trade continues to mid-afternoon), you can visit a great Sunday market on Fuyu Lu, the small street running east to west along the northern edge of Yu Yuan. The market has a very raw, entrepreneurial feel about it; all sorts of curios and antiques - some real, some not - ranging from jade trinkets to Little Red Books can be found here, though you'll have to bargain fiercely if you want to buy. Just outside the Old City in a small alley called Dongtai Lu leading west off Xizang Nan Lu, is the largest permanent antique market in Shanghai (daily 10am-4pm ), and possibly in all China . Even if you're not interested in buying, this is a fascinating area to walk around. The range is vast, covering every era of Chinese history, from old Buddhas, coins, vases and teapots, to mah-jongg sets, renovated furniture and Cultural Revolution badges. Some of the antiques are clearly fakes, but many of the traders are serious, respectable people with reputations to defend.
WESTERN SHANGHAI
In the west of the city, sights thin out considerably, and you'll certainly need some form of motorized transport. The main sights include two temples , the rambling old Longhua Si to the southwest, and Yufo Si, with its superb statuary, to the northwest. Due west from the city, there is less to see; if you follow Nanjing Lu beyond Jing'an Si, it merges into Yan'an Lu, which (beyond the city ring road) eventually turns into Hongqiao Lu, the road that leads to the airport. Shortly before the airport it passes Shanghai Zoo (daily 6.30am-4.30pm; ￥20), a massive affair with more than two thousand animals and birds caged in conditions which, while not entirely wholesome, are considerably better than in most Chinese zoos. The star attraction, inevitably, is a giant panda. The zoo grounds used to serve as one of pre-1949 Shanghai 's most exclusive golf courses.
Next door, at 2409 Hongqiao Lu, stands the mansion that once served as the Sassoons' home , and which originally boasted a fireplace large enough to roast an ox. The central room, since renovated, resembled a medieval castle's Great Hall. Victor Sassoon, who used this mansion as a weekend house (his other house was on the top floor of the Peace Hotel), only allowed for the design of two small bedrooms because he wanted to avoid potential overnight guests. It has served since as a Japanese naval HQ, a casino and as the private villa of the Gang of Four, but now suffers the relative ignominy of being rented out as office space. Bus 57 from the western end of Nanjing Lu will bring you out here. The side gate is sometimes open if you wish to take a peek.
THE SOUTHWEST
The southwestern limits of the city offer a few points of interest. First is the Xujiahui Catholic Cathedral , one of many places of public worship which have received a new lease of life in recent years. Built in 1846 on the site of the grave of Paul Xu Guangqi, Matteo Ricci's personal assistant and first Jesuit convert, it was closed for more than ten years during the Cultural Revolution, reopening in 1979. Most of the cathedral library's 200,000 volumes, as well as the cathedral's meteorological centre (built at the same time as the cathedral and now housing the Shanghai Municipal Meteorology Department) still survive on the grounds. The congregations are remarkable for their size and enthusiasm, especially during the early Sunday morning services and at Christmas or Easter. If you're up in time, take a metro train to Xujiahui station, a short walk from the cathedral. The first service on weekdays starts at 6:30am , while on Sundays it begins at 8am .
About a kilometre to the southeast of Xujiahui is Longhua Park, now officially named the Longhua Cemetery of Martyrs (daily 6.30am-4pm; ￥1 for the cemetery, ￥5 for the exhibition hall) to commemorate those who died fighting for the cause of Chinese Communism in the decades leading up to the final victory of 1949. In particular, it remembers those workers, activists and students massacred in Shanghai by Chiang Kaishek in the 1920s - the site of the cemetery is said to have been the main execution ground. The area contains a glass-windowed, pyramid-shaped exhibition hall in the centre with a rather propagandic memorial to 250 Communist martyrs who fought Chiang's forces. Large numbers of commemorative stone sculptures, many bearing a photo and a name, dot the park, including one directly behind the exhibition hall with an eternal flame flickering in front. The fresh flowers brought daily testify to the power that the memories of these events still hold. The cemetery is a short walk south from the terminus of bus #41, which you can take here from Huaihai Lu near Shanxi Lu or from Nanjing Xi Lu near the Shanghai Centre.
Right next to the Martyrs' Cemetery is one of Shanghai 's main religious sites, the Longhua Si (daily 5.30am-4pm ; ￥5), with its associated seventeen-hundred-year-old pagoda, on which building work began in 242 AD by a lord from the state of Wu. The pagoda itself is an octagonal structure, about 40m high, its seven brick storeys embellished with wooden balconies and red lacquer pillars. In 977, a monk installed bronze wind chimes that could be heard on the Huangpu River into the nineteenth century. Until the feverish construction of bank buildings along the Bund in the 1910s, the pagoda stood as the tallest edifice in Shanghai . What you see today has been restored after a long period of neglect - Red Guards saw the pagoda as a convenient structure to plaster with banners. In recent years, an ambitious re-zoning project has spruced up the pagoda and created the tea gardens, greenery, and shop stalls that now huddle around it. The temple complex is slightly later in date than the pagoda (345 AD) and is now the most active Buddhist site in the city, with large numbers of new monks being trained. Although it has also seen reconstruction, it is regarded as a prime specimen of Southern Song architecture. On the right as you enter there's a bell tower, where you can strike the bell for ￥10 to bring you good luck. On Chinese New Year, a monk gongs the bell 108 times, supposedly to ease the 108 "mundane worries" of Buddhist thought.
An extra kilometre south (bus 56 down the main road, Longwu Lu, just to the west of the Longhua Si site) will bring you to the Botanical Gardens (daily 7am-4pm; ￥6), whose leafy trees and chirping birds can serve as a respiteful day's escape from the city hubbub. Among the more than nine thousand plants on view are two pomegranate trees said to have been planted in the eighteenth century during the reign of Emperor Qianlong, and still bearing fruit despite their antiquity. Take a look as well at the orchid chamber, with more than a hundred different varieties on show. In spring 1999 the gardens hosted the World Plant Expo.
THE NORTHWEST
Just south of the Suzhou Creek, northwestern Shanghai boasts the second of the city's most important religious sites, the Yufo Si (Temple of the Jade Buddha; daily 8.30am-4.30pm; ￥10), a monastery built in 1882 to enshrine two magnificent statues which had been brought from Burma. Each of these Buddhas is carved from a single piece of white jade: the larger statue, a reclining figure, is displayed downstairs, while the smaller, but far more exquisite, sitting statue is housed in a room upstairs as part of an extensive collection of Buddhist sutras and paintings. Although the temple was closed from 1949 until 1980, it is now large and active, despite its suffocating location surrounded by highrises. A hundred or so monks are in residence, dividing their time between training novices to repopulate monasteries reopening throughout China , and keeping an eye on tourists (photos are not allowed). The temple is on Anyuan Lu, just south of the intersection of Changzhou Lu and Jiangning Lu. Bus #112 from Renmin Square passes here, as does #24 from Huaihai Lu (along Shaanxi Lu); alternatively you can walk from the train station in about 25 minutes.
OUTSIDE THE CITY
Shanghai Shi ( Shanghai Municipality ) covers a huge area of approximately two thousand square kilometers, comprising ten counties and extending far beyond the limits of the city itself. To the north it includes three islands in the Yangzi River delta, the largest of which, Chongming Island , is nearly 100km long. To the northwest and southwest are the provinces of Jiangsu and Zhejiang respectively, while to the east the municipality abuts the East China Sea . Surprisingly, very little of this area is ever visited by foreign tourists, though there are a couple of interesting sights.
The most obvious of these is She Shan (She Hill), about 30km southwest of the city. The hill only rises about 100m, but such is the flatness of the surrounding land that it is visible for miles around - and it is unexpectedly crowned by a huge and thoroughly impressive basilica , a rare legacy of the missionary work undertaken by Europeans in the last century. The hill has been under the ownership of a Catholic community since the 1850s, though the present church was not built until 1925. Services take place only on Christian festivals; nevertheless, it is a pleasant walk up the hill at any time of year (or you can take the cable car if you prefer), past bamboo groves and the occasional ancient pagoda. Most of the peasants in this area are fervent Catholics and highly welcoming towards any Westerners they come across. Also on the hill is a meteorological station and an old observatory, which contains a small exhibition room displaying an ancient earthquake-detecting device - a dragon with steel balls in its mouth which is so firmly set in the ground that only movement of the earth itself, from the vibrations of distant earthquakes, can cause the balls to drop out. The more balls drop, the more serious is the earthquake.
To reach She Shan, take a bus from the Wenhua Guangchang bus stop, or the Xiqu bus station. If there are no direct buses, you can catch any bus to Songjiang and get off a few stops before the terminus - you'll have to ask. You then need to take a motor-rickshaw (￥15) the remaining distance to She Shan (daily 7.30am-4pm ; ￥5).
Another twenty or so kilometres to the west of here, in Qingpu County , is Dianshan Hu and the Grand View Garden . For local tourists, the area around the southeastern shore of Dianshan Hu is being turned into a real holiday resort, with opportunities for boating, swimming, fishing and even golf. The Grand View Garden is unashamedly intended for tourists, having been modelled on the famous garden from the eighteenth-century Chinese novel Dream of the Red Chamber. To get here, take a bus to Qingpu, and then hire a motor-rickshaw (￥5) for the short ride to the lake.
Another 20km west, just across the border in Jiangsu Province , is the huddle of Ming architecture that comprises the small canal town of ZHOUZHUANG . Lying astride the large Jinghang Canal connecting Suzhou and Shanghai , Zhouzhuang grew prosperous from the area's brisk grain, silk and pottery trade during the Ming Dynasty. Many rich government officials, scholars and artisans moved here and constructed beautiful villas, while investing money into developing the stately stone bridges and tree-lined canals that now provide the city's main attractions. Chinese tour groups invade Zhouzhuang in droves on weekends, but if you come on a weekday you should be able to appreciate the town in its serene, original splendour. Minibuses make the three-hour run from Shanghai Beizhan bus station twice daily (6.20am & 3.30pm), from Hongkou Gongyuan once daily (2pm) and from the Xinzhuang metro station twice daily (9.30am & 10.30am). There is also the intriguing possibility of travelling by speedboat from here to another canal town farther in Jiangsu , Tongli , from where frequent buses complete the journey to Suzhou .
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