French Concession

This guide to Shanghai's French Concession returns to a summer night in 1921, when a stranger walks into a rented shikumen townhouse on a quiet lane, asks for a man who doesn't exist, and leaves. Inside, a dozen people meeting in secret to found the Chinese Communist Party, Mao Zedong among them, go quiet. You'll hear how this leafy neighborhood of stone gateways and plane trees came to exist at all, carved out after a French consul talked Shanghai's governor into handing over the land in 1849. Walk these lanes past the wrought balconies and you're tracing a district built on a bargain most visitors never think to ask about.