Fuxing Park

This guide to Fuxing Park in Shanghai starts with the two six-and-a-half-meter granite figures of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels watching over the lawn, and works backward to the private Gu family garden that stood here before French authorities remade it as a public park in 1908. You'll follow its renaming under Japanese occupation and again in 1946, when it became Fuxing, meaning revival, long before the two philosophers ever arrived in stone. Listen for how a garden built to feel like a slice of Paris kept changing hands and names across a century in Shanghai. Best heard slowly, walking the plane-tree alleys between the lake and the statues.