Fuxing Park
French colonial-era garden of formal lawns, a lake and plane-tree alleys, now filled at dawn with dancers and tai chi.
Location
About this audio guide
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.
This audio guide was created using AI.
Similar places
Zhongshan Park
Century-old public garden of lawns, rose beds and lotus ponds, once a foreigners-only colonial pleasure ground.
Huangpu Park
Waterfront garden on a reclaimed riverbank, its exclusionary past marked by a monument to revolutionary heroes.
Zhangyuan
Restored shikumen lane complex of stone-gated houses once Shanghai's grandest private pleasure garden.
French Concession
Tree-lined former colonial district of villas, stone-gated lanes and boutique-lined boulevards.
People's Square
Vast civic plaza built over a colonial-era racecourse, ringed by museums, a theatre and government buildings.
People's Park
Landscaped urban park with a pond and cafe, built on a former colonial-era racecourse, home to a weekend matchmaking market.