Sheshan National Forest Park

This guide to Sheshan National Forest Park in Shanghai starts with a desperate promise a Jesuit priest made in the 1860s, as anti-Christian violence swept the countryside, to build a church on this hilltop if it was spared. You'll hear how a small chapel gave way, decades later, to a much larger baroque basilica, and how French Jesuits also built an observatory on the same hill that once housed the largest telescope in Asia. The guide follows the hilltop through the Cultural Revolution and the pilgrims who still climb it every May.