Shanghai is China at full volume — a metropolis of nearly 25 million where 1920s Art Deco banks stare across the Huangpu River at the tallest skyline in the country. A modest fishing town until the 1840s, it exploded into the "Paris of the East" after opening as a treaty port, and today it is the nation's engine of finance and fashion. The best way to take it all in is at your own pace with a self-guided audio tour in your ear, letting each waterfront façade and temple courtyard tell its own story as you pass.
Two skylines, one river
Start on the Bund, the sweeping riverside boulevard where neoclassical and Art Deco landmarks line the west bank — an audio guide here unpacks the banks, trading houses and grand hotels of Shanghai's jazz-age boom. Then cross to Lujiazui in Pudong, where the space-age spheres of the Oriental Pearl TV Tower rise beside the 632-metre Shanghai Tower, China's tallest building. Few walks anywhere pack a century of ambition into a single river crossing.
Old Shanghai, alive in the alleys
Behind the towers survives another city. The Ming-dynasty rockeries and koi ponds of Yu Garden anchor the Old City, incense drifts through the gilded halls of Jing'an Temple, and the shikumen lane-houses of Tianzifang now shelter studios, cafés and craft shops. Neon-lit Nanjing Road, China's most famous shopping street, stitches it together — with audio guides queued up, you can wander lane to lane and still catch the history behind every stone gate.
Why visit
- A skyline rivalled by few cities on Earth, at its best at dusk from the Bund
- Treaty-port heritage: former concessions, plane-tree avenues and Art Deco at every turn
- Xiaolongbao soup dumplings and a food scene spanning every Chinese region
- The free Shanghai Museum, with one of the world's great collections of bronzes and ceramics
- An easy escape to the stone bridges and canals of Zhujiajiao water town
From quiet temple courtyards to a maglev that tops 300 km/h, Shanghai swings between centuries in a single afternoon — press play and let the city narrate itself.