Shanghai on a second visit: the city beyond the Bund and Yu Garden

The first visit to Shanghai is the Bund, Yu Garden, a tall building, Suzhou and a water town, and it is right that it is; our 4-day itinerary is exactly that. The second visit is when the city opens up: the museums that have made it an art capital, the neighbourhoods where people actually live, the history that the colonial waterfront only hints at, and the countryside that is not a water town. This is what we plan for returning guests, many of whom are visiting relatives and have “done the sights” with every cousin.

The West Bund: the museum mile

South of the French Concession along the Huangpu, the former industrial riverfront has become Shanghai’s museum district: the Long Museum, the Yuz Museum, the West Bund Museum (which hosts rotating shows from the Centre Pompidou), the Tank Shanghai galleries in old aviation fuel tanks, and a riverside promenade that runs for kilometres past climbing walls, skate parks and coffee carts. Pick two museums, walk between them along the water, and eat at one of the warehouse restaurants. Half a day; a full one for art people.

Art districts and old industry

• M50, a cluster of galleries in a former textile mill on Suzhou Creek, is the original art district: smaller than Beijing’s 798, free, and good for an hour of wandering.
• The 1933 Slaughterhouse in Hongkou is a concrete labyrinth of ramps and bridges built by the British for cattle and now full of studios and cafés; architecture people love it.
• The Power Station of Art, a former power plant on the river south of the Bund, is the city’s contemporary art museum and hosts the Shanghai Biennale.
• Columbia Circle and Zhangyuan are restored historic compounds turned into shops, restaurants and galleries; the first is a former American country club in the west of the Concession, the second a block of 1920s shikumen lane houses north of Nanjing Road, both good for an evening.

The French Concession, properly

On the first visit you walked Wukang Road and Tianzifang. On the second, go deeper:

• Anfu Road, Wuyuan Road and Yongfu Road for the city’s best small restaurants, wine bars and bakeries, in a few blocks of plane trees.
• The shikumen lanes off Xinle Road and Changle Road, where the stone-gated terraces of the 1920s are still lived in; a guide who grew up in one walks you through the courtyards and explains the plumbing, the politics and the prices.
• The former residences of Sun Yat-sen, Zhou Enlai, Soong Ching-ling and the writer Lu Xun, each a small house museum that tells one piece of 20th-century China.
• Fuxing Park at 7 am for the tai chi, the ballroom dancers, the men with birds in cages and the retirees arguing over cards; the best free show in the city.

Hongkou: the Jewish refugees and the north

Across Suzhou Creek, Hongkou was the Japanese quarter and then, from 1938, the refuge for some 20,000 European Jews who fled to Shanghai when almost nowhere else would take them. The Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum, in the old Ohel Moshe synagogue, tells the story with the names on a wall and the lanes where they lived outside; it moves Australian visitors in particular, because many of those families went on to Melbourne and Sydney. Combine it with Duolun Road, a street of 1920s villas where the left-wing writers lived, and Lu Xun Park. This is the half day that changes how people see the city.

The new museums

The Shanghai Museum East, opened in Pudong in 2024, holds the great collection of bronzes, ceramics, calligraphy and painting in a vast new building; the old museum on People’s Square remains for the furniture and the jades. The Shanghai Astronomy Museum, far out in Lingang, is the largest planetarium in the world and a day out for children. The Natural History Museum in Jing’an is the rainy-day standby for families and better than it sounds.

Where the city eats and walks

• Breakfast at a wet market with a guide: Wuzhong Road, Jiashan Market, or any neighbourhood market at 7 am, for jianbing, soy milk and the produce that explains the cuisine.
• Hongkou and Yangpu for noodle houses and the university district’s cheap, good restaurants.
• Xinhua Road and Panyu Road in the west for a quieter version of the Concession.
• Sheshan in the far west for the city’s only hill, with a basilica on top and an observatory, and the Chenshan Botanical Garden beside it: a Saturday for families.
• The Huangpu by ferry, all the way, on the cheap commuter boats rather than the tourist cruise.

The food guide has the dishes; on a second visit the point is the neighbourhoods.

Day trips the first visit missed

• Nanxun, two and a half hours west: the grandest of the water towns, with merchant mansions that mix Chinese courtyards and French ballrooms, and almost no foreign visitors. The water towns guide compares it.
• Nanjing, an hour by train: the Ming tomb, the city wall, the Presidential Palace, the memorial to the 1937 massacre, and Confucius Temple at night; a long day or a better overnight.
• Hangzhou overnight rather than the day trip: an evening on an empty causeway and the dawn lake, which the Hangzhou guide argues for.
• Chongming Island, the alluvial island at the mouth of the Yangtze, for wetlands, birds, bicycles and farm restaurants; a different China an hour from Pudong.
• Moganshan, the hill station three hours west where Shanghai’s foreign residents summered a century ago, now bamboo forests, converted villas and the city’s weekend escape.

A second-visit four days

We plan second visits as day guide bookings rather than a set tour, because every returning guest has a different list; a guide who has lived in the lanes for thirty years, a car for the far days, and the rest on foot. Tell us what you saw last time and we will fill in what you missed.