Shanghai, at street level

The caseWhy Shanghai, and not Beijing

The standard first-trip-to-China itinerary sends you to Beijing for the Forbidden City and the Great Wall, and treats Shanghai as the commercial afterthought with a nice waterfront. That gets it backwards for a lot of travellers. Beijing is where you go to see imperial China; Shanghai is where you go to see what China is doing now, and what it did to itself in the twentieth century in order to get here. Both are worth a trip. Only one of them has a metro system you can use without thinking, a restaurant scene that spans every regional Chinese cuisine plus a serious international one, and streets built at a scale that rewards walking.

Shanghai's specific pleasure is friction between eras that are only a few decades apart and physically adjacent. On Wukang Road you can stand under 1920s plane trees outside a Hungarian-designed apartment building shaped like a ship's prow, surrounded by twenty-year-olds queuing to photograph it for social media, while an elderly resident in pyjamas — an entirely normal and unembarrassed Shanghai street uniform — carries groceries into a lane house behind. Ten minutes on the metro puts you under the Shanghai Tower, in a mall that would embarrass most of Europe. Twenty minutes further and you are in a canal town that has looked more or less the same since the Ming dynasty.

It is also, practically speaking, the softest landing in China. The metro signage and announcements are bilingual and clear. The airports connect to more of the world than anywhere else in the country. There is a critical mass of English-speaking service staff in hospitality, a huge resident foreign population, and a general municipal competence that means things work. If you have never been to mainland China and are unsure whether you will cope, Shanghai is the correct place to find out.

The calendarWhen to go

The honest answer is a narrow window twice a year. Late September to early November is the best stretch: warm, dry, clear-ish days, hairy crab season in full swing on every menu in the city, and the plane trees turning. Late March to mid-May is the other one, with magnolia blossom — the city flower — and comfortable temperatures before the humidity arrives. Those are the two periods worth building a trip around.

The rest of the calendar has real problems and you should know them. Mid-June to early July is meiyu, the plum rain season: weeks of grey, drizzling, saturating humidity that soaks into everything and makes walking the city miserable. July and August are genuinely punishing — sustained mid-to-high thirties Celsius with humidity that makes it feel worse, plus typhoon season, which occasionally shuts down flights and the Maglev for a day. Shanghai copes by moving indoors between eleven and five, and so should you: this is the season for the Shanghai Museum, the Power Station of Art, and long lunches.

Winter is the underrated one, with a caveat. December to February is damp and cold rather than freezing, usually three to eight degrees, and Shanghai sits south of the old Huai River line that historically determined which Chinese cities got municipal central heating — meaning older buildings, restaurants and some hotels are colder inside than you expect. Dress in layers you can keep on indoors. In exchange you get thin crowds and genuinely cheap flights. Two dates to avoid or embrace deliberately: National Day Golden Week, the first week of October, when the entire country travels at once and every attraction is at capacity; and Chinese New Year, when the migrant workforce goes home and Shanghai empties into an eerie, quiet, half-shuttered version of itself. Many small restaurants close for a week or more. Some travellers love it. Do not turn up expecting business as usual.

LogisticsGetting around

Shanghai has the largest urban metro network on the planet by route length — over twenty lines and 800-odd kilometres — and it is cheap, clean, punctual and bilingual throughout. Fares run roughly three to ten yuan depending on distance. This should be your default for anything over about twenty minutes' walk. The critical practical point: do not queue for the ticket machines. Once Alipay or WeChat Pay is set up (see the practical section — do this before you fly), both apps generate a metro QR code you scan at the gate, and the fare is deducted automatically. Every station entrance has an airport-style bag scanner, which is mandatory and takes about fifteen seconds; factor it in.

The network's edges are worth knowing. Trains stop running around 22:30 to 23:00 on most lines, earlier than in many world cities and easy to get caught by after dinner. Line 2 runs all the way from Hongqiao airport and railway station in the west to Pudong airport in the east, which is convenient but slow — well over an hour end to end. The Maglev from Longyang Road to Pudong airport hits 430 km/h and covers 30 kilometres in under eight minutes; it is a genuine novelty worth doing once, but it deposits you at Longyang Road, not in the centre, so it only makes sense combined with a metro leg or a taxi.

Taxis are cheap by Western standards, starting around fourteen to eighteen yuan, and plentiful. Almost no driver will speak English, so do not rely on saying a destination out loud — have the address in Chinese characters on your screen, which every hotel front desk will write for you and which the mapping apps display. Didi, the local ride-hailing app, has a functional English interface, accepts foreign cards bound through Alipay, and removes the language problem entirely; it is what most residents use. Uber does not operate in China. For mapping, Google Maps is both blocked and inaccurate here because of the mandatory coordinate offset applied to mapping data in China; use Amap (Gaode) or Baidu Maps, or Apple Maps, which is licensed locally and works well. Finally, the walking: the former concession districts are flat, shaded and laid out at human scale, and a huge amount of the pleasure of Shanghai is only available on foot. Cross the Huangpu on the public ferry from the Bund at least once — it costs two yuan and gives you the skyline from water level without a tour boat's commentary.

The tableHow Shanghai actually eats

Shanghainese cooking — benbang cai — is sweeter, oilier and more soy-forward than most regional Chinese cuisines, and it is unapologetic about all three. The emblematic dish is hongshao rou, red-braised pork belly: cubes of skin-on pork slow-cooked in soy, rock sugar and wine until the fat turns to something closer to custard. Order it once. Alongside it, look for drunken chicken served cold in Shaoxing wine, braised bran dough with wood ear and lily bulb (kaofu), sweet-and-sour smoked fish, and in late autumn the city's obsession: dazha xie, hairy crab from Yangcheng Lake, steamed whole and eaten with vinegar and ginger, priced by weight and gender.

The dumplings deserve their own paragraph, and the distinction matters because visitors routinely order the wrong one. Xiaolongbao are the delicate steamed soup dumplings with a pleated top, filled with pork and a set aspic that melts into broth — Jia Jia Tang Bao near People's Square and the endlessly queued Nanxiang Mantou Dian at Yuyuan are the famous addresses, though quality is high across the city. Shengjianbao are the other thing entirely and, for many residents, the better breakfast: thicker leavened dough, pan-fried to a hard golden base, sesame and spring onion on top, and a scalding jet of soup inside that will burn your mouth if you bite it whole. Yang's Fry Dumpling is the ubiquitous chain version and is genuinely fine. Bite a corner, sip, then eat.

Breakfast is worth setting an alarm for. The classic street quartet — youtiao (fried dough stick), dabing (a sesame flatbread), cifantuan (a sticky rice roll wrapped around youtiao and pickles) and warm soy milk — is sold from hole-in-the-wall counters all over the lanes for a handful of yuan and disappears by mid-morning. So does congyou banmian, scallion oil noodles, which is nothing but noodles, soy and slowly fried scallions and is one of the great cheap dishes anywhere.

Beyond the local cuisine, Shanghai's real advantage is that everyone else in China is also here. You can eat Yunnan mushrooms, Xinjiang lamb skewers, Sichuan mala hotpot, Chaoshan beef hotpot and Shaanxi roujiamo all within a few blocks in the former concession. The city also has, by most counts, more coffee shops than any other city in the world — comfortably several thousand — and the standard in the Anfu Road and Yongkang Road area is as high as anywhere in Europe. The bar scene runs from natural wine rooms on Wukang Road to a well-established speakeasy circuit that takes cocktails extremely seriously. One norm to internalise: tipping is not practised in mainland China and attempts to do it in ordinary restaurants will confuse rather than please. Bills are settled by QR code at the table, often by scanning a code to order in the first place — many places have no printed menu at all, only a code that opens a Chinese-language mini-programme, which is where a translation app earns its keep.

The mapNeighbourhoods to know

The Bund (Waitan) is the mile of 1920s and 30s banking and trading houses along the west bank of the Huangpu — Neoclassical, Art Deco, built with concession-era money and now mostly hotels, luxury retail and restaurants. The promenade in front of it is where the whole city photographs Pudong across the water. Go at night, accept that it will be crowded, and then go back at seven in the morning when it belongs to tai chi practitioners and almost nobody else.

The Former French Concession is the reason to come and the vaguest term on the map, covering large parts of Xuhui and Huangpu districts. Practically, it means the low-rise grid of plane-tree streets around Wukang Road, Anfu Road, Fuxing Road, Yongkang Road and Wuyuan Road: 1920s villas and Art Deco blocks, converted lane houses, independent shops, and the highest concentration of good coffee and small restaurants in the city. This is where you walk with no destination. Xintiandi, at its eastern edge, is the polished commercial version — a block of shikumen lane houses gutted and rebuilt as an upmarket dining and retail precinct in 2001. Purists dismiss it as a theme park, which is fair, but it is well made, and the site of the First National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party sits within it, which is a genuinely strange and interesting juxtaposition. Tianzifang, a few streets southwest, tried the same trick in an actual surviving lane network and is now dense, narrow, souvenir-heavy and best visited early.

Jing'an is the commercial centre of gravity north of the concession: the Jing'an Temple with its gilded roofline sitting directly across from a luxury mall, the restored Zhangyuan lane complex, big-brand retail on Nanjing West Road, and a spine of serious restaurants. Pudong, across the river, is the skyline itself — Lujiazui is the cluster of supertall towers, and outside office hours it is a district of plazas and podiums rather than street life. It is a place to visit rather than to stay, unless you want the view from your room. Further south along the west bank, the West Bund in Xuhui has converted a stretch of industrial riverfront into a contemporary art corridor with the Long Museum and Tank Shanghai, and it is the best afternoon in the city for anyone who likes museums with space around them. Hongkou, north of Suzhou Creek, is scruffier and historically loaded: it sheltered around twenty thousand Jewish refugees from Nazi Europe during the war, and the Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum in the old Ohel Moshe Synagogue tells that story properly. And the Old City, the oval of streets around Yuyuan Garden, is what predates all of the above — heavily restored and heavily touristed, but the garden itself, laid out in the sixteenth century, is the real thing.

Field intelligencePractical intelligence

Payments first, because this is the single thing that ruins unprepared trips. Mainland China has effectively skipped cards and runs on two apps: Alipay and WeChat Pay, both of which work by QR code. Since 2023 both allow foreign visitors to bind an international Visa or Mastercard directly, without a Chinese bank account, and this works well — but you must install the app, complete passport-based identity verification and bind the card before you arrive, because the verification steps involve SMS and web pages that are painful to complete on arrival. Expect a small percentage fee on transactions above a couple of hundred yuan. Cash in renminbi is still legal tender and vendors are officially required to accept it, but many small ones genuinely have no float and will be annoyed by a large note; carry a few hundred yuan in small denominations as a backup, not a plan. Foreign cards work at international hotels, big department stores and airports, and almost nowhere else.

Second: the internet. Google in all its forms, Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook, X, YouTube and most Western news sites are blocked. If you want them, install and test a VPN before you fly — VPN provider websites are themselves blocked, so you cannot fix this after landing. The far simpler workaround, and what many travellers now do, is to skip local SIMs entirely and use international roaming or a travel eSIM: roaming traffic is routed out of the country and lands outside the firewall, so everything works normally. It costs more per gigabyte and it is worth it. Note that Alipay and WeChat both function fine either way, and that Chinese hotel wifi is not a workaround — it is inside the firewall like everything else.

Visas have loosened dramatically and remain in flux, so verify against your own passport before booking. China has extended visa-free entry to citizens of a long and growing list of countries, mostly European plus Australia, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea and much of Southeast Asia, typically for stays of up to thirty days. Separately, a transit scheme allows visa-free stays of up to 240 hours — ten days — for nationals of over fifty countries, including the United States, United Kingdom and Canada, provided you arrive and depart on a through journey to a third country and stay within permitted provinces. Shanghai is a qualifying entry point. These rules have changed several times in recent years and airline check-in staff are the ones who enforce them, so print the confirmation of your onward ticket.

Registration is a rule visitors miss. Every foreigner must be registered with the local police within twenty-four hours of arrival at an address. Hotels do this automatically at check-in and you will never think about it. If you stay in a private apartment or with friends, you are responsible for registering at the neighbourhood police station yourself, and not doing so can cause real problems on exit.

The rest, briefly. Tap water is not drinkable — hotels supply bottled water and kettles, and boiled water is the local norm. Air quality has improved enormously since the notorious mid-2010s and most days are fine, but winter still produces spikes; any AQI app will tell you, and a bad day is a museum day. English is common in hotels, international restaurants and among younger office workers, and rare everywhere else, including taxis, small restaurants and shops — translation apps with camera and voice modes are not optional here, they are how you order. The local dialect is Shanghainese, a Wu language mutually unintelligible with Mandarin, which you will hear among older residents; everyone under fifty also speaks Mandarin. Crime against tourists is very low and walking anywhere at night is unremarkable, but the classic Shanghai scam persists in tourist areas — a friendly young pair, usually claiming to be students practising English, invite you to a teahouse or bar and vanish before an enormous bill arrives. Decline politely and keep walking. Finally, keep your passport on you: it is technically required, and you will need it to buy train tickets, enter some museums and check into anything.