Things to do in Shanghai, China

The skyline gets the photographs. The city that people come back for is at street level — plane trees, lane houses, and a bathhouse that never closes.

Updated 2026-08-18 · 7 min read · Written by the PoppaTrip editors

Start where the two centuries face each other

Everyone begins at the Bund, and everyone is right to. Stand on the promenade with the river in front of you and you are standing in the argument that made Shanghai: behind you, the heavy stone banks and trading houses of the 1920s; in front of you, across half a kilometre of brown water, the Pudong skyline that did not exist within living memory. Almost nowhere else can you turn on your heel and cover a century.

Come twice — once in the morning, when the promenade is joggers and the buildings behind you get the light, and once at night, when Pudong turns itself on. The second visit is the one your camera wants.

The old city, and the garden inside it

Yu Garden is four hundred years old, and its trick is compression: rockeries, carp ponds, dragon-topped walls and pavilions folded into a space that keeps convincing you it is larger than it is. Every corner is engineered to hide the next one. The bazaar packed around the entrance is a tourist machine and you should walk through it without guilt to reach the actual garden.

Go early. This is the single most crowded ticket in central Shanghai by mid-morning, and a Ming dynasty garden is a poor venue for a queue.

Where the city actually lives: the plane-tree streets

If Shanghai wins you over, this is probably where it happens. The former French Concession is a low-rise grid of 1920s and 30s villas, lane houses and shopfronts under a canopy of plane trees, and it is best approached with no plan at all. Aim roughly at Wukang Mansion — the wedge-shaped 1924 apartment building that anchors the neighbourhood — and then walk in whatever direction looks quiet.

Tianzifang does the same century in miniature and much denser: shikumen lane houses turned into a maze of studios and coffee shops, so narrow in places you go single file. Xintiandi is the same building type restored to an entirely different budget, and it comes into its own after dark.

The stop you can sleep in

Shanghai's 24-hour bathhouses are the local institution most visitors never hear about, and they are genuinely one of the best things you can do with a jet-lagged night. The format is Japanese-derived and thoroughly localised: you pay one entry fee, change into house pyjamas, and get the run of a floor of hot pools at graded temperatures, cold plunges, steam and dry saunas, a buffet, and a hall of reclining chairs and sleeping cabins with blankets.

Shuiguo Spa, out in the Hongqiao district and reachable underground from Hongqiao railway station, is the one to try. Nobody rushes you out. Arriving at eleven at night and leaving after breakfast is a completely normal way to use it — which makes it the rare attraction that solves your evening and part of your accommodation at once. Bring nothing; everything is issued at the door.

Art, height and a day on the water

Give the Shanghai Museum a morning — the bronzes alone justify it — and the Power Station of Art an afternoon, if only for the pleasure of a contemporary gallery that kept its 165-metre chimney. For height, the Shanghai Tower's deck is the highest view in the city, and it is worth checking the day's visibility before you commit; the tower spends a good part of the year inside the weather.

The one trip worth leaving town for is Zhujiajiao, an hour west — a canal town of stone arch bridges and waterside lanes that gives you the Jiangnan water-town postcard without the overnight commitment of Suzhou or Hangzhou. Go on a weekday if you have the choice.

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Written by hand and fact-checked on 2026-08-18. Opening hours, ticketing and prices change — check them before you rely on them.