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We've compiled the best of the best in Xintiandi and City Center - browse our top choices for the top things to see or do during your stay.
Home of the Shanghai Museum, the city's enormous main square is a social center for locals. During the day, residents stroll, practice tai chi, and fly kites. In the evening, kids roller-skate, and ballroom dancers hold group lessons. There is also a small amusement park. Weekends here are extremely busy—particularly on Xizang Road—and are not for the agoraphobic.
Look past the eyesore of an exterior—this museum holds the country's premier collection of relics and artifacts. Eleven galleries exhibit Chinese artistry in all its forms: paintings, bronzes, sculpture, ceramics, calligraphy, jade, furniture of the Ming and Qing dynasties, coins, seals, and art by indigenous populations. Its bronze collection is one of the best in the world, and its dress and costume gallery showcases intricate handiwork from several of China's 55 ethnic minority groups. There are signs and an audio guide available in English. You can relax in the museum's pleasant tearoom or head to the shop for postcards, crafts, and reproductions of the artwork.
In colonial days this park was the northern half of the city's racetrack. Today the 30 acres of flower beds, lotus ponds, and trees are crisscrossed by a large number of paved paths. It's also home to the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Urban Planning Exhibition Hall.
The marriage market, held in the park weekends noon–5 pm, is not to be missed.
Desperately seeking spouses for their children, the parents and grandparents of unmarried adults post flyers advertising their child's height, job, income, Chinese Zodiac sign, and more.
The secret meeting on July 31, 1921 that marked the first National Congress was held at the Bo Wen Girls' School, where 13 delegates from Marxist, Communist, and Socialist groups gathered from around the country. The upstairs of this restored shikumen is a well-curated museum detailing the rise of communism in China. Downstairs lies the very room where the first delegates worked. It remains frozen in time, the table set with matches and teacups. Ironically, the site today is surrounded by Xintiandi, Shanghai's center of capitalist conspicuous consumption.
