55 Best Sights in Shanghai, China

Housed inside the China Pavilion at the 2010 Shanghai World Expo (which had sites on both sides of the river in Pudong and Puxi), this gleaming homage to contemporary art has a whopping 27 exhibition halls. Much of the work is underwhelming, but be sure to stop by the animation hall, where you can catch shorts and feature-length films from the '50s to the '90s. The touring exhibits are often a real treat; besides a huge Picasso retrospective, the museum has hosted works from New York's Whitney Museum, London's British Museum, and Paris's Maisons de Victor Hugo. Look for works from David Hockney, Jasper Johns, and Rodin.

Situated in the M50 arts district for about 10 years before moving to this location in 2016, this gallery and project space specializes in photography. Look for works by both Chinese and foreign artists, such as Holland's Robert Van Der Hilst and Germany's Michael Wolf. It's open every day but Monday, when viewings are by appointment only.

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.

The site of the Shanghai World Expo was a barren wasteland until this massive contemporary art museum, housed in a former power plant, opened in late 2012. It did so with a bang, opening the ninth Shanghai Biennale and simultaneously hosting an exhibition from the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Rather than a permanent collection, the museum hosts one large-scale exhibition after another. It pulls in top Chinese artists like Cai Guoqiang and is the city's home for major touring exhibitions. Every Tuesday is free entry for all visitors. The PSA is actually about 2½ miles south of the Old City, on the edge of the Huangpu River. You can get here from the Old City or Xintiandi/City Center by taxi or via metro Lines 4 and 8 (and a 15-minute walk from the metro station).

The detailing on this 1932 art deco building is as enticing as the artwork inside. Rockbund has no permanent collection, which keeps things exciting. When exhibitions are being installed, the museum is closed, so check the website before you go. Exhibits showcase works by both Chinese and international artists, and some include interactive elements. Lectures and film screenings are held often; many are in English, and some are family-friendly. On the top floor is a quiet, airy seating area and, the cherry on the sundae, the museum's roof deck.

Built in 1927, the Ohel Moishe Synagogue was the spiritual center of Shanghai's Jewish ghetto in the '30s and '40s, and now houses the excellent Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum. More than 20,000 Central European refugees fled to Shanghai during World War II, and the museum has a good selection of photos and newspaper clippings. Around the corner is Huoshan Park, where a memorial tablet has been erected in honor of Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin's 1993 visit.

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.

To understand the true scale of Shanghai and its ongoing building boom, visit the Master Plan Hall of this museum. Sprawled out on the third floor is a 6,400-square-foot planning model of Shanghai—the largest of its kind in the world—showing the metropolis as city planners expect it to look in 2020. You'll find familiar existing landmarks like the Pearl Tower and Shanghai Center as well as a detailed model of the Shanghai Expo, complete with miniature pavilions.

Shanghai's waterfront boulevard best shows both the city's pre-1949 past and its focus on the future. Both the northern and southern ends of Bund are constantly changing, with hotels and restaurants popping up amid scooter repair shops and hardware stores.

On the riverfront side of the Bund, Shanghai's street life is in full force. You'll find Chinese tourists as well as foreigners here, ogling the Pudong skyline. If you have blonde hair, prepare to be stopped for photos. In the morning, just after dawn, the Bund is full of people ballroom dancing, doing aerobics, and practicing kung fu, qi gong, and tai chi. The rest of the day, people walk the embankment, snapping photos of the Oriental Pearl Tower, the Huangpu River, and each other. In the evenings, lovers come out for romantic walks amid the floodlit buildings and tower.

Be prepared for the aggressive souvenir hawkers; while you can't completely avoid them, just ignore them—and watch your pockets and bags.

By World War II, more than two-thirds of Shanghai's residents lived in a shikumen (stone gatehouse). Most have been razed in the name of progress, but this 8-acre collection of them has been transformed into an upscale shopping-and-dining complex called Xintiandi, or "New Heaven on Earth." The restaurants are busy from lunch until past midnight, especially those with patios—perfect places from which to watch the passing parade of shoppers.

Since the 18th century, this complex, with its traditional red walls and upturned tile roofs, has been a marketplace and social center where local residents gather, shop, and practice qi gong in the evenings. It is overrun by tourists and not as impressive as the ancient palace gardens of Beijing, but Yu Garden is a piece of Shanghai's rapidly disappearing past, and one of the few old sights left in the city.

To get to the garden itself, you must wind your way through the crowded bazaar. The garden was commissioned by the Ming Dynasty official Pan Yunduan in 1559 and built by the renowned architect Zhang Nanyang over 19 years. When it was finally finished it won international praise as "the best garden in southeastern China." In the mid-1800s, the Society of Small Swords used the garden as a gathering place for meetings. It was here that they planned their uprising with the Taiping rebels against the French colonists. The French destroyed the garden during the first Opium War, but the area was later rebuilt.

Winding walkways and corridors bring you over stone bridges and carp-filled ponds and through bamboo stands and rock gardens. Within the park are an old opera stage, a museum dedicated to the Society of Small Swords rebellion, and an exhibition hall of Chinese calligraphy and paintings.

In a former airport hangar and within walking distance of the Long Museum, the Yuz Museum is the brainchild of Chinese-Indonesian art collector Budi Tek. The massive, light-flooded space is perfect for showcasing installations like Maurizio Cattelan's Untitled, an olive tree planted in a cube of dirt, which was featured in his retrospective at New York's Guggenheim. Chinese artists get plenty of showtime, too; in the same exhibition, you will find Ren Jian's painting Stamp Collection, six acrylic-on-canvas versions of stamps from African nations. The museum has Wi-Fi throughout, a small gift shop, and a café where you can watch the sun set. Its cement courtyard, with several sets of stairs, ramps, and a few sculptures, is a good place for kids to roam. Note that, like the Long Museum, the Yuz is in the emerging West Bund arts area, readily reached from the Former French Concession by taxi or metro Line 11.

British art deco and Chinese elements combine in this 1937 building, which was designed to be the tallest in the city. However, opium magnate Victor Sassoon insisted that no building surpass his Cathay Hotel (now the Peace Hotel). Were it not for the Cathay Hotel's copper-faced pyramid roof, the bank would indeed be taller.

The art deco–style Cathay Cinema was one of the first movie theaters in Shanghai and, indeed, still shows a mix of Chinese and Western films. The theater was a favorite of Shanghainese author Eileen Chang, of Lust, Caution fame.

If you're staying in Pudong, this giant swath of green is a great place to take kids, as it has a variety of bicycles for hire, good flat paths for Rollerblading, and pleasure boats. On a nice day, pack a lunch and head to the designated picnic areas, fly a kite in the open areas, or take a walk among the trees.

If you find yourself passing by this tiny temple on your exploration of the Old City, you can make an offering to Buddha with the free incense sticks that accompany your admission. Built in 1600 by the same man who built Yu Garden, it was destroyed during the Cultural Revolution and rebuilt in the 1990s. The temple is now a nunnery, and you can often hear the women's chants rising from the halls beyond the main courtyard.

At the southeast end of the Yu Gardens bazaar stands this Taoist temple, built during the early part of the Ming Dynasty and destroyed by fire in 1924. The main hall was rebuilt in 1926, and has been renovated many times over the years. Inside are gleaming gold figures, and atop the roof you'll see statues of crusading warriors—flags raised, arrows drawn. This is a popular place for locals to light incense; expect it to be crowded around major holidays like Chinese New Year.

With instructions clearly spelled out in English, Double Rainbow Massage House provides an inexpensive introduction to traditional Chinese massage. Choose a masseur; state your preference for soft, medium, or hard pressure; then keep your clothes on for a 45- to 90-minute massage. There's no ambience, just a clean room with nine massage tables.

This local spa chain has claimed the middle ground between expensive hotel spas and workmanlike blind-man massage parlors. Don the suede-soft treatment robes for traditional Chinese massage, or take them off for an aromatic oil massage. Dragonfly also has waxing and nail services.

Although this road has been heavily restored, its architecture and general ambience takes you back in time to the 1930s, when the 1-km (½-mile) lane was a favorite haunt of writer Lu Xun and fellow social activists. Bronze statues of those literary luminaries dot the lawns between the villas and row houses whose ground floors are now home to cafés, antiques shops, and art galleries. As the street takes a 90-degree turn, its architecture shifts 180 degrees with the seven-story stark gray Shanghai Duolun Museum of Modern Art.

When this beautiful neoclassical structure was built by the British in 1923, it was the second-largest bank building in the world. It served as the headquarters of the Shanghai branch of The Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation. After the building was turned into offices for the Communist Party in 1955, the beautiful 1920s Italian-tile mosaic in the building's dome was deemed too extravagant and was covered by white paint. Ironically enough, this protected it from being destroyed by the Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution. The mural was then forgotten until 1997, when the Pudong Development Bank renovated the building. If you walk in and look up, you'll see the circular mosaic in the dome—an outer circle portraying the cities where the bank had branches at the time: London, Paris, New York, Bangkok, Tokyo, Calcutta, Hong Kong, and Shanghai; a middle circle made up of the 12 signs of the zodiac; and the center painted with a large sun and Ceres, the Roman goddess of abundance.

Sun Yat-sen, the father of the Republic of China, lived in this two-story house from 1919 to 1924. His wife, Soong Qing-ling, of the illustrious Soong family, continued to live here until 1937. Today it's a museum, where tours are conducted in Chinese and English.

This European-style park, once open only to Shanghai's French residents, is one of downtown's most tranquil spots. Here you'll find people strolling hand in hand, practicing tai chi, and playing cards and mah-jongg. There is a tiny amusement park and, on weekends and holidays, art projects for kids. The open spaces double as dance floors, with elderly couples dancing away the day—visitors are welcome to join in.

The spectacular front wall of glass shines as brightly as the star power in this magnificent theater. Its three stages present the best domestic and international performances. The dramatic curved roof atop a square base is meant to follow the ancient Chinese philosophy that "the earth is square and the sky is round." The best time to see it is at night.

Completed in 1918, this temple is fairly new by Chinese standards. During the Cultural Revolution, the monks pasted portraits of Mao Zedong on the outside walls so that the Red Guards couldn't tear them down without destroying Mao's face as well. The temple is built in the style of the Song Dynasty, with symmetrical halls and courtyards, upturned eaves, and bright yellow walls. The temple's great treasure is its 2-meter (6½-foot) seated Buddha made of white jade with a robe of precious gems, originally brought to Shanghai from Burma. Frightening guardian gods of the temple populate the halls, home to a collection of Buddhist scriptures and paintings. The temple is madness at festival times.

There's a simple vegetarian restaurant serving inexpensive noodle dishes.

Rising 88 floors—eight being the Chinese number imparting wealth and prosperity—this tower combines the classic 13-tier Buddhist pagoda design with postmodern steel and glass. It houses one of the highest hotels in the world—the Grand Hyatt Shanghai occupies the 53rd to 87th floors. The 88th-floor observation deck, reached in 45 seconds by two high-speed elevators, offers 360-degree views of the city. The brave can also try the tower's Skywalk experience, a glass pathway without rails outside the 88th floor.

Skip the line and instead spend what you would've shelled out for a ticket to the observation deck at the 87th-floor Cloud 9 bar.

Originally built about AD 300, this temple has had a tumultuous history of destruction and rebuilding, with a brief stint as a plastics factory during the Cultural Revolution. What you see today dates from the 1980s. The temple's main draw is its copper Hongwu bell, cast in 1183 and weighing 3½ tons. The gilded temple, on one of Shanghai's busiest thoroughfares, is an interesting contrast to the surrounding skyscrapers, shopping malls, and luxury boutiques.

Billionaire art collectors Liu Yiqian and Wang Wei don't do anything halfway; their Long Museum, designed by Shanghai-based firm Atelier Deshaus, is a testament to the money flowing into supporting contemporary Chinese art. The museum hosts rotating exhibitions, from Qing Dynasty paintings to a show on the past, present, and future of silver in Mexico. Long Museum is also walking distance from Yuz Museum. On the first Tuesday of every month, Long Museum offers free entry. Note that the museum is in the up-and-coming West Bund gallery and arts district to the south. Although you can easily reach the West Bund by taxi from anywhere in central Shanghai, the Former French Concession provides the best public-transit access via metro Lines 7 and 12.

It may seem tranquil now, but Longhua Martyrs Cemetery was the execution site of many Communists, particularly during the Guomingdang crackdown in 1927. The small, unkempt, grassy execution area—accessed by a tunnel—is chilling. In the 1950s, the remains of murdered Communists were found here still wearing leg irons. A glass, pyramid-shape museum in the center of the grounds contains paintings and other items. Elsewhere, Soviet-style sculptures dot immaculate lawns.