Bund + Sightseeing Tunnel + Ultraviolet (book NOW), Quarry Hotel (one night), Propaganda Poster Centre, Mossy City as add-on if time.
Modern Chinese tasting-menu restaurant in Shanghai. Opened 2020 by chef DeAille Tam (Asia's Best Female Chef 2021) and chef Simon Wong. Awarded one Michelin star.
Promoted to must-see after Ultraviolet's 2024 closure. 2 Michelin, chef Deaeyon Kim. Korean-Chinese tasting, theatrical, ~4hr. Closest spiritual successor in Shanghai. Book ~6 wks ahead.
Vegetarian fine-dining restaurant on Yuyuan Road in Changning, Shanghai, by chef Tony Lu. Awarded two Michelin stars in the MICHELIN Guide Shanghai 2025.
3 Michelin vegetarian tasting in a 1930s villa, Jing'an. Spectacular setting, single seating. If you want one Shanghai temple-meal, this is it.
Originally built in 1955 as the Sino-Soviet Friendship Building to commemorate the China–USSR alliance. Now a major central-Shanghai exhibition and convention venue.
Sister to Beijing's Soviet Exhibition Hall — same Stalinist wedding-cake template, red star on top. Walk from People's Square.
Private contemporary-art museum on Shanghai's West Bund. Designed by Liu Yichun of Atelier Deshaus, integrating a preserved coal-hopper bridge from the site's industrial past. Opened 28 March 2014.
Atelier Deshaus's vaulted concrete halls over old Bund coal-unloading bridge. One of China's best buildings.
German-themed development in Anting, Jiading District, Shanghai. Designed by Albert Speer & Partners (Frankfurt) with central-European-style streets and plazas. First project of Shanghai's 'One City, Nine Towns' programme.
Sister to Thames Town. Built 2001 in 'authentic Bauhaus style' for Volkswagen execs who never came. Eerier than Thames because almost nobody is there. Ghost-Weimar in Shanghai's outer NW.
Same as Beijing branch but in Shanghai. Verify it's still operating — sanctions and state diplomacy have shut some branches; ask your hotel concierge to call ahead.
British-designed Art Deco concrete complex in Hongkou District, Shanghai. Built 1933 as the Shanghai Municipal Council Slaughterhouse — then the city's largest. Renovated 2006–08 into a cultural, retail, and dining hub. Labyrinthine ramps, bridges, and a square-outside / round-inside core engineered to channel both workers and cattle.
1933 Old Millfun; brutalist concrete spirals. Now half-redeveloped into shops but still haunting.
Octogenarian jazz band on the Bund. Shanghai legend.
Yunnanese 'folk cuisine' restaurant inspired by the Ancient Tea Horse Road. Original location at 38 Gaoyou Road in the former French Concession; second branch (Lost Heaven on the Bund) at 17 Yan'an East Road, Shanghai.
Yunnanese fine dining in Shanghai. Reliable banger.
Cantonese restaurant in Shanghai noted as one of the most affordable two-Michelin-starred restaurants in the world. Distinct from Yong Yi Ting (a Michelin-starred Jiangnan restaurant at Mandarin Oriental Pudong).
Cheapest Michelin 3-star meal in the world. Shanghai.
Iconic Shanghai xiaolongbao house inside Yu Garden / City God Temple area in Huangpu. Established 1900 with origins in Nanxiang village. Pork, crab-pork, and matsutake-pork fillings.
Nanxiang Steamed Buns — Yu Garden flagship XLB. Tourist trap but historic.
Modern Xinjiang restaurant in Shanghai (Changshu Lu / Xuhui, Fengshengli, MixC). Founded 2009 by Xibonese owner Atina Kuo. Lamb-forward Xinjiang dishes, ingredients sourced from Xinjiang.
Xinjiang/Uyghur cuisine in Shanghai. Underrated banger.
Private museum founded by collector Yang Pei Ming in 1995 with a rare collection of Maoist- and Cultural Revolution-era propaganda posters. Originally in the basement of an apartment building on Huashan Road; relocated 2019 to an office building on Yan'an West Road.
Tiny basement museum, Shanghai. Cult favorite.
Foreign concession administered by France 1849–1943, occupying parts of today's Xuhui and Huangpu districts. Premier early-20th-century residential and retail district; still known for plane-tree-lined streets, shikumen, and Art Deco architecture.
Shanghai walking neighborhood. Half-day.
China's first city-planning exhibition hall, opened 2000 on People's Square, Huangpu, next to the municipal government building. Centerpiece is a scale model of central Shanghai showing all existing and approved buildings.
Shanghai Urban Planning Center. Quick easy add.
Italian fine-dining restaurant on the Bund — the Cerea family's first venue outside Europe (NOT in the Bulgari Hotel). Holds two Michelin stars.
3 Michelin Italian inside Bulgari Hotel on Suzhou Creek. Most 'occasion dinner' option in town. Easier to book than the Chinese tastings.
Modern French restaurant at Capella Shanghai, Jian Ye Li (480 West Jianguo Road), in the former French Concession. By Pierre Gagnaire with Romain Chapel. One Michelin star.
Pairet-adjacent French tasting at Capella Jian Ye Li, French Concession. The shikumen courtyard setting is half the experience.
Where the Party was founded in 1921. Recently rebuilt as a giant shrine. Free, central, surreal.
China's first state-run contemporary art museum, in a converted former power station on the Expo 2010 site along the Huangpu River. Opened 2012; conversion budget reportedly ~US$64 million from the Shanghai government.
Decommissioned 1985 power plant turned contemporary art museum. Smokestack still on. Pure industrial concrete.
Park-cemetery for Communist martyrs; massive socialist-realist sculpture program. Free, quiet, intense.
Shanghai Yunnanese.
Shanghai seafood.
Shanghai fried chicken.
Cable-hauled passenger rail tunnel under the Huangpu River connecting the Bund (Puxi) with Pudong near the Oriental Pearl Tower. Opened 2 January 2001; known for a kitsch sound-and-light show during the 3–5 minute crossing.
Bund LSD-trip pedestrian tunnel. Cult favorite.
Shanghai acrobat show.
Informal weekend gathering in Shanghai's People's Park, active since around 2004. Parents and matchmakers post advertisements with the age, height, income, education, and zodiac of their unmarried adult children seeking partners.
People's Park parents matchmaking, Shanghai. Sunday only.
Contemporary art district in the former Chunming Slub Mill along Suzhou Creek, Putuo District, Shanghai. Established 2000; over 120 galleries and artist studios.
Shanghai art warehouses.
Shanghai. Decent rainy-day option.
Old Shanghai re-creation.
1930s Shanghai backlot.
1930s skyscraper that was the tallest in Asia for 20 years; faded interior.
Decommissioned cotton mills + power station along the Huangpu. Walk it; lots of preserved-decay aesthetic.
1932 building, contemporary art inside, cluster of preserved/decaying Bund-side blocks around it. Easy add.
Shanghai Italian; you didn't fly to China for this.
Five-star hotel built into a former Songjiang quarry. 18 stories with 16 below ground (incl. 2 underwater); 337 rooms. Concept and façade by JADE+QA (Martin Jochman) with ECADI and Atkins. Opened 20 November 2018.
InterContinental Shanghai Wonderland. Built into a flooded pit. Worth booking even one night.
Completed 2006 in Songjiang District, ~30 km from central Shanghai. British market town pastiche — cobbles, Victorian terraces, red phone boxes. Roughly 1 km², planned for 10,000 residents; popular for wedding photography.
FAKE ENGLISH TOWN OUTSIDE SHANGHAI. Half-deserted, ghostly, identical genre to Tianducheng — surprised you don't have it. Tudor pubs, fake Bath stone, Wedding Photo central, ~80% empty. 20 min from your Quarry Hotel. Pair them: Tianducheng + Thames Town in one weekend = a thesis on Chinese ghost-Europe.
Branch of the Shanghai Science & Technology Museum in Lingang, Pudong. Designed by Ennead Architects (Thomas J. Wong) with no straight lines or right angles. Opened 2021; described as the world's largest planetarium by building scale.
Ennead Architects. Curved concrete shells, no straight lines, oculus that projects a sundial. 1h from central Shanghai. Probably the best new museum building in the world right now.
Full-scale replica of London's Tower Bridge in Suzhou's Xiangcheng District, completed 2012. Doubled up with four 40 m towers (twice the original's two). Adapted to span a five-lane highway.
Suzhou full-scale replica with double the towers.
317 m, 53-arch stone bridge near Suzhou at the intersection of the Grand Canal and Tantai Lake. Built AD 816 (Tang); reconstructed 1446 (Ming). Named for a legend that prefect Wang Zhongshu funded construction by selling his ornate belt.
53-arch Tang bridge, Suzhou. Easy.
Abandoned fishing village on Shengshan Island, ~40 miles east of Shanghai. Established 1950s, depopulated by the early 2000s; now overgrown with greenery.
Floating fishing village reclaimed by vines on Shengshan Island. Iconic, photogenic, signature 'abandoned' pick.
Zhongshuge Yangzhou — kaleidoscopic bookshop. Easy stop.
Wuxi.
