Private Half-Day Tour: Amazing Highlights of Old Shanghai

Overview

A private half-day of four hours through old Shanghai: the Bund's row of pre-war banks and trading houses, a high observation deck for the view back across the river, and the streets behind the waterfront where the older city survives.

What to expect

A guide to yourselves and a route that can lean towards photography, architecture or history depending on what you say at the start. Most of it is walking on flat pavement, with transport between stops when the distances need it.

A dome that spent thirty years under plaster

The former bank at the southern end of the Bund, finished in 1923, has an octagonal entrance hall crowned by a mosaic ceiling showing the cities the bank operated in. During the Cultural Revolution the mosaic was considered dangerous to display, and rather than destroy it someone covered the whole thing with a false plaster ceiling. It was forgotten, and only uncovered again in 1997 — intact, because the covering had protected it.

The clock that changed its tune

The customs house next door carries the largest clock in Asia, installed in 1927 with bells cast to play the Westminster chimes. In 1966 the mechanism was reset to play a revolutionary anthem instead, and the great bells rang it out over the river for two decades. The Westminster sequence was restored in the 1980s, and that is what you hear on the quarter hour now.

A city with a circle in its street plan

Look at a map of the old Chinese city south of the Bund and you will see a ring road enclosing a dense tangle of lanes. That ring is where the city wall stood. Built in the 1550s against pirate raids, it was pulled down in 1912 as an obstacle to traffic, and the road simply took its place. A short stretch of the original wall still stands, hemmed in by later buildings.

Nine turns to lose a ghost

The bridge across the pond by the old teahouse does not run straight. It turns nine times, and the reason is folk belief: bad spirits were held to move only in straight lines, so a zigzag was a way of shaking them off before you reached the door. It also slows every visitor down to exactly the pace at which the garden is best looked at.

A port that asked no questions

In the late 1930s Shanghai required no visa and no papers to disembark, almost uniquely among world ports. Some twenty thousand Jewish refugees from Europe arrived for that reason alone, settling in the Hongkou district north of the creek. Many stayed until the end of the war, and the street pattern they lived in is still there.

Practicalities

Wear shoes for several hours of pavement. The riverfront is exposed and the wind comes straight off the water, so a windproof layer helps outside summer. Say at the start if you would rather spend the time on foot than on views from above.