Shanghai Audio Tours

Shanghai became a treaty port in 1842 after the First Opium War, and the foreign concessions that followed produced an architectural record that has no equivalent in China. Walk the Bund and you are looking at a two-kilometer sequence of neoclassical, Art Deco, and Beaux-Arts buildings from the 1920s and 1930s, many of them the former headquarters of global banks and trading houses that bet on Shanghai as the commercial capital of Asia. The bet looked correct until 1949. The Peace Hotel, the HSBC Building, the Customs House with its bell tower are all still there, still standing, still dominating the waterfront across from the Pudong towers that went up after 1990.

The former French Concession, in the western part of the city, offers something different: shikumen houses, the typical Shanghai grey-brick courtyard buildings that combine Chinese spatial logic with European street plans, set in a neighborhood that still has the plane trees lining Huaihai Road and Fuxing Road that the French municipal council planted a century ago.

Yu Garden in the Old City was built in 1559 and gives you the Jiangnan classical garden tradition inside the city. Jing'an Temple, rebuilt multiple times, is an active Buddhist temple that the city grew up around.