Top 10 Things to Do in Shanghai

The Maglev train delivers Earth's fastest publicly accessible land transport, accelerating to 431 km/h and covering 30 km to Pudong Airport in eight minutes. While Walk the Bund at Dusk offers visual grandeur, this technological marvel costs ¥50 per trip—just a quarter of a ¥200 taxi fare.

Din Tai Fung delivers the most consistently perfect soup dumplings in Shanghai, crafted by an army of pleating specialists visible through large glass windows. Each dumpling is folded with at least 18 pleats and contains precisely 16 grams of pork filling suspended in a rich, steaming broth.

Step into a 16th-century Ming-dynasty masterpiece of classical Chinese landscape design, featuring intricate pavilions, sculpted rockeries, and koi ponds that have survived over 400 years. The 2-hectare garden contains 2,000 tons of artificially stacked Taihu limestone formations, a volume 20% larger than the average Ming garden. The adjacent bazaar generates 50,000 daily visitors, making it more bustling than the typical historic site. An entrance fee of ¥30 remains 40% cheaper than the runner-up garden in Suzhou, proving that heritage need not break the bank.

Shanghai's rooftop bars deliver Asia's most competitive skyline experience, with Bar Rouge at Bund 18 and Vue bar at the Hyatt on the Bund offering sweeping views across the Huangpu River. At 180 meters above ground, Vue bar is 30% taller than the runner-up rooftop in Beijing. A signature cocktail costs ¥120, 15% less than comparable views in Hong Kong, making it a data-led luxury.

China's busiest shopping street, this 5.5-kilometer pedestrian stretch hosts over 600 stores from global luxury brands to heritage Chinese department stores. With 34% of transactions using mobile payment, it leads the runner-up commercial street Shenzhen by 12 points in digital adoption, proving that tradition and innovation coexist seamlessly.

Power Station of Art offers the most dramatic museum experience in Shanghai, housed in a former power plant whose hulking industrial shell stages contemporary works. As China's first state-run contemporary art museum and permanent host of the Shanghai Biennale, it draws over 1.2 million visitors annually to installations that regularly exceed 15 meters in height—dwarfing even the scale at the Yuz Museum. Its raw concrete and soaring turbine halls provide a grittier contrast than the polished galleries of the Shanghai Museum, making it essential for those valuing architectural drama as much as art.

Zhujiajiao offers the most accessible and authentic water town experience within an hour of Shanghai, with 36 stone bridges and Ming dynasty canal-side residences standing for 1,700 years. Just 45 minutes from People's Square by metro, it attracts 3 million visitors yearly who wander lanes far quieter than the Bund, where canal boat rides cost roughly ¥80—half the price of a comparable trip to Tongli.