Three Days in Shanghai: The Bund, Yu Garden and Tianzifang

Arriving in Shanghai

The flight landed ten minutes early, and since I had only carry-on I was at immigration ahead of most of my fellow passengers. The officer had a lot of questions. Be prepared with your first hotel and its address, and with a brief account of why you are coming to China. Mine was “sightseeing”, which together with a planned exit to Hong Kong was good enough. I got the visa-free thirty days.

You can take the subway from the airport into the centre, but I wanted the Maglev. It is capable of 431 km/h, faster than any train I have been on by a wide margin, though it only runs at that speed during high demand hours, so I had to settle for 300. Also impressive. It took all of eight minutes to reach the city.

From there it was a couple of subway stops to the East Nanjing Road pedestrian street. Coming up out of the station the first four things I saw were an H&M, an Apple store, a Huawei store and a Samsung store, arranged more or less in a square. This turned out to be the middle of a long pedestrian shopping street carrying every modern brand you could think of, Western and Chinese alike.

Finding the hotel was harder. The map app pointed confidently at a building that was not the hotel. I asked a security guard, who did not know it either. I was eventually rescued by a man who had been trying to sell me a watch and who gave that up to walk me the whole way to the door instead. Kind of him, to rescue a stranger rather than sell to him.

I dropped the backpacks and went straight back out, down the walking street to the Bund. The classic view across the river was there but the light was not. It began to drizzle. The pictures did not turn out.

The classic Shanghai skyline photo

Every evening a few thousand people stand on the Bund with their backs to those buildings, photographing the other side.

The other side is Pudong, and it was planned as recently as April 1990. Before that it was farmland, with warehouses and wharves along the shore. The Oriental Pearl Tower was finished in 1994, the Shanghai Tower in 2015. The skyline the entire city turns out to look at went up in my lifetime. The century-old buildings standing behind those several thousand people had nobody pointing a camera at them at all.

The Bund, and where the word came from

The Bund is a mile of riverfront on the Huangpu, fifty-two buildings put up between about 1900 and 1930 by people who fully intended to stay. The name is not Chinese, and it is not English either.

Banks, customs houses and trading company headquarters, in every European style that was fashionable at the time. The Customs House went up in 1927, the HSBC building four years before that.

The name arrived in English from Hindustani, where it meant a dyke or an embankment, and the British carried it east out of India along with everything else they carried. The Chinese name for the same stretch is Waitan, the outer bank, which distinguishes it from the inner bank over by the old walled city. So the most famous address in Shanghai is a Hindi word applied by the English to a Chinese river.

After the disappointment at the Bund I strolled back along Nanjing Road, found some simple food at a Chinese food court, and made it back to the hotel. It had been a long flight and an even longer day.

A garden built to keep a father happy

The second morning began with breakfast, or rather with the search for it. There were plenty of restaurants offering big bowls and plates of local food. What I wanted was a pastry and a coffee, and that turned out to be the difficult thing to find in Shanghai. What I eventually ate was, I am fairly sure, crispy chicken. Or crispy something.

Then the two kilometres walk south to Yu Garden, which in the pressing heat felt longer. I bought the senior ticket. Always ask if you are over 65, since most places offer a discount and some will simply wave you through. Inside are traditional halls and rockeries and carp ponds and dragon walls, all folded into a space you would not think could hold them.

Yu Garden, and the man who took eighteen years over it

Yu Garden is a private Ming garden that a son built for his father, and it very nearly ruined him.

Pan Yunduan (1526 to 1601) was a Shanghai man who rose to be governor of Sichuan. He began the garden in 1559 as a retirement gift for his father, Pan En, a senior official, and did not finish it until 1577. Eighteen years is a long time to spend on a present, and the cost is generally held to have been a considerable strain on the family. Pan En died before it was done.

The name is usually read as the garden of peace and comfort, which was the point of it. After Pan Yunduan’s death it passed out of the family, and over the following centuries it was damaged, divided, sold off in pieces and repeatedly rebuilt. What you walk around today is a restoration of a restoration, which is true of nearly everything old in this city.

Afterwards I had a good lunch of pork and noodles, then went round the shops that surround the garden, a mix of souvenirs and genuine handicraft. The place was packed with Chinese families enjoying a Saturday out.

The second attempt

I walked back to the hotel, took a short nap, and set out again for sunset at the Bund. This time the weather held up its end. It was as crowded as the first evening, thousands of people along the rail. The sun came through at full strength for perhaps three minutes right before it set, and I got the photographs I had gone there for twice.

I stayed on for the blue hour, sitting down with a drink. The blue hour never really arrived. What did arrive, once it had properly gone dark, was a different picture and a reasonably good one, the buildings neon lit.

Walking home up Nanjing Road I was in far better shape than the night before, eager to stop at shops, look at a number of things, and buy none of them.

Dinner was spicy chicken, a little too spicy, at the same food court. I was back at the hotel around half past nine.

The wrong map

Another day, another hunt for breakfast, and this time I found the trick. There are usually coffee shops at the subway entrances selling exactly what I had been looking for. Coffee and a chocolate croissant. Health food.

The first stop of the day was Tianzifang, an arts neighbourhood a few subway stops away. The Shanghai subway is well signed and you pay by tapping your phone at the turnstile, so there was no difficulty getting there. At the far end Apple Maps told me I had a fifteen minute walk.

This is where the trouble started. Apple Maps got me close to Tianzifang and then led me completely astray, and I found myself outside an enormous hospital complex. I walked around it. Still no Tianzifang. I was getting hot, and stopped at a coffee shop just for the air conditioning.

Sitting there I worked out the problem. China requires approved maps to use its own coordinate system, which shifts every position by a few hundred metres in a direction that varies from place to place. Apps that convert properly are fine. Apple Maps is not one of them, and a few hundred metres is exactly enough to put a neighborhood inside a hospital. Switching to Amap fixed it. The detour had cost me an hour and a half.

Amap got me to Tianzifang, where I spent a couple of hours meandering all the artsy shops and stall. I had an excellent cashew chicken with rice for lunch, a lot of it, slightly spicy, and finished the lot. My first real meal since arriving in China.

Tianzifang, from lane housing to laneway shopping

Tianzifang is a block of 1930s Shanghai lane housing that survived by turning into an arts quarter, which was not the original plan for it.

The core of it is Zhicheng Fang, a shikumen residential complex from 1933, off Taikang Road in what used to be the French Concession, with small factories on the streets and abandoned warehouses in the alleys behind. Shikumen are the stone gate houses that were Shanghai’s ordinary housing for most of the twentieth century, and most of them have been demolished.

Artists moved in during the late 1990s because the rent was low. The wet market moved indoors in 1998, the area was formally redesignated as a creative quarter in 2001, and by 2006 it was successful enough that somebody proposed demolishing it. The painter Chen Yifei, who had a studio there, was prominent in the fight to keep it. The name is a pun on Tian Zifang, a figure from the Warring States period usually described as China’s first recorded artist, and was given to the alley by the painter Huang Yongyu.

I bought a selfie stick in an electronics shop for 85 yuan. Who knows, one day I may turn into a vlogger.

Further along I came across a young woman doing hand painting of a standard I did not expect to find in a lane full of souvenir stalls, so I photographed her working and bought one of her small paintings. She had learned a word of Swedish to greet me with. The word was our word for goodbye.

The discount nobody understood

From Tianzifang I took the subway to Jing’an Temple. At the ticket booth I asked about the senior discount. This resulted in confusion, then a request for my passport, then a short conference, and then they simply waved me in without taking any money at all. Normal admission is 50 yuan.

The temple is magnificent, set in the midst of a neighborhood of high-rises. I explored it slowly.

Jing’an Temple, which spent part of its life as a plastics factory

The building is new and the institution is not. It has been going, on one site or another, since the third century.

Jing’an Temple was founded in 247 AD, in the Kingdom of Wu during the Three Kingdoms period, on a site beside Suzhou Creek. It moved to its present position in 1216, under the Song. Everything after that is a cycle of destruction and rebuilding, and the most recent round is the sharpest: during the Cultural Revolution the temple was razed and the site turned into a plastics factory. It was returned to religious use and rebuilt from 1983.

Inside there is a 3.8 metre jade Buddha, said to be the largest seated jade Buddha in the country, a 15 tonne silver Buddha installed in 2009, a 3.5 tonne Ming dynasty copper bell, and stone Buddhas from the Southern and Northern Dynasties, which are around fifteen hundred years old and have outlived every building that has been put over them.

One hundred yuan, bones included

For my last Shanghai dinner I stayed on my little side street and picked a place offering chicken stir fry, which sounded manageable.

What came out was a pot. Not a plate, a giant pot, containing enough for two (or more) people, and the chicken was in pieces with the bones still in. The only implement on the table was a pair of chopsticks. I got through perhaps half of it. With the beer it came to 100 yuan, which for the quantity involved was not a bad deal at all, though it was not the meal I thought I was ordering.

Three days in Shanghai and the shape of the trip was becoming clear. The map was wrong. The meal was never quite what I ordered. But people were helpful and everything always turned out well.

Shanghai, good to know

Have your answers ready at immigration — the officer will want your first hotel and its address, a reason for coming, and ideally an onward route out of the country. “Sightseeing” plus a flight tfrom Hong Kong was enough for the visa-free thirty days.
Use Amap, not Apple Maps or Google Maps — approved maps in China use a coordinate system offset by a few hundred metres, and apps that do not convert for it will put you in the wrong building. Google is blocked on the mainland regardless. Amap has an English mode and is the one that works.
The Maglev is eight minutes from Pudong airport to Longyang Road — it is rated at 431 km/h but only runs that fast at peak hours, so expect 300. Buy the onward metro ticket before you go looking for the platform, not after.
The subway is well signed in English and you pay by tapping your phone at the turnstile — it is the cheapest and least stressful way to cross the city, including in from the airport if you skip the Maglev.
Always ask for the senior discount if you are over 65 — most places have one, some will not mention it, and at Jing’an Temple the question turned a 50 yuan ticket into no ticket at all. Have your passport out.
The Bund is crowded at sunset every night — go anyway, but go early enough to pick your spot, and stay past dark rather than leaving at the blue hour. Staying at a hotel within walking distance of it means a cloudy evening costs you nothing.
Breakfast is the hard meal for a foreigner — restaurants do bowls and plates of local food from early on, but if you want coffee and a pastry, the coffee shops at the subway entrances are the reliable answer.
Portions are for sharing unless you are told otherwise — a stir fry ordered for one arrived as a pot for two, bone-in, with chopsticks.