Take a Trip to Shanghai at Home

Your travel plans may have to wait, but with a little creativity, you can imagine you’re anywhere you want to be. As you dream of where your next trip may take you, our Bring Travel Home series will make you feel like you’re exploring another city in the world right now – from the comfort of home.

It’s been several years since my last visit to Shanghai – a lifetime when it comes to how dramatically a place can change in China. Consider that a 57–storey skyscraper can be built in 19 days while a major highway overpass can be demolished and fully replaced in 43 hours. A Chinese TV drama series I watched recently (more on that later) made me long to return to the city of my mother’s birth – to stroll through the historic foreign settlements, to eat my fill of street food, perhaps catch some “dancing aunties” showing off their moves in a Shanghai park and speaking Shanghainese, the distinctive but declining local dialect.

While you may not be able to feel the breeze come off the Huangpu River as you walk along The Bund, or have your tea served by a tea master or cháyì shī (茶艺师), there are other ways to escape the solitude of the pandemic and immerse yourself in the vibrancy of China’s most populous metropolis.

Take a virtual walk through the city

The great thing about armchair travelling is you don’t need to worry about things like traffic jams and directions on how to get across town. You can check out The Bund, known locally as Wàitān, a historical district in central Shanghai that runs along the Huangpu River, via Google Earth, a fun tool I like to play around with to visit new places or to show my kids just how vast and wondrous our world is. Google can also take you to the nearby Yu Garden, which was first built in 1559 during the Ming dynasty and was once a decadent 70–acre private garden. Head west and you will find the Shanghai Museum, which houses over a million cultural relics.

In a city dominated by skyscrapers, some of the loveliest parts of Shanghai for walking are the tree–lined streets and alleyways of the former French Concession and Shanghai International Settlement, foreign enclaves once inhabited by the French, British, and Americans, among other foreign residents. This was land governed and occupied by foreign powers during the 19th and early 20th centuries when Western colonialism and imperialism extended its exploitive reach into China. Why not take a proverbial stroll through images and blog posts? Many of the oldest structures are long gone, but a number of the buildings, lane houses (Shíkùmén 石库门), and grand villas built in the early 20th century still stand. Some were long ago partitioned into cramped living quarters that can house as many as 50 families, but in others the incredible architectural details are still intact, while others were torn down to make way for modernity.

For something more sobering, Life and Death in Shanghai by Nien Cheng is a compelling autobiography set during the Cultural Revolution that resonated for me on a personal level, having grown up hearing stories about the way the women in my family were persecuted during those tumultuous years. This account of Cheng’s own journey and courage helped me better understand the events that shaped the lives of my own family but is also a powerful and insightful narrative about one of the most turbulent and destructive periods in modern China.

Travel to Shanghai through film

Nothing captures Shanghai quite like seeing the city through the eyes of its people – both real and fictional. For a little bit of history, China’s 2020 blockbuster The Eight Hundred focuses on a group of Chinese soldiers that defended the Sihang warehouse in Shanghai against the invading Japanese army in 1937. Shot in IMAX, the film became the highest–grossing film in the world last year, pulling in US$461.3 million. But it wasn’t before adjustments were made to the film. It was pulled at the eleventh hour from the Shanghai International Film Festival in 2019 amid controversy over the heroic depiction of the Kuomintang forces, who were defeated more than a decade later by the Communist Party. If blockbuster films are not to your taste, Harbor from the Holocaust is an American PBS documentary about the nearly 20,000 Jewish refugees who settled in the city after fleeing Europe during World War II and the complex relationship between the disparate communities.

Stories tied to war may not be the escapism you’re looking for during a pandemic, in which case you can fast–forward to modern–day Shanghai. Germany’s Deutsche Welle, known as DW, produced a 26–minute documentary in 2018 called Shanghai: Life in the Megacity. It offers a glimpse of what it is like for the city’s 24 million inhabitants, told through a series of vignettes of those who call Shanghai home. If you’re up for something more ambitious, however, I Will Find You a Better Home (Ānjiā 安家) is the 53–episode Chinese drama that made me long to visit the city again. It’s a “slice of life” series released in 2020 that racked up a whopping four billion views. The show captures the socio–economic diversity of the people in Shanghai, where they live and how they live, told through the work and personal lives of an eclectic group of real estate agents.