Shanghai

The currency is the yuan renminbi (CNY, ¥), at about 6.9 to the dollar in 2026. Practically everything is paid by QR code: Alipay and WeChat Pay have accepted foreign Visa and Mastercard cards since 2023, but registration requires SMS and a passport photo, so install and test it before you fly; at the counter, with a line behind you, is not the time to find this out. The limit for foreign cards is US$5,000 per transaction and US$50,000 per year. Cash is still legally accepted, but small shops may not have change for 100-yuan bills; ATMs at the Bank of China and ICBC accept international cards. 2026 price ranges: coffee 15–35 CNY (local chains like Luckin run 10 to 16), street breakfast 8–15, noodle or rice lunch at a neighborhood shop 15–25, dinner at a mid-range restaurant 100–200 per person, a drink at a Bund rooftop 100–150, subway 3–9 downtown and up to 15 on long lines, a taxi ride across downtown 30–60, a three-star hotel night 400–900. Tipping doesn't exist at restaurants, taxis, or hotels. Public museums, including the Shanghai Museum and the Shanghai East Museum, don't charge admission.

Airports: 2, not interchangeable

The city has two airports and they're not interchangeable, which is worth memorizing before buying a ticket: Pudong (PVG) is about 40km to the east and handles the international flights; Hongqiao (SHA) is 13km to the west, almost entirely domestic, and sits right next to the Hongqiao railway station. Between the two it's 55km and about 1 hour 30 minutes by subway, so check the code before locking in a connection. From Pudong, the maglev covers the 30km to Longyang Road station in about 8 minutes, at 300 km/h, for about 50 CNY: 40 with the same-day boarding pass; there you switch to subway lines 2, 7, 16, and 18. Line 2 goes straight downtown in 60 to 75 minutes, sometimes with a transfer at Guanglan Road, and a taxi to the Bund costs around 200 CNY in 50 to 70 minutes. From Hongqiao station, bullet trains leave for Suzhou (25 minutes), Hangzhou (45 to 60 minutes), Nanjing (1 hour 10 minutes), and Beijing (4 hours 20 minutes to 4 hours 40 minutes).

The world's largest network: 800 km and 500 stations

The subway opened in 1993 and today runs over 800km with more than 500 stations across about 20 lines, the largest network in the world, with daily traffic close to 10 million trips. It operates from 5:30am to 10:30pm–11pm, with some lines extended on Friday and Saturday; every entrance has baggage X-ray, which adds a minute or two that nobody factors into their planning. The fare starts at 3 CNY up to 6km and rises 1 CNY every additional 10km: downtown it runs 3 to 9 CNY, and on the long lines it reaches 15 CNY. You pay by QR code inside Alipay, WeChat, or the Metro Daduhui app, with a public transit card, or with the 1-, 3-, or 7-day Shanghai Pass, which gives unlimited rides on the subway, buses, and ferries. Buses cost 2 CNY, the ferries that cross the Huangpu also 2 CNY and are worth more than the tourist tunnel. Taxis have a 16 CNY flag fall for the first 3km and about 2.9 CNY/km, with a night surcharge between 11pm and 5am; DiDi has an English interface and avoids the spoken-address problem, which rarely works well by voice. Shared bikes require a Chinese app with real-name registration. On foot, the old French Concession, the Bund, and Jing'an work well; Pudong doesn't.

Shanghai has a very low violent-crime rate for a city of about 24.9 million people, and walking alone at night downtown is routine for residents. There are three real risks. The first is traffic: electric scooters are silent, drive against traffic, and ride up on the sidewalk, and you won't hear one coming. The second is two old scams, run on East Nanjing Road, the Bund, and People's Square: the invitation to a “tea ceremony” and the invitation from “art students” to see a gallery, both of which end in a bill for thousands of yuan; the practical rule is not to follow strangers who approach you in English offering an address. The third is unlicensed taxis at airports and stations: use the official line or DiDi and check that the meter was turned on. Pickpockets show up in holiday crowds, and crowd density is the city's historic risk: the crush on the Bund at the turn of 2014 into 2015 killed 36 people, and the public countdown was canceled for good. Avoid photographing military installations and police operations; VPN use is tolerated in practice, but it isn't legal.

Pay with your phone

Alipay and WeChat Pay cover almost everything, from the subway to the street market. Link an international card before you travel, since registration needs an SMS and passport verification, and carry a few 10 and 20 CNY bills for street carts and older buses.

Bring your passport to public museums

Entry to public museums is logged by ID, and at the Shanghai East Museum, in Pudong, the physical passport doubles as the ticket.

Carry your passport

Hotels, trains, SIM cards, museum turnstiles and some cafés require real-name registration, and most systems scan the physical document. A photocopy or a photo on your phone is usually not accepted.

Don't tip

Restaurants, taxis, hotels and guides don't work on tips, and offering one can read as a mistake or something you forgot to collect. Large bills at hotels may already carry a 10–15% service charge built in.

The table is shared

Dishes go in the center and whoever invited orders for everyone; refusing food already placed on your plate is ruder than refusing a second helping. Don't stick your chopsticks upright in your rice (it echoes funeral incense) and pour tea for your neighbor before pouring your own.

Look twice before crossing

Scooters make no noise at all, and that changes how you cross the street here. A green pedestrian light doesn't stop cars from turning right, so look both ways even on a crosswalk.

Arriving without Alipay or a VPN

Arriving without Alipay or WeChat Pay set up and without having sorted out the internet. Google, Gmail, WhatsApp, Instagram, and most Western services don't open on the Chinese network, and the local app stores don't sell VPNs. Set up payment before you board and, if you depend on those services, install a VPN too, because once you've landed it's too late; VPN use is tolerated in practice, but it isn't legal.

Pudong and Hongqiao are 55 km apart

Mixing up Pudong (PVG) with Hongqiao (SHA). They're 55 km apart, about 1 hour 30 minutes by subway, and many international-to-domestic connections switch airports without a clear warning on the ticket.

Carry the address in characters on your phone

Counting on English outside the hotels. Taxis, markets, and most neighborhood restaurants work only in Chinese; carry the address in characters on your phone screen and use a camera translator for the menu.

The Bund at night on a national holiday

Going to the Bund at night on a national holiday expecting a quiet stroll. On October 1 and New Year's there's crowd control, one-way lanes, and a line to get onto the promenade; the civilized hour is before 9am.

The 240-hour transit without a confirmed onward ticket

Using the 240-hour visa-free transit without a confirmed ticket to a third country. The exemption requires an outbound ticket to a destination different from your origin within the time limit. The boarding counter checks this, not immigration on arrival.

你好: nǐ hǎo (ni rrão)

Hello

谢谢: xièxie (siê-siê)

Thank you

多少钱？: duōshao qián (duô-sháo tchién)

How much is it?

买单: mǎidān (mái-dan)

The bill, please

我不吃辣: wǒ bù chī là (uô bu tchr lá)

I don't eat spicy food

侬好: nong hó

Hello in Shanghainese, used among older residents

A delta plain four meters up

Shanghai covers 6,340 km² of alluvial plain in the Yangtze delta, with an average elevation of around 4 meters; the highest natural point is She Shan hill, at 99 m, 30 km from the center.

The Huangpu, Suzhou Creek, and Chongming

The Huangpu River, about 113 km long, cuts through the city from south to north and flows into the Yangtze at Wusongkou, setting the basic divide between Puxi (the west bank, where everything predating 1990 stands) and Pudong (the east bank, almost all of it later). Suzhou Creek, once called the Wusong River, enters from the west and meets the Huangpu right at the northern tip of the Bund, and that confluence explains why the foreign banks settled there. Chongming Island, in the middle of the river mouth, covers about 1,267 km² and is China's third-largest island.

Subsidence, walls, and a mosaic of street grids

Because the subsoil is soft sediment and the city pumped groundwater until the 1960s, some areas sank more than two meters, which is why flood walls hide the river from anyone not on the promenade. Each era left its own grid, and you can tell where you are by the street layout: short blocks and curved streets in the old French Concession, grid-pattern commercial streets in the old International Settlement, formed in 1863 by the merger of the British and American settlements, and 500m superblocks in Pudong. Over all of it run four ring roads (Inner, Middle, Outer, and the suburban ring), crossed by elevated roads like Yan'an and Nan-Bei.

Shanghai, the capital of Chinese cinema before 1949

Shanghai was the capital of Chinese cinema before 1949: the city's studios produced “The Goddess” (1934), starring Ruan Lingyu, and sustained a press and advertising industry whose posters still circulate as iconography. The literature that explains it is local and easy to find: Mao Dun wrote “Midnight” (1933) about the stock exchange and the factories; Eileen Chang published the city's occupied-era stories between 1943 and 1947; Wang Anyi won the Mao Dun Prize in 2000 with “The Song of Everlasting Sorrow,” which follows an alley-house resident from 1945 to the 1980s. The Shanghai International Film Festival, a FIAPF Category A event since 1994, runs for two weeks in June and sells tickets online that vanish in minutes.

The 1879 orchestra and November's art-market weekend

In music and the visual arts the city runs at two speeds. The Shanghai Symphony Orchestra, founded in 1879 as a municipal band and Asia's oldest, has played since 2014 in a hall designed by Arata Isozaki on Fuxing Zhong Road; the Shanghai Grand Theatre, from 1998, on People's Square, hosts opera and dance. On the other side, the contemporary art market crowds into a single November weekend that stirs up the whole city. The live music scene is small and keeps changing addresses; it's worth checking the weekly listings rather than looking for fixed venues.

The tennis Masters in October and the Formula 1 GP

Three annual events mark Shanghai's sports calendar: the tennis Masters, in October, at Qizhong Stadium; the Shanghai Marathon, which closes down the center in November; and the Formula 1 Chinese Grand Prix, held since 2004 at the Shanghai International Circuit, in Jiading. In soccer, Shanghai Port and Shanghai Shenhua split the city's fans. Outside the stadiums, locals meet at the café more than at the bar, and Shanghai has the highest concentration of coffee shops in the world, with estimates above 9,000 addresses, which explains the string of counters along the streets of the old French Concession.

The Song of Everlasting Sorrow, by Wang Anyi (1995)

Follows an alley-house resident from 1945 to the 1980s and shows what's left of the concession-era city under the socialist one. Won the Mao Dun Prize in 2000.

Flowers of Shanghai, by Hou Hsiao-hsien (1998)

Shot entirely in the interiors of 19th-century courtesan houses, with dialogue in Shanghainese. It explains the economy of favors, debts and patience that the city inherited from the concession years.

Stories by Eileen Chang, Zhang Ailing (1943–1947)

“Love in a Fallen City” and her other stories were written inside occupied Shanghai, in real time. They're the direct source for much of what Chinese cinema still says about the city today.