Where to stay in Shanghai

The former French Concession

You sleep better here than anywhere else in Shanghai, and it isn’t much argued: narrow streets with shading plane trees, art deco villas, cafés, restaurants and a human scale that doesn’t exist in the rest of this city. It’s the only place where you want to leave the hotel and walk with no destination.

There are small hotels built into old villas and there are ordinary chains, and it’s ten or fifteen minutes by metro from the Bund. The trade-off is the price, among the highest in the city, and that technically you aren’t “in the centre”, though in practice it doesn’t matter.

If it’s your first trip to China and you want a soft landing, this is the zone: it’s the part of China that most resembles something you recognise.

The Bund and Nanjing Road

Sleeping with a view of the river and the Pudong towers is what a lot of people want and it’s available: the Bund hotels are in the twenties buildings or right beside them, and the view is exactly the one from the photographs. You pay accordingly.

What to know: Nanjing Road, running west off the Bund, is one of the busiest shopping streets in the world, and that means a continuous river of people from morning to night. The Bund promenade fills up too. It’s an area to see rather than to be in.

And at night, once the coaches leave, there isn’t much around. It’s well worth it for one or two nights. For a week, it wears.

Jing’an

West of the centre, Jing’an is where Shanghai’s upper middle class lives and works: office towers, good restaurants, a gilded temple in the middle of it all, and tree-lined streets to the south already brushing the French Concession. It’s the part of the city that works without trying to be anything. It’s probably the best balance of price, location and real life: it’s on three metro lines, the Bund is ten minutes away and you eat well without paying river-view prices. There’s nothing to see except the temple, and that’s the point: it’s an area you’re in, not one you look at. A good choice for a trip of more than three or four nights.

Pudong

Across the river rise the tall hotels with Shanghai’s best views, because from here you see the Bund, which is what there is to see. The hotels occupy the upper floors of the towers and they’re excellent. It’s twenty minutes from Pudong airport by metro and one stop from the Bund.

And here’s the warning: Pudong is a financial district built from nothing in thirty years, and at nine in the evening it empties. There are no streets to stroll, no neighbourhood shops, no bar on the corner: there are eight-lane avenues and towers.

You eat at the hotel or you cross the river. Sleep here if you’re on business or if the view is literally the reason for the trip, otherwise you’ll be better off in Puxi.

Hongkou

North of Suzhou Creek, Hongkou doesn’t appear in guidebooks: fairly battered thirties buildings, street markets, older people playing mahjong on the pavement and prices that aren’t Shanghai’s. It’s a quarter of an hour from the Bund by metro. This is where the twenty thousand Jews fleeing Europe between 1938 and 1941 settled, and the museum telling that story is here, in the synagogue they used. It’s the cheapest area that’s still close, and the choice of anyone who wants to see an ordinary Chinese city rather than a postcard. There are no fashionable restaurants and no speciality coffee: there’s a city.