Book Shanghai attraction tickets

Few cities in the world compress so much ambition into a single skyline. Shanghai's Pudong district, which was largely farmland as recently as the early 1990s, now contains some of the tallest and most photographed towers on earth, a fact that says something essential about the city's relationship with speed and reinvention. The Oriental Pearl Radio and Television Tower, with its distinctive pink spheres stacked above the Huangpu River, was the symbol of that transformation when it opened in 1994, and it remains one of the most recognisable structures in Asia. Visitors who take the lift to its observation levels find the full panorama of both banks laid out below, a view that makes the sheer scale of modern Shanghai legible in a way that street level never quite manages.

Across the river, the Bund presents an entirely different face. The long riverside promenade is lined with European neoclassical and art deco facades built during Shanghai's era as an international treaty port, and the contrast between those stone-fronted banks and trading houses on the western bank and the glass towers of Pudong to the east is one of the great urban juxtapositions anywhere. The Bund is best understood not as a museum piece but as a working part of the city, busy with morning tai chi practitioners, afternoon tourists, and evening crowds who come for the illuminated skyline after dark.