People's Square

The 1933-34 Shanghai Race Club — clock tower, members' staircases, the grandstand that once looked over the racecourse — is now the city's history museum. The building is the first exhibit: everything you see on People's Square, the park, the museums, the avenue, was the racecourse's turf until 1951. Free, no booking since May 2023, closed Mondays, with a fifth-floor rooftop garden over the square and a café in the West Building.

The city explaining itself: four exhibition floors on the square (rebuilt 2020-22) that walk you from the walled town to the 2035 plan, with a 5D digital model of the whole city as the centrepiece. Free, but every visit must be booked by name through the hall's WeChat official account, whose notice — unusually — lists passports as an accepted ID. English audio guides are available for rent. Closed Wednesdays. The best first stop if you want to understand what you are looking at for the rest of the trip.

Hudec's 1933 cinema on Nanjing West Road — long horizontal lines, a glass tower that was lit like a lantern, an auditorium restored in 2009 and refitted again in 2024-25 — and it still shows films every day. The surest way in is a ticket for a screening in Hall 1, the historic main auditorium (now a LUXE screen); the lobby, the staircases and the 'L.E.HUDEC' cipher in the marble floor come with it.

The 1917 amusement palace with the wedding-cake tower at the Xizang Rd / Yan'an Rd corner — the byword for Shanghai's demi-monde in the gangster Huang Jinrong's years. It closed 2003-17, reopened as an intangible-heritage showcase, and since March 2023 has been free to walk into, with 26 small stages selling their own tickets (over 5,000 shows a year, tourism bureau 2025). Regular hours are the one thing no official page states — platforms say 11:00-23:00. Go past it, look up, and check the '上海大世界' mini-program for what is on.

A restaurant street behind the Park Hotel — 755 m long with close to a hundred restaurants at its 1990s peak (district government) — that the 2024 television series 'Blossoms Shanghai' turned into a pilgrimage overnight. Know two things before you come: the street you saw on screen is a one-to-one replica at the Chedun film park in Songjiang, not this road; and the rush of early 2024 has passed. What is real here: Yang's pan-fried buns at No. 97, the Park Hotel's butterfly-pastry window, Jia Jia soup dumplings at No. 127, and the 1990s restaurant fronts the series was about.

The glass former conservatory in People's Park that housed Shanghai's first private contemporary-art museum from 2005 is closed: 'MoCA Shanghai is currently undergoing relocation and spatial upgrades, and is temporarily closed to the public' (official site, undated). The museum's own exhibition archive shows the last show in this building closed on 15 February 2025, so the closure is recent, not years old. No new address and no reopening date have been published. Whether the small MoCA Pavilion by Gate 7 at 215 Nanjing West Rd is still operating during the closure is not stated officially.

László Hudec's 1934 hotel on the north edge of the old racecourse — 83.8 m, called the tallest building in the Far East when it opened and the tallest in Shanghai until 1983 — and still a working hotel. Two reasons to stop: the marble marker in the lobby's history room where, in 1950, the city fixed the origin of its coordinate system on the flagpole above (opened to the public, though visiting hours for non-guests are not published), and the Fansheng pastry window on the Huanghe Rd side that sells the butterfly pastries half the city queues for (about ¥30 a bag, city guide 2026).

The north half of the old racecourse, opened as a public park in October 1952: trees, a lake, the glass former conservatory that housed MoCA Shanghai (now closed for relocation), and at weekends the 'marriage market' — parents lining the paths with umbrellas pinned with their children's CVs. Free; the city's park list gives 5:00-22:00. The market is a real family affair, not a show: look, do not point a camera at faces or papers.

The 1930 Nanking Theatre, a neoclassical hall that in 2003 was jacked up 3.38 m and rolled 66.46 m south-east to clear the way for the Yan'an Road works — the whole building, finished on 17 June 2003, then the largest relocation in the city's history. Three cheap ways in: 'Music Afternoon Tea' lunchtime concerts on weekdays at ¥30 (usually South Hall, Gate 1; one ticket per ID card, sold in batches on the hall's mini-program), ¥30 self-guided visits, and 'Explore the Palace' guided tours — all booked through the mini-program.

Read this before you come for the bronzes: they are not here. From 9 July 2026 to 14 November 2027 the People's Square building is given over entirely to 'Top of the World Tree', billed by the museum as the largest exhibition of ancient American civilisations ever staged (1,129 lots, nearly 3,000 objects from Mexico, Peru and Chinese collections), and shows nothing else. The permanent Chinese collection — bronzes, ceramics, calligraphy — is at the East Building in Pudong. Here you buy a ticket (¥148 full, ¥135 on designated days, ¥74 concession), book by name, and enter from the south gate on Wusheng Road.