Xintiandi & Tianzifang

Three things under one museum: the original shikumen house on Xingye Road where the Communist Party of China held its first congress on 23 July 1921, the large memorial and exhibition hall opened next to it in 2021, and the Oath Hall between — the museum's own English page describes them as three parts of one site. Free, no reservation, six free guided tours a day, security check at the door, closed Mondays, national 5A attraction. For foreign visitors it is the easiest major political-history site in the city to walk into — and the exhibition is worth an hour for the story of Shanghai in the 1920s, whatever you think of the politics.

Three lanes of 1930s shikumen houses off Taikang Road that artists and then shops colonised from the late 1990s without anyone demolishing anything — the opposite of Xintiandi. Ground floors are cafés, craft stalls and studios; upper floors are still homes, with washing on poles above your head. It is charming for an hour and exhausting for two: the alleys are a shoulder's width, shops turn over constantly, and the residents did not ask for you.

The 2001 project that invented 'shikumen chic': two blocks of 1920s stone-gate lane houses gutted and rebuilt as an open-air mall of restaurants, bars and flagship stores, with the Party's founding house preserved at one corner. It looks like old Shanghai and functions like a luxury mall — that is both the point and the complaint.

The shikumen house at 127 Taicang Road where nine out-of-town delegates to the 1921 congress lodged, restored and now open as a free museum — a companion to the First Congress site 200 m away. It is the one venue on this corner that runs on reservation, and its booking rules are unusually explicit: real-name, 1-7 days ahead in the memorial's WeChat mini-program, with passports listed as a valid document.

The French Concession's public park of 1909 — formal beds and a fountain in the French manner in the north, a rock garden and lawns in the south, plane trees all over. Free, and since its walls came down in 2022 listed as open all day. Its two lives share one fence: pensioners dancing, playing cards and doing tai chi from dawn, and a night-time amusement zone and nightlife on its eastern edge. The Marx-and-Engels statue watches both.

A 1920s shikumen house in Xintiandi's North Block furnished as a 1930s family home. A May 2023 newspaper article already described it as 'now closed'; no operator notice of closure or reopening has been found since, and pages claiming it is open are AI-generated collages. Placeholder entry — do not plan around it.

Garden villas of the 1920s-30s on Sinan Road and Fuxing Middle Road — 49 of the original 51 kept in a 2010 restoration as a hotel-restaurant-bookshop quarter — the polished end of the villa district, with a weekend market and open lawns between the houses. Two bookshops carry the name: Sinan Books in the villa at 517 Fuxing Middle Road, and Sinan Books · Poetry Store in a converted Russian Orthodox church on Gaolan Road, which is the one to see.

Three shikumen houses in a lane off Madang Road: the best-preserved office of the Provisional Government of the Republic of Korea, founded in Shanghai in April 1919. The government moved through more than ten addresses before settling here in July 1926, and left in April 1932 after the Hongkou Park bombing. For Korean visitors the most important site in Shanghai, and 2026 is its centenary year. Open again after an August-September 2026 maintenance closure, with weekday hours split by a lunch break and no closing day.

The two-storey villa on Xiangshan Road (then Rue Molière) where Sun Yat-sen and Soong Ching-ling lived from 1918 to 1924 — the house where he wrote 'The International Development of China' and met the Comintern's envoys. Kept with the family's furniture; a small exhibition hall next door. Ten yuan, closed Mondays, opposite Fuxing Park — and prone to short closures, so check the museum's notice board online before walking over.

The 1920s villa at 73 Sinan Road that housed the Communist delegation's Shanghai office in 1946-47, with Zhou Enlai's rooms upstairs — run by the First Congress Memorial, and the easiest museum in the district: free, no booking, six free guided tours a day, a Chinese-English audio guide, and a garden that stays open until 21:00 in summer. The one place on this villa street you can walk into after dinner.