Shanghai

• 1. Introduction

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  Shanghai counted 29,558,908 people in its urban area in 2025. That figure makes it the most populous city in China and the fifth-largest city in the world. A place this large began as a fishing village and market town. Why does a metropolis carry a name that places it upon the sea? What kind of ground can hold up the towers of a city like this? Who arrived here, who was forced out, and what did each wave leave behind? The answers begin with the name itself.

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• 2. What The Name Means

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  The name Shanghai joins two Chinese characters, shàng for "upon" and hǎi for "sea". Read together, they mean "On the Sea". The earliest appearance of the name dates to the 11th century, in the Song dynasty, when a river confluence and a town in the area already carried it. Some scholars argue that records mention the area 2150 years ago under the ancient name "Hu", which suggests a fishing settlement. In 1280 the place was renamed Shanghai, translated as "Above the Sea". People disputed how to read the name. Chinese historians reasoned that the land of modern Shanghai lay below sea level during the Tang dynasty, so it looked as though it sat on the water.

  Hù Dú, meaning "Harpoon Ditch", was a Jin-era name from the 4th or 5th century for the mouth of Suzhou Creek. In those days the creek was the main channel into the ocean. Its first character, Hù, is now the official abbreviation for Shanghai and appears on motor vehicle license plates issued in the municipality. Fishermen once made a tool called the hù, and it gave its name to the creek's outlet north of the Old City.

  Módū, glossed as "monster", "fiend" or "magical city", is a contemporary nickname. The Japanese novelist Shōfu Muramatsu first mentioned it in his 1924 work Mato. English speakers prefer the "New York of China", the "Pearl of the Orient" and the "Paris of the East". The first of these points to the city's role as a cosmopolitan megalopolis and financial hub.

  Shēn, or Shēnchéng meaning "Shen City", is an early name that comes from Lord Chunshen. He was a nobleman and prime minister of the state of Chu in the 3rd century BC, and his fief included modern Shanghai. The Huangpu River's former poetic name, the Chunshen River, gave the city that nickname. Huátíng was another early name. In AD 751, Zhao Juzhen, the governor of Wu Commandery, set up Huating County as the first county-level administration inside modern Shanghai. Local legend credits Lord Chunshen with more than a name, since it says he ordered the Huangpu River itself to be dug.

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• 3. Mud, Rivers And Weather

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  Skyscrapers in Shanghai rest on deep concrete piles, because the sandy soil is soft enough that a tower could otherwise sink. The ground itself was built by the Yangtze, which laid down sediment over time, and later by modern land reclamation projects. The city lies on the east coast at the Yangtze Estuary, with the Yangtze to the north, Hangzhou Bay to the south and the East China Sea to the east. Zhejiang borders it to the south, while Jiangsu lies to the west and north.

  Chongming Island holds the northernmost point of the municipality. After growing during the 20th century, it became the second-largest island in mainland China.

  Almost all of Shanghai's 6340.5 square kilometres of land is flat alluvial plain, with an average elevation of 4 m. A few hills, such as She Shan, rise in the southwest. The highest point is the peak of Dajinshan Island in Hangzhou Bay, at 103 m. Rivers, canals, streams and lakes are everywhere, and the area belongs to the Lake Tai drainage basin.

  The Huangpu River, a man-made tributary of the Yangtze, cuts through downtown. Puxi, on the west bank near the mouth of Suzhou Creek, was the historic center. That creek links the city with Lake Tai and the Grand Canal. The financial district of Lujiazui was founded on the east bank, in Pudong. Building Pudong International Airport destroyed local wetlands. Protecting and expanding a nearby shoal, Jiuduansha, as a nature preserve has partly made up for that loss.

  Shanghai has a humid subtropical climate with four distinct seasons, and downtown averages 17.5 °C across the year. Winters are damp, and northwesterly winds from Siberia can push night temperatures below freezing. The city averages 4.7 days of snowfall and 1.6 days of snow cover each year. Summers are hot and humid, with 21 days a year at or above 35 °C. Typhoons threaten in summer and at the start of autumn. Sunshine totals 1,754 hours a year, ranging from 28% of possible hours in June to 46% in August.

  The Xujiahui weather station recorded 40.9 °C on the 21st of July 2017 and again on the 13th of July 2022. On the 2nd of August 2024 it logged 32.1 °C, the highest daily minimum on record. The 2025 average there was 19.4 °C, which was 1.9 °C above the 1991-2020 average.

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• 4. A Port Opens

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  Qinglong Town, in modern Qingpu District, was founded in 746 and became a major trading port during the Tang and Song dynasties. Historians call it a "giant town of the Southeast". Ships carried goods between it, other provinces along the Yangtze and the coast, and foreign partners including Japan and Silla. By the end of the Song, trade had shifted downstream on the Wusong River to Shanghai. Shanghai rose from village to market town in 1074. A second sea wall in 1172 added to an earlier dike to steady the ocean coastline.

  From 1292 in the Yuan dynasty until 1927, central Shanghai was only a county under Songjiang Prefecture. Even so, the county built a wall in 1554-10 m high and 5 km around, to ward off raids by Japanese pirates. In 1602, during the Wanli reign, it received a City God Temple, an honor usually kept for prefectural capitals. Scholars guessed that the gift reflected the town's economic weight.

  Two decisions by Qing emperors then lifted the port. In 1684 the Kangxi Emperor reversed a ban on oceangoing vessels that dated to 1525. In 1732 the Qianlong Emperor moved Jiangsu's customs office from Songjiang to Shanghai. He also gave the town exclusive control of customs collection for the province's foreign trade. By 1735 Shanghai was the major trade port of the lower Yangtze, despite sitting at the lowest rung of the administrative ladder.

  British forces occupied the city during the First Opium War, which ended in 1842 with the Treaty of Nanking. The treaty opened Shanghai as one of five treaty ports. The Treaty of the Bogue, the Treaty of Wanghia and the Treaty of Whampoa followed between 1843 and 1844. Britain, France and the United States set up outside the walled city, which stayed under direct Chinese administration.

  Rebels from the Small Swords Society seized the Chinese-held Old City in 1853, and the Qing government regained it in February 1855. The Shanghai Municipal Council, created in 1854, managed the foreign settlements. Taiping rebels attacked twice between 1860 and 1862 and wrecked the eastern and southern suburbs, but could not take the city. The British settlement south of Suzhou Creek and the American settlement north of it merged in 1863 as the Shanghai International Settlement. France opted out of the council and kept its own concession in the south and southwest.

  The 1895 Treaty of Shimonoseki, which ended the First Sino-Japanese War, made Japan another foreign power in Shanghai. Japan built the first factories in the city, and other powers copied them. All this international activity earned the city the nickname "the Great Athens of China".

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• 5. Refuge And Upheaval

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  The Old City walls came down in 1912 because they blocked the growth of the city. In July 1921, the Chinese Communist Party was founded inside the Shanghai French Concession. On the 30th of May 1925, a Japanese foreman shot and killed a worker in a Japanese-owned cotton mill. That set off the May Thirtieth Movement. Workers launched general strikes against imperialism, and the protests spread nationwide and gave rise to Chinese nationalism.

  Shanghai became a municipality on the 7th of July 1927, after separating from Jiangsu. The new Chinese municipality covered 494.69 square kilometres and included Baoshan, Yangpu, Zhabei, Nanshi and Pudong. Led by a Chinese mayor and municipal council, it carried out the Greater Shanghai Plan to build a new city center in Jiangwan town, in Yangpu, outside the foreign concessions. In the 1930s the city became a commercial and financial hub of the Asia-Pacific region.

  Foreigners who stayed for long periods called themselves "Shanghailanders". Almost 20,000 White Russians fled the newly established Soviet Union during the 1920s and 1930s and formed the second-largest foreign community. By 1932 Shanghai was the fifth-largest city in the world and home to 70,000 foreigners. In the 1930s roughly 30,000 Jewish refugees from Europe also arrived.

  Japanese forces invaded on the 28th of January 1932. More than 10,000 shops and hundreds of factories and public buildings were destroyed, and Zhabei district lay in ruins. About 18,000 civilians were killed, injured or declared missing. A ceasefire came on the 5th of May. The Battle of Shanghai in 1937 led to the occupation of the Chinese-administered areas outside the International Settlement and the French Concession. Residents who stayed endured hunger, oppression or death. Japan occupied the foreign concessions on the 8th of December 1941 and held them until its surrender in 1945.

  In 1939, Horace Kadoorie, head of a powerful philanthropic Sephardic Jewish family in the city, founded the Shanghai Jewish Youth Association. It gave refugees an English education so they would be ready to emigrate. During the occupation, Chiune Sugihara, a Japanese vice-consul in Lithuania, issued thousands of visas to Jewish refugees escaping the Holocaust. The Japanese government moved many of them to Shanghai by November 1941, and others came from Italy. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, the refugees were interned in the Shanghai Ghetto in Hongkou District. Their community centered on the Ohel Moishe Synagogue, now the Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum. When Japan surrendered, the Chinese Army liberated the Ghetto, and most Jews left over the following years.

  On the 27th of May 1949, the People's Liberation Army took control of the city through the Shanghai Campaign. Shanghai stayed one of only three municipalities that were not merged into neighboring provinces, along with Beijing and Tianjin. Most foreign firms moved their offices to Hong Kong. From 1949 to 1952, agricultural output rose 51.5% and industrial output rose 94.2%.

  During the Cultural Revolution, from 1966 to 1976, Shanghai society was severely damaged. Most workers in the Shanghai branch of the People's Bank of China were Red Guards, who formed a group called the Anti-Economy Liaison Headquarters. The group dismantled economic organizations, investigated bank withdrawals and disrupted regular service. Even so, the city kept production going, with positive annual growth.

  On the 5th of April 2022, during a large COVID-19 outbreak, the government locked down the entire city. Disrupted supply chains caused widespread food shortages. The restrictions were lifted on the 1st of June.

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• 6. Stone Gates And Skylines

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  The Bund runs along the bank of the Huangpu River and is lined with early 20th-century buildings. They range from the neoclassical HSBC Building to the Art Deco Sassoon House, now part of the Peace Hotel. The area has been revitalized several times. The first effort came in 1986, with a new promenade by the Dutch architect Paulus Snoeren. The second came before the 2010 Expo and included restoring the century-old Waibaidu Bridge and reconfiguring traffic flow.

  The construction boom of the 1920s and 1930s left the city with several Art Deco buildings. László Hudec, a Hungarian-Slovak who lived in Shanghai from 1918 to 1947, designed the Park Hotel, the Grand Cinema and the Paramount. Clement Palmer and Arthur Turner designed the Peace Hotel, the Metropole Hotel and the Broadway Mansions. The Austrian architect C.H. Gonda designed the Capitol Theatre.

  The shikumen residence takes its name from Chinese words meaning "stone storage door". These are typically two- or three-story gray brick houses whose front yard is guarded by a heavy wooden door set in a stone arch. Rows of them are joined along straight alleys known as longtang.

  Stalinist architecture also marks the city. Most of it went up between the founding of the People's Republic in 1949 and the Sino-Soviet Split in the late 1960s, when Soviet personnel came to help build a communist state. The Shanghai Exhibition Center is one example of this Soviet neoclassical style.

  The Shanghai Tower, completed in 2015, is the tallest building in China and the third tallest in the world. Other skyscrapers include the Jin Mao Tower and the Shanghai World Financial Center. The Oriental Pearl Tower, at 468 m, stands near them at the northern tip of Lujiazui. Despite rampant redevelopment, the Old City still keeps traditional designs, including the Yu Garden, an elaborate garden in the Jiangnan style.

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• 7. Reform And Money

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  In 1990, Deng Xiaoping allowed Shanghai to begin economic reforms that brought foreign capital back and built up the Pudong district. Lujiazui was born from that effort. The central government named Shanghai the "Dragon Head" of reform and opening up that same year. Earlier, during the Cold War, trade had been mostly limited to socialist countries in the Eastern Bloc, and the city's global influence had faded.

  The figures show the scale of what followed. Annual GDP was 0.027 trillion yuan in 1978 and 3.816 trillion yuan in 2019. The city recorded double-digit GDP growth in almost every year from 1992 to 2008, before the financial crisis.

  The Shanghai Stock Exchange is the largest in China and the fourth-largest in the world. Shanghai ranks eighth globally and third in Asia on the Global Financial Centres Index. In 2021 it ranked as the second Fintech powerhouse in the world after New York City. In 2009, the Shanghai Futures Exchange ranked first globally in trading volume for six key commodities, including rubber, copper and zinc. By the end of 2017, the city had 1,491 financial institutions, 251 of them foreign-invested.

  In September 2013, the city launched the Shanghai Free-Trade Zone, the first in mainland China. It covers 240.22 square kilometres and joins four existing bonded zones. They are Waigaoqiao Free Trade Zone, Waigaoqiao Free Trade Logistics Park, Yangshan Free Trade Port Area and Pudong Airport Comprehensive Free Trade Zone. Goods entering the zone are exempt from duty and customs clearance. The Banker reported that Shanghai drew the highest volume of financial-sector foreign direct investment in the Asia-Pacific region in 2013.

  Baosteel Group, China's largest steelmaker, is based in Shanghai. So are the Hudong-Zhonghua Shipbuilding Group, China's largest shipbuilding base, and the Jiangnan Shipyard, one of its oldest shipbuilders. SAIC Motor, one of the three largest automotive corporations in China, has strategic partnerships with Volkswagen and General Motors. It ranked 84 on the Fortune Global 500 list in 2023. As of 2024, Shanghai is home to 13 Fortune Global 500 companies, the fourth-highest number of any city.

  In 2009 and 2012-15-year-old students from Shanghai ranked first in math, reading and science in the Program for International Student Assessment. In the 2025 Nature Index, the city ranked second globally, after Beijing, for scientific research output. New York University Shanghai, which opened in 2012, was the first China-U.S. joint venture university.

  Yangshan Port was built in 2005 because the river could not dock large container ships. The 32 km Donghai Bridge connects it to the mainland. In 2010 the Port of Shanghai became the world's busiest container port, and it moved 42 million TEU in 2018. The Shanghai International Port Group runs the port, yet it belongs administratively to Shengsi County in Zhejiang.

  The Shanghai Metro opened in 1993 and is the longest network in the world. It has 19 lines, 508 stations and 808 km of track, not counting the maglev and the Jinshan railway. Daily ridership hit a record 13.3 million on the 8th of March 2019. The maglev train, which opened in 2004, is the first and fastest commercial high-speed maglev in the world, with a maximum speed of 430 km/h.

  New private cars cannot be driven without a license plate, and plates are sold in monthly auctions. Around 9,500 plates go on sale each month. The policy was introduced to limit the growth of automobile traffic and ease congestion. Even so, the city counted 3.40 million private cars in 2019, a rise of 12.5% from 2018.

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• 8. Tongue, Table And Screen

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  Shanghainese belongs to the Taihu Wu subgroup of the Wu Chinese language family, and Mandarin speakers cannot understand it. It descends from the indigenous Wu of the former Songjiang prefecture and was shaped by Suzhounese and Ningbonese. Before the city expanded, the local speech was called "the local tongue", a name now used only in the suburbs. In the late 19th century, a downtown Shanghainese emerged and replaced Suzhounese as the prestige dialect of the Yangtze River Delta. Most immigrants then came from Jiangsu and Zhejiang, whose dialects influenced it most.

  After 1949, the government promoted Putonghua, or Standard Mandarin, and it left its mark on Shanghainese. Since the 1990s, migrants from outside the Wu-speaking region have arrived for education and jobs, and they use Putonghua as a lingua franca. About 40.3% of residents, or 9.8 million people, come from other regions of China. Fluency among young speakers has weakened. In recent years, movements within the city have tried to protect the local language from fading out.

  The culture of the city blends two streams, Wuyue culture and the "East Meets West" Haipai culture. Beijing writers coined the term Haipai in 1920 to criticize Shanghai scholars for admiring capitalism and Western culture. Haipai influence reaches literature, fashion, architecture, music and cuisine.

  Benbang cuisine originated in the 1600s and uses condiments heavily while keeping the original flavors of its ingredients. Sugar, especially paired with soy sauce, is a key ingredient. Its signature dishes include xiaolongbao, red braised pork belly and Shanghai hairy crab. Haipai cuisine borrows from French, British, Russian, German and Italian cooking and adapts it to local taste. It gave the city a Shanghai-style borscht with the Chinese name for "Russian soup", crispy pork cutlets and a Shanghai salad derived from Olivier salad.

  The Difficult Couple, made in 1913, was China's first short film, and An Orphan Rescues His Grandfather, made in 1923, was its first fictional feature. Both were produced in Shanghai. The film industry grew in the early 1930s and produced stars such as Hu Die, Ruan Lingyu, Zhou Xuan, Jin Yan and Zhao Dan. Filmmakers and actors who went into exile during the Second Sino-Japanese War and the Communist revolution helped shape the Hong Kong film industry. The Shanghai International Film Festival, founded in 1993, is one of the nine major international film festivals in the A category.

  UNESCO has recognized Shanghai as a "City of Design" since February 2010. In the early 21st century, the city has also become a source of influence and inspiration for cyberpunk culture.

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