The argument of the day
Most Shanghai study programmes use the Shanghai Museum for the history of Chinese objects. This one goes after the history of the city itself, and it does it in two places: outdoors on the Bund, where the dates are written into the buildings, and indoors at the Shanghai History Museum, where the city's own collections make the same argument with objects.
The two are close enough to walk between in the course of a day, and the guide carries the narrative across both.
The Bund as a document
The Bund runs about 1,500 metres along the west bank of the Huangpu, and the western side of Zhongshan East No. 1 Road carries 52 historic buildings in seventeen varieties of European classical style - over 120 in all with those behind them - listed as a National Key Cultural Relics Protection Unit in November 1996. Walking them in order of date is the fastest way to see the city change. Your guide works through the sequence: the British consulate of 1873, the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank of 1923, the Customs House of 1927, Sassoon House of 1929, once the tallest building in the city, the Bank of China building of 1937, the only one on the row designed and built by Chinese architects, and the Bank of Communications building of 1948, the youngest. Each is a decision about what Shanghai expected to become.
Lunch
A local lunch near the Bund or on the way to the museum.
The Shanghai History Museum
The afternoon is spent in the museum on Nanjing West Road, in the former Shanghai Race Club building of 1933 - a British classical design by the firm of Moorhead and Halse, four storeys and a 53-metre clock tower. The museum is free and needs no booking. Its own history runs from a local gazetteer office of 1932 through a series of moves, before the race club building was restored and opened as the museum on 26 March 2018.
The permanent display is in two parts. The upper floor of the east building covers ancient Shanghai from the Majiabang culture of about 6,000 years ago through to the late Qing; the floors above cover the modern city from the opening as a treaty port in November 1843 to the liberation of Shanghai in May 1949, in seven sections. The collections run past a hundred thousand objects, of which about 1,100 are shown, and the building itself - with its clock tower and its horse-head ironwork on the stairs - is part of what you are there to look at.
Meals
Lunch
Accommodation
Day programme - no hotel night included.
