Why these two
A short stop in Shanghai is usually spent looking at towers. This programme goes the other way and takes the two oldest inhabited fabrics the city still has: the walled old town around Yu Garden, and the shikumen lanes of Xintiandi. They are close enough to each other to be done properly in half a day, and both are reached without crossing the river.
We meet you at the airport or your airport hotel and drive in on the elevated road; the car stays with you throughout and returns you to the terminal in time for check-in.
Yu Garden and the old city
Yu Garden was begun in 1559 and enlarged in 1577 by Pan Yunduan, then a provincial administrator in Sichuan, who named it for the pleasure it would give his ageing parents. It was laid out by Zhang Nanyang, one of the great garden-makers of the Ming, and it is the only garden in Shanghai to be listed by the State Council among the first batch of National Key Cultural Relics Protection Units, in 1961. What survives is around thirty mu of the seventy-odd it once held, and it still contains more than forty named scenes - the Hall of Three Rices, the Hall of Heralding Spring, which served as the headquarters of the Small Swords Society uprising of 1853, the Hall of Ten Thousand Flowers and the great rockery. The jade rock Yulinglong in the courtyard is counted, with the Auspicious Cloud Peak in Suzhou's Lingering Garden and the Wrinkled Cloud Peak in Hangzhou, among the three celebrated garden stones of Jiangnan.
Around the garden, the lanes of the old city and the City God Temple bazaar are the densest concentration of snack stalls and small workshops in Shanghai, and the best place in the city to understand that a temple fair and a market were the same thing. Tickets to the garden are payable locally and are not in the price shown.
Lunch
A Shanghainese lunch in or near the old city.
Xintiandi and the shikumen lanes
The afternoon moves to Xintiandi, where the Republican-era shikumen lane houses were protected rather than demolished. The site was leased in June 1998 by a Hong Kong developer, built between 1999 and 2001 and fully opened in 2002, on three hectares with sixty thousand square metres of floor space; the northern block keeps most of the original brick and tile with the interiors rebuilt to modern standards, and the northern and southern halves are joined by a pedestrian street. Your guide explains what was actually saved and what was rebuilt - the distinction matters, and it is the reason this project changed how the whole city treats its lanes.
Meals
Lunch
Accommodation
Layover programme - no hotel night included.
