Shanghai was a walled Ming county seat for 400 years before 1842 forced it open to the world. Three days trace the arc: Ming temples and city-wall remnants, the treaty-port concessions and wartime refuge of Hongkou, then the lilong alleyways where revolutions were plotted.
Built 1294 under the Yuan and moved to this Old City site in 1855, the Wen Miao survived the Small Swords Society uprising that used it as headquarters. Its Kuixing Pavilion and 300-year-old gingko sit around a stone-tablet courtyard. Open 09:00–16:30.
Shanghai's oldest surviving vegetarian house, founded 1910 beside the Old City temples to feed Buddhist pilgrims. Wheat-gluten 'mock eel', vegetarian crab roe made from carrot and potato, and su ya 'duck' in bean curd skin. Mains ¥30–70.
The only surviving fragment of Shanghai's 1553 city wall, raised in 50 days against Japanese wokou pirate raids. Fifty metres of rampart and the Guandi temple pavilion above it, with a scale model of the walled county town inside. Open 09:00–16:00.
Founded 1600 by Pan Yunduan, the same official who built Yu Garden, to house an aloeswood Guanyin statue. Destroyed in the Taiping era and rebuilt; now home to a working community of Buddhist nuns whose evening chanting starts around 16:30.
Set in the 1927 Ohel Moishe Synagogue, this museum records the 20,000 Jews who fled Nazi Europe to the one port that required no visa. A wall of names lists 18,578 refugees confined to the Hongkou 'Designated Area' after 1943. Open 09:00–17:00.
A 550-metre lane where Lu Xun, Mao Dun and Guo Moruo lived in the 1930s and founded the League of Left-Wing Writers at No. 2 Duolun. Bronze statues of the writers stand outside the Hongde Temple, a 1928 church built in Chinese palace style.
Housed in the 1934 Shanghai Race Club building on People's Square, where the British ran horses until 1941. Four floors cover fishing-village origins to 1949, including the pair of bronze lions from the HSBC Bund building. Free, closed Mondays.
Victor Sassoon's 1929 art-deco tower, the tallest in Asia when built, where Noël Coward wrote Private Lives in four days with influenza. The Old Jazz Band has played the lobby bar since 1980, its members averaging over 80 years old.
A shikumen house at 76 Xingye Lu where 13 delegates, Mao among them, founded the Communist Party in July 1921 before police forced them onto a boat in Jiaxing. The restored meeting room holds the original teacups and 13 stools. Passport required.
A 1930s shikumen residential block that became a factory district, then in 1998 an artists' quarter after painter Chen Yifei took a studio here. Residents still hang laundry above the lanes — the only lilong where daily life and shops coexist.
The 1920 house at 7 Xiangshan Lu where Sun and Song Qingling lived from 1918 until his death in 1925, and where he met the Comintern envoy who reshaped the Kuomintang. Furniture and 2,700 books remain as Song arranged them. Open 09:00–16:30.
László Hudec's 1924 flatiron block anchors the former Route Ferguson, a plane-tree avenue of French Concession villas: Ba Jin's house at No. 113, where he wrote for 40 years, and Huang Xingzeng's mansion at No. 117.