About Shanghai

Shanghai is probably the most evocative city for an outsider in the whole of China. Beijing may be more purely, mysteriously Chinese but only Shanghai offers such a heady brew of half-digested images and preconceptions.

For the second city of the world’s oldest surviving ancient civilization, Shanghai is surprisingly new. Literally ‘On the Sea’, Shanghai is a port city on the Huangpu River, where the Yangzi River empties into the East China Sea.

The area was marshland until the Song Dynasty (AD 960-1126), when refugees from Mongol and other northern nomad invasions settled the area. By 1291, Shanghai had become a county capital.