Shanghai China 6 Day Itinerary

Six days across Shanghai, planned without inventing street addresses for restaurants that may or may not exist at those coordinates, which is a surprisingly common failure mode of itineraries written for this city.

Day 1: Arrival and French Concession

Land at Pudong or Hongqiao. Skip the Maglev unless you want the novelty ride; it only reaches Longyang Road station, still a Metro Line 2 transfer or taxi from downtown, so it saves nothing once your luggage is involved. Metro Line 2 straight through is the smarter choice.

Spend the afternoon walking Wukang Road and Anfu Road in the French Concession, the neighborhood built for wandering rather than checklists. The Propaganda Poster Art Centre nearby is a genuinely odd museum experience worth the detour. Dinner at Jia Jia Tang Bao, the local pick for xiaolongbao (Y20-30, expect a queue).

Day 2: The Bund and Height

Morning: walk The Bund, free and open all hours. Lunch at Din Tai Fung if you want reliability (Y80-120), though it’s a Taiwanese chain, not a Shanghai native, worth remembering before calling it authentic local food.

Afternoon: Shanghai Museum East in Pudong, free and, since September 2024, requiring no advance reservation for individuals; walk in with ID. Evening: Shanghai Tower’s 118th-floor deck (about Y180, up to Y199 on holidays) for sunset, the highest observation point in the city.

Day 3: Waterfront and Old Streets

Morning: a Huangpu River cruise for a skyline angle the Bund itself can’t give you. Afternoon: walk the Old City’s alleys near Yu Garden, then visit Yu Garden itself (about Y40, worth it), skipping the surrounding bazaar’s “Nanxiang” stalls trading on a name unconnected to the actual original restaurant, which sits inside the garden grounds.

Evening: dinner somewhere off the main tourist strip, where prices climb without the food improving.

Day 4: Parks and Gardens

Morning: Century Park in Pudong or the Shanghai Botanical Garden, both genuine green spaces worth a slow walk if you need a break from pavement and crowds. Afternoon: back to the French Concession for a second pass, this time through Tianzifang’s old shikumen laneways, packed with indie shops and cafes and noticeably scrappier than the polished Xintiandi nearby.

Evening: dinner in the French Concession, then an early night ahead of tomorrow’s shopping day.

Day 5: Markets and Nanjing Road

Morning: walk Nanjing Road for the shopping, but stay alert. It’s free and it’s also the densest scam zone in the city. If a stranger offers to “practice English” with you here, that’s the tea ceremony scam opening, ending in a bill of Y3,000-10,000 with the exit blocked. Real tea ceremonies cost Y50-200 with a printed menu shown upfront, no exceptions.

Afternoon: a genuine night market for street food, ideally one recommended by your hotel rather than one you find blindly, since quality varies a lot stall to stall. Evening: dinner at Yang’s Fry Dumpling for shengjianbao (Y15-25), a faster, cheaper alternative to the soup dumpling circuit.

Day 6: Departure

Spend the morning on any last-minute shopping or a final Bund walk, then head to Pudong or Hongqiao for your flight.

Where to Stay

Base near the Bund or in the French Concession for the shortest hops between everything above. Every hotel is required to register overnight foreign guests with local police; reputable places handle this automatically at check-in once you hand over your passport.

Transportation

Metro fares run Y3 for the first 6km, typically Y4-8, across 20 lines operating roughly 5:30am to 11pm. Bind a foreign card to the Metro Dazhong app or use Alipay’s transit QR, which works citywide. Alipay and WeChat Pay have accepted international Visa, Mastercard, and JCB cards directly since mid-2023, bound through your passport with no local bank account needed; late-2025 verification adds a day or two of lag, so set this up before you fly. Didi, with an English interface, beats hailing a street taxi on price and reliability.

Things to Know

Summer runs hot and humid, worsened by the plum rain season from mid-June to mid-July. Spring and autumn are milder and better suited to the amount of walking this itinerary involves. Avoid Golden Week (October 1-7) entirely, when every attraction on this list hits capacity and prices spike to match.

Install and test a VPN before you leave home, since Google, Maps, WhatsApp, and Instagram are all blocked and there’s no downloading one once you’ve landed. Apple Maps and Amap work locally without any workaround. Don’t drink the tap water; bottled or filtered is standard practice throughout the city.

Visa Notes

Travelers from 55-plus countries, including the US, UK, EU nations, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea, and Brazil, qualify for 240-hour visa-free transit covering Shanghai, Jiangsu, and Zhejiang with a confirmed onward ticket. That’s up to 10 days, comfortably more than this six-day plan needs, which leaves room to bolt on a Suzhou day trip if you finish early or the weather cooperates better than expected.

A Note on Airport Arrival

Skip any tout at the arrivals hall offering a flat “special” taxi rate, or claiming the official queue is closed; it isn’t, and the fare they’re quoting runs 2-3x the meter. Walk to the marked rank and get a teal Dazhong or turquoise Qiangsheng cab instead, insisting on the meter, or use Didi for a more predictable price from the start.