Shanghai, China Trip Planning Guide
This Shanghai city guide provides trip planning tips including the best things to do, where & in which hotels to stay, transportation info, and more about China’s largest and most modern metropolis. As the photo above illustrates, Shanghai is a breathtakingly cool and futuristic place, and we’ll try to help you plan for a visit!To get more news about
China travel advice, you can visit shine news official website.
In a basic sense, Shanghai is mainland China’s counter part to Hong Kong. Both are cosmopolitan world cities, serving as powerful economic and cultural hubs. There are obvious and pronounced differences between the two; Shanghai has undergone a meteoric rise in international prominence and redevelopment beginning only a few decades ago, and has not slowed since. This is reflected in the ultra-modern and ever-expanding Pudong skyline and its main highlight, the Oriental Pearl Tower.
Before we dig into the guide, we want to be upfront with the fact that we’ve only traveled to Shanghai once so far. Normally, we try to visit destinations at least a few times before writing these more ‘comprehensive’ guides to them, but we’ve had a lot of interest in the city of Shanghai from Disney fans who are planning trips to Shanghai Disneyland. Accordingly, this guide should be considered an incomplete work-in-progress.
While we always recommend consulting an array of resources for a broad range of coverage and opinions, in the case of Shanghai, using guidebooks–like Lonely Planet Shanghai—is strict necessity, as we’ve yet to experience many of the city’s highlights.
With that said, there’s no shortage of things to do in Shanghai, and even just wandering around this mega-city of 24 million people is a fun experience. In this guide, we’ll take a look at some of those popular tourist destinations, and cover a variety of topics that will help you plan your trip to this incredible city…
As noted at the top, we’ve only been to mainland China once, so our ‘when to visit’ is hardly a comprehensive window into when we made trips to Shanghai. However, we have been to Hong Kong numerous times (see our Hong Kong City Guide if you’re also traveling there), which shares similar weather patterns and is impacted by many of the same tourist trends, which usually result from national holidays.
In terms of national holidays, there are two week-long Golden Weeks in China each year; these occur during Chinese New Year and the first week of October. These are among the most crowded times of the year to visit, and unless there’s a specific event for Lunar New Year that you want to experience, we strongly recommend avoiding both Golden Weeks. In addition to crowds, you’ll be paying more for accommodations and flights during these travel periods.
More broadly, the main season we’d strive to avoid is summer, which is exactly when we visited Shanghai. Climate-wise, Shanghai is not as far south as Hong Kong, which can be brutally hot as early in the year as April and as late as November. It’s also not as far north as Beijing, where it can snow in the winter.
However, Shanghai does have a range of weather, with everything from subzero temperatures to oppressive heat. With this in mind, we view late-October through mid-December and February through April as the best times to visit Shanghai. This article covers other good/bad times to visit China.
Most visitors to mainland China are going to need/want to apply for a travel visa prior to visiting China. The Chinese Embassy website details how to go about this. There are a number of services that will make the process painless for you if you’re uncomfortable submitting the paperwork yourself.
For our first trip to China, we took advantage of the 144-hour visa exemption policy. Shanghai was our only stop in China, and staying just over 6 days (the clock doesn’t start ticking until the day following arrival) was plenty of time for us before continuing on to Hong Kong.
This rule only applies if you’re making a stopover in China and are visiting a third country on your trip. If your itinerary is Los Angeles to Shanghai to Hong Kong to Los Angeles, you are eligible for the exemption. If you’re taking a roundtrip flight to Shanghai, you are not eligible. Be sure to consult this comprehensive 144-hour visa exemption resource before taking advantage of this policy, as there are some tricks to it.
