Shanghai: The city that still thrives on its waters

In an intercultural dialogue between Shanghai and London, an initiative known as Our Water: Season 2 recently launched in London, with the aim at fostering inclusive, creative and future-facing partnership between the two cities.

Speaking at the launch ceremony on 10 June 2025, Wang Qi, Minister at the Chinese Embassy in the UK, talked of how water is the soul of a city and how it has shaped both Shanghai and London, “May the dialogue flow like the rivers.”

Shanghai is a city built on water. Throughout the centuries, its waterways shaped its growth in ways that few visitors realise, including the city’s development into a financial hub for China. Everything that makes it special today, from its historical waterfront to the presence of the largest stock exchange in the Asia Pacific, comes from its waters. Now its recently revamped riverfront, creeks and canals are offering modern-day travellers a unique way to get beneath the skin of Shanghai.

There are few more recognisable waterfronts in the world than Waitan (also known as The Bund), perched on the west bank of the Huangpu River. It’s the starting point for many visitors’ explorations of the city, thanks to its mass of 19th- and early 20th-century colonial buildings spanning Beaux-Arts, Neoclassical and Art Deco styles. Many of these date from the colonial era, when this area emerged as China’s financial centre and the riverside became a busy mass of shipyards, factories, warehouses, banks and foreign trading houses.

Between Suzhou Creek and Jinling East Road on the west bank (Puxi), you can spy China’s oldest high-rise (Asia Building), the magnificent Neo-Renaissance Union Building and the stately Shanghai Club (now the Waldorf Astoria) – famed for its 34m-long bar. It’s a walk that takes you deep into the modern history of the city and offers a stark contrast to the river’s opposite bank (Pudong), where the glistening skyscrapers of Lujiazui financial district tell the story of the beginnings of China’s rapid economic growth in the 1990s. Buildings such as the rocket-like Oriental Pearl Tower, completed in 1994, still catch the eye even today.

Cruises on the Huangpu as the sun sets offer a glittering view of the futuristic east bank and the historical west all at once, as you swivel to take in the city’s past and present in one movement.

In recent years, there have been major efforts to restore and preserve Shanghai’s waterways in ways that make it easier for visitors to explore, as part of the ‘One River, One Creek’ initiative. First came a 45km-long scenic trail alongside the Huangpu, between Yangpu and Xupu bridges. This connects up the river’s industrial legacy and modern-day culture, as you stroll past power stations turned into art galleries, history and silk museums, and the modern-day skyscrapers glimpsed across the water.

Just as eye-catching has been the flourishing of the West Bund area, turning the Huangpu riverside into a cultural hotbed. The likes of the Jean Nouvel-designed Museum of Art Pudong; the creative Tank Shanghai, built by repurposing five aviation fuel tanks into gallery spaces; and the ambitious West Bund Museum, which opened with a series of programmes held in cooperation with France’s Centre Pompidou, have all emerged over the past five years. Alongside the addition of the Long Museum in 2014, whose concrete curves hide a remarkable and eclectic private collection, this stretch of the waterfront has becomes the city’s cultural calling card.

Next came the Suzhou Creek development, following four phases of ecological restoration spanning three decades. By the 1960s, the creek was lined with factories and warehouses and all the accompanying pollution that comes with them. As these disappeared, much of the area fell into disrepair. The initiative has seen 80 hectares of greenery replace the urban sprawl, with a 42km trail now following the creek’s waterfront through central Shanghai.

The trail stretches past historical relics such as the Sihang Warehouse Memorial Museum, still riddled with the bullets from a 1937 battle at the start of the Second Sino-Japanese War, and modern-day wonders like the Tian An 1000 Trees shopping centre, designed to resemble a tree-covered mountain. For travellers, it offers a way to take in the city’s industrial past and ambitious present in one swoop.

Out in the suburbs of Shanghai, water is still integral to the lives of the residents of the region’s canal towns – ancient villages veined by waterways. These scatter a wide area bound by Suzhou and Hangzhou, but a few lie within easy reach of Shanghai’s downtown and offer an easy glimpse of the city of yesteryear, with locals and visitors still ferried about on small wooden boats, drifting tree-shaded, temple-lined stone embankments.

Zhujiajiao lies just 30km from central Shanghai, towards the end of metro line 17. It’s one of the oldest of the water towns and a magnificent throwback, webbed with beautiful Ming and Qing dynasty-era bridges arcing elegantly over the water. It’s far from a secret, though, and it pays to beat the crowds to manorial gardens like the impressive early 20th-century Kezhi, which took 15 years to complete. Spare a moment too to visit one of the oldest surviving post offices in China, a beautiful late-19th-century building now turned into a community centre.

Another ancient water town lying within easy reach of the city centre is Qibao (on Line 9), allegedly named after the ‘seven treasures’ it once held in its temple. Known for its Hui-style architecture, characterised by white walls and black tile roofs, it’s not as grand as some of the other towns, with only a few of its old streets remaining intact. But its convenience (20 minutes from the CBD) makes Qibao an easy way to get a quick taste of ancient Shanghai.

It’s not just towns that have prospered on Shanghai’s waters. Chongming Dongtan Wetland Park, set on an alluvial island in the estuarine jaws of the Yangtze, is part of a collection of coastal bird sanctuaries that has recently been recognised as a UNESCO World Natural Heritage site – a first for the city. Home to around 300 resident and visiting bird species, it is an important migratory stopover, with sightings of Arctic warblers and Siberian thrushes joining the rush of cranes, geese and ducks that pit-stop here. It is yet one more side to a region built on water and still – in many ways – intimately connected to it.