User:Pashley/Shanghai

Shanghai (上海; Zånhae in Shanghainese, Shànghǎi in Mandarin) is the largest and most developed city in China, the country's main center for finance and fashion, and one of the world's most populous and important cities.

Shanghai is one of four cities in China that are administered as municipalities (市) at the same level in the hierarchy as provinces (discussion). It is not part of any province and there is no government structure at province, prefecture or city level, just a government for Shanghai Municipality and one for each district or county within it.

The municipality covers quite a large area &mdash; 6341 km2 or 2,448 square miles &mdash; and has a population around 24 million, which is about the same as Australia and more than all but two US states and all but six EU member countries. Its GDP is larger than that of many countries, and it has the world's busiest container port. Shanghai is the main hub of the East China region, all of which is densely populated, heavily industrialized, prosperous, well supplied with migrant workers from poorer parts of China, and still growing.

Shanghai is split in two by the Huangpu River (黄浦江 Huángpǔ Jiāng), into Puxi (浦西 Pǔxī) west of the river and Pudong (浦东 Pǔdōng) east of the river. Both terms can be used in a general sense for everything on their side of the river, including various suburbs. However, they are more often used in a much narrower sense where Puxi is the older (since the 19th century) city center and Pudong the mass of new (since 1990) high-rise development right across the river from there.

This is an overview article for the entire municipality. For the central districts which have most of the tourist attractions, hotels, restaurants and nightspots, see and  below. From the early 1840s to the late 1930s parts of Shanghai were concessions, areas administered by foreign powers. Eight nations—Britain, France, the US, Germany, Italy, Russia, Austria-Hungary, and Japan—had concessions in Shanghai, areas that they controlled and where Chinese law did not apply. Most of these were jointly administered as the "International Settlement", but the French ran theirs separately. In all of them, the population was mainly Chinese but there were also many foreigners, and the government and legal system were foreign. The police included many Sikhs and some French gendarmes.

Many important Chinese lived in the concession areas. Chairman Mao's Shanghai house is now a museum in Jing'an District, while both the houses of several other leaders and the site of the first national meeting of the Communist Party are now museums in the French Concession.

Today most of the former concession areas are parts of downtown Shanghai, listed at below.
 * "Central District" on the old map was British and the center of colonial Shanghai. It corresponds roughly to the modern district Huangpu.
 * The horse racing track on the edge of that area is now People's Square, considered the center of modern Shanghai.
 * "Western District" was mostly British but also included the Italian Concession. It corresponds roughly to Jing'an.
 * "French Settlement" on the old map corresponds roughly to Luwan District; the Concession later expanded westward to include Xuhui District, and our French Concession article covers both.

The "Chinese City" is the area that was the walled city of Shanghai for hundreds of years before the modern city developed around it. It has its own Wikivoyage article, Old City.

"Northern District" and "Eastern District" were once the American Concession; today they are parts of Zhabei and Hongkou respectively. They do not get as many visitors as the districts mentioned above, but they do have some attractions and the Shanghai Railway Station is in Zhabei. These are listed under.

Districts
Shanghai Municipality has 16 administrative districts (15 urban districts and one semi-rural county), all with at least a few hundred thousand people, and Wikivoyage has separate articles for most of them. Here we try to split them up in a way that will make sense for travellers.

Downtown
The historic core of Shanghai, it includes both the old Chinese city and the area of the International Settlement which began in the 1840s and lasted until the 1930s. It can be called Puxi (浦,西), downtown Shanghai (上海市区) or the city center (市中心). Today this area is still the core of the city. Most of the tourist attractions and many hotels are here, and many metro lines run through it.

Wikivoyage has a separate article, Downtown Shanghai that gives an overview of the whole area, plus articles for the four districts it includes:

Pudong
Directly across the river from (east of) downtown, Pudong is a major center of recent development (since about 1990) as a skyscraper-filled financial center. Pudong is listed here separately from the older downtown area on the Puxi side, but it might be described as an extension of the downtown core, or even as the new center of the city.

In Shanghai's administrative system the area we describe in the Pudong article is just the central part of a much larger official district called Pudong New Area, which also includes the less developed Nanhui to the south. Wikivoyage has a separate article for Nanhui, and it is listed as an outer suburb below.

Inner suburbs
The inner suburbs all (except Yangpu) have direct borders with the downtown core, are all quite built up, and all have good metro service. All are primarily residential areas, but many have considerable industry as well and all have some large shopping malls.

These districts have some tourist attractions and several have hotels that are cheaper than those downtown but still convenient for sightseeing or shopping. Several have universities, and nearby areas tend to have many low-priced restaurants and bars catering to the student market; see below and the district articles for details.

Outer suburbs
The outer suburbs wrap around the southern, western and northwestern sides of the city. The sea is on the east and the Yangtze on the northeast.

All of these areas still include some farmland but large parts of them are already covered with residential and industrial suburban development and the trend shows no sign of stopping. What were once rural villages serving nearby farms have become towns, often fairly interesting ones that preserve some of the traditional buildings.

As of 2018, nearly all of these outer suburbs have metro connections and planned extensions to the metro system will reach the rest by 2020. In the meanwhile, there is bus service to all of them; see the district articles for details.

The areas along the seacoast at the southern edge of the municipality &mdash; Fengxian, Jinshan and Nanhui &mdash; have beaches that are popular as a weekend getaway for Shanghai residents.

The islands
Chongming is the only part of Shanghai administered as a "county" rather than a "district"; the general rule is that districts are urban areas while counties are relatively rural. Apparently, compared to the rest of Shanghai, Chongming can be considered rural even though it has about 700,000 people.