Shanghai Garden offers one-day orientation tours of Shanghai, including visits to major landmarks, tourist destinations, popular retail outlets and shopping districts, restaurants, and entertainment districts.
Shanghai is one of the most dazzling and international cities in the world. Situated on the banks of the Yangtze River Delta in East China, Shanghai is the jewel of the modern Chinese economy and the cultural center of the mainland.
Shanghai is a historical and cultural city with a written history of over 4,000 years. The beautiful Longhua Pagoda dating from 242 A.D., the exquisite Mao Pagoda built in Tang Dynasty and the Song Dynasty Huzhou Pagoda still stand today. The city has a number of Ming and Qing Dynasties gardens, the most famous being Yuyuan Garden built in 1559. Also found in Shanghai are the former residences of Dr. Sun Yat-sen (forerunner of the democratic revolution) and Lu Xun (the renowned philosopher and writer), and other places of historical significance such as the Jade Buddha Temple and Xujiahui Church.
Today, Shanghai is known as China's largest trade and finance center, contributing over 11% of China's total income, providing a home for over 18 million people, handling a quarter of all commodities imported to China through it's ports, embarking on an average of 400 major construction projects per year, and providing China's central government with many of its leading figures, including Presidents and Premiers. In the first six months of 2005 alone, the city attracted US$7 billion in foreign direct investment.
Not surprisingly, average wages in Shanghai are four times the national average for China as a whole and the city is home to no less than 14 of China's richest entrepreneurs. It's also home to the country and regional headquarters of hundreds of foreign firms seeking to both contribute to and exploit China's economic dynamism in a place which many analysts now believe is becoming Asia's best business location. In fact, the city has attracted more than 20,630 direct foreign investment projects and has attracted investment from more than half of the world's top 100 industrial companies.
Yet Shanghai's role as China's leading world city is nothing new. That is the role the city performed from the mid 19th century, when its when it's strategic location at the mouth of the Yangtze made it the ideal location for trade between China and Western nations. Shanghai then developed into China's first major industrial center, focusing on producing goods for export-pioneering the strategy adopted generally in China around 100 years later. In the early years of the 20th Century, Shanghai became the world's third largest financial center, following London and New York.
Shanghai continues to develop at an astounding pace, making the city one of the most dynamic in the world and an exciting place to live. Seventeen percent of the world's cranes are located in Shanghai, and new buildings, shops, and hotels seem to spring up everyday. The most recently developed district, Pudong, was nothing more than rice paddies as late as the early 1990s. Today, Pudong is the finance center of China and is famous for its skyline, which includes the Oriental Pearl TV Tower (the third largest TV tower in the world), the Jin Mao Tower (currently the fifth largest building in the world), and the soon-to-be-completed Shanghai World Financial Center (the tallest building in the world upon completion). The ultra-modern architecture stands in contrast to pre-revolutionary Western and Chinese architecture to give Shanghai a character found nowhere else in the world.
For many expatriates, the most attractive thing about Shanghai is just how fashionable it is. The city has a long tradition of looking to the West for inspiration, and the progressive outlook of its people is famous throughout China. Museums, art galleries, restaurants, and bars hold a prominent place in city life, and the shopping is on par with anywhere in the world. At night, Shanghai is a sleepless city with flashing neon lights and billboards found along the streets. This cosmopolitan cultural scene harks back to the heydays of the 1920s and 30s and the new found wealth in the city is helping to reinvent Shanghai as the "It" city of the world.
People from all around the world are flocking to Shanghai, drawn by curiosity, a sense of possibility, the lure of potential professional and financial success, or perhaps simply a desire to be in the most exciting city in the new century. Whatever the reason, Shanghai never fails to impress and intrigue even the most travelled and cosmopolitan of visitors.