43 Fun Facts About Shanghai

The two characters of Shanghai's name together mean what?

'On the Sea': shàng means on or above and hǎi means sea. English later borrowed the port's name as a verb: to shanghai a man was to drug or force him aboard a ship short of sailors.

Which river divides Shanghai's historic centre from its skyscraper district?

The Huangpu names both halves: Pudong means 'east of the Pu' and Puxi 'west of the Pu'. Until the 1990s the east bank was mostly farmland, wharves and warehouses.

Shanghai's one-character Chinese abbreviation, Hù, is traced to an old word for what?

A fishing tool: a hù was a bamboo fish trap staked across tidal creeks, and the old river mouth was called Hù Dú after them. The single character now marks every Shanghai licence plate.

Shanghai's first city wall, built in the 1550s, was intended to protect the town from whom?

Japanese pirates: the wall went up against the wokou, sea raiders then plundering the coast. Local leaders pulled it down from 1912 as an obstacle to the modern city's growth.

The 1842 treaty that ended the First Opium War and opened Shanghai to foreign trade is named after which city?

The Treaty of Nanking (1842) opened Shanghai alongside Canton, Amoy, Foochow and Ningpo; Britain, France and the United States then set up settlements outside the walled Chinese city.

In 1863 Shanghai's British and American enclaves merged to form what?

The International Settlement was never a colony like Hong Kong: the land stayed Chinese territory, while a council of foreign residents, the Shanghai Municipal Council, ran it.

In treaty-port Shanghai, who were the 'Shanghailanders'?

Shanghailanders were the long-settled foreign residents, mainly European and American, with their own courts, police and clubs. Yet foreigners never made up more than about four per cent of the city.

Which Japanese diplomat in Lithuania wrote transit visas in 1940 for Jewish refugees, many of whom ended up in Shanghai?

Chiune Sugihara wrote some 2,000 transit visas in Kaunas in summer 1940, some for refugees with no papers at all. In 1941 Japan shipped those still stranded in Japan on to occupied Shanghai.

Which leader permitted Shanghai to begin economic reforms in 1990, opening up Pudong?

Deng Xiaoping gave the go-ahead, and the building boom that followed in Pudong made Shanghai once again the centre of China's economic life.

In 2010 Shanghai's harbour overtook Singapore's to become the world's busiest for what?

Container traffic: Shanghai moved about 29 million boxes in 2010, beating Singapore by only half a million. By total cargo tonnage it was already the world's largest port.

As a 'directly administered municipality', Shanghai ranks level with what?

A province: Shanghai answers straight to the central government, one of only four cities that do. The newest, Chongqing, was split off from Sichuan in 1997.

'Bund', the name of Shanghai's colonial waterfront, looks German but reached English from which language?

Hindi: dictionaries trace it to band, a dam or dyke, a word of Persian origin used across British India. On the China coast it came to mean an embanked quay beside a river or the sea.

The Bund's row of early 20th-century buildings looks across the water at which modern skyscraper district?

Lujiazui sits on a river bend directly opposite the old banking row. Until the 1980s the area was low-rise housing and warehouses, and it was set aside as a finance zone only in the early 1990s.

Shanghai's Oriental Pearl Tower, a stack of glassy spheres on concrete legs, was built in the 1990s chiefly to do what?

Broadcast television and radio: the city's broadcasting bureau first proposed the mast in 1983. The eleven spheres are said to echo a Tang poem's line about pearls, large and small, falling on a jade plate.

The Shanghai Tower's glass skin twists about 120 degrees as it rises, chiefly to cut what?

Wind loads: the spiral lets the wind slip around the tower instead of hitting a broad face. That let the builders use roughly a quarter less structural steel than a conventional tower of the same height.

The proportions, core and columns of Shanghai's pagoda-like Jin Mao Tower all revolve around which number, thought lucky in China?

Eight: the tower has 88 floors and an octagonal core ringed by eight giant columns. Yet the pagoda-style design, lucky number and all, was drawn up by a firm of Chicago architects.

The trapezoid gap at the top of the Shanghai World Financial Center has earned the tower which nickname?

The bottle opener: the first design had a round 'moon gate', but Shanghai's mayor saw Japan's rising sun in it on a Japanese-owned tower. The architect reworked the hole to settle the row.

Ming-era scholar Pan Yunduan began Shanghai's Yu Garden as a comfort for whom?

His ageing parents: yu means pleasing, and the garden was meant to cheer his father, the minister Pan En. Work dragged on for nearly twenty years, and after the builder's death the family declined and the garden changed hands.

The Shanghai maglev, opened in 2004, links Longyang Road with which airport?

Pudong Airport: the 30 km ride takes about eight minutes. The line ends at a suburban metro interchange rather than downtown, so most riders still change trains to reach the centre.

What adjoins Shanghai's older, mainly domestic airport?

A high-speed rail station: Hongqiao's new terminal and the 30-track station beside it opened months apart in 2010, planned together as a single hub for planes and bullet trains.

Roughly how many visitors came to Shanghai's Expo 2010 during the fair's six-month run?

About 73 million, passing the 64 million who went to Osaka in 1970. Yet it was a world's fair mostly in name: the great bulk of the visitors were Chinese.

What was the theme of Expo 2010 Shanghai?

Better City, Better Life: by 2010 more than half of humanity lived in cities, and the fair was pitched as a showcase of fixes for urban living. China's bright red pavilion stayed on afterwards as an art museum.

Shanghai Disneyland opened in 2016 with which record among all of Disney's theme parks?

The tallest castle: where Disney's older castles each belong to a single princess, the Enchanted Storybook Castle was the first built to stand for all of them.

Nanjing Road, Shanghai's main shopping street, is named after a city that was once capital of what?

The Republic of China: Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists governed from Nanjing until Japan took the city in 1937, and again from 1946 to 1949. The city's name simply means 'southern capital'.

Nanxiang, a village swallowed by Shanghai's suburbs, is regarded as the home of which dumpling?

Xiaolongbao: the soup goes in solid, as cubes of jellied pork stock folded in with the meat, and melts in the steamer. Nanxiang's cooks have been making them for more than a century.

Which of these dishes is a signature of Benbang cuisine, Shanghai's home-style cooking?

Red-braised pork: in Shanghai's version the red comes not from chilli but from dark soy sauce and melted sugar. Local cooks sum up the glossy house style as 'thick oil, red sauce'.

The local language, Shanghainese, belongs to which branch of Chinese?

Wu: the group is spoken across Shanghai and its neighbouring region. It keeps voiced consonants that Mandarin lost, one reason a Mandarin speaker cannot follow a Shanghainese chat.

What are Shanghai's traditional lane houses, each entered through a heavy wooden door in a stone frame, called?

Shikumen: developers threw up the first rows in the 1860s to rent to refugees fleeing civil war into the foreign settlements. At their peak they held about 60 per cent of Shanghai's housing, often several families to a house.

What did Yao Ming do for the Shanghai Sharks in 2009?

Bought the club: Yao had led the Sharks to the Chinese league title in 2002, months before leaving for the NBA, and became their owner while still a Houston Rockets centre.

Which Formula One race was first held at the Shanghai International Circuit in 2004?

The Chinese Grand Prix: the track was laid on marshland in just 18 months. Seen from the air, the layout traces the first character of the city's name, which drivers meet as an ever-tightening first corner.

Fudan is one of two Shanghai universities in the C9 League, China's answer to the Ivy League; which is the other?

Jiao Tong: the league links nine universities that the state singled out and funded to become world-class, which is why it is pitched as China's Ivy League.

Chongming, the farming island that forms Shanghai's northern tip, sits in the mouth of which river?

The Yangtze: the island began as sandbanks noted in the 7th century and is built entirely of the river's silt. From about 1960 wide stretches of its mudflats were diked and reclaimed.

Shanghai's skyscrapers stand on piles driven dozens of metres down because of what beneath the city?

Soft delta sediment: the city stands on ground laid down by its river, too weak for towers, so the Jin Mao Tower rests on a concrete raft atop steel piles sunk some 80 metres.

Shanghai borders only two provinces: Jiangsu and which other?

Zhejiang: it meets Shanghai on the southwest while Jiangsu wraps the north and west. Every other side is water: a river mouth to the north, open sea to the east and Hangzhou Bay to the south.

Shanghai's Longhua and Jing'an temples both trace their founding to which era, some 1,800 years ago?

The Three Kingdoms: tradition dates Longhua to AD 242 and Jing'an to 247. Little that old survives, as war wrecked Longhua's halls, rebuilt under the late Qing, and Jing'an moved from a creek bank in the Song era.

Where did Communist troops sleep after taking Shanghai in May 1949?

The pavements: the exhausted troops slept in doorways and on sidewalks rather than disturb residents in their homes, and the city received them warmly.

Shanghai's 2022 Covid lockdown was announced as four days for each half of the city; roughly how long did it last?

Two months: the staggered closure due to end on 5 April was extended indefinitely as cases surged, and most of the 25 million residents were not let out until 1 June. Many households ran short of food in the first weeks.

Shanghai's Nationalist rulers built a 1930s civic centre away from the foreign enclaves; which Chinese form did its city hall take?

A palace: the design brief demanded traditional Chinese form, so the concrete hall got a roof of green glazed tiles. War in 1937 ended the wider plan, and the hall later became a sports university's offices.

When Small Swords rebels held Shanghai's walled city from 1853, what passed into foreign hands?

The customs service: amid the revolt the treaty powers put duty collection under foreign supervision in 1854, the birth of China's foreign-run Maritime Customs. French and Qing troops retook the walled city in February 1855.

The C919, developed in Shanghai by COMAC, entered service in May 2023; what is it?

Passenger jet: the single-aisle C919 was built to take on the Boeing 737 and Airbus A320, though many of its parts came from foreign suppliers. COMAC was founded in 2008 to build it and first flew one in 2017.

The Shanghai International Film Festival's top prize is the Golden what?

Goblet: the prize's Chinese name, Jin Jue, points to the jue, a bronze wine vessel of the Shang dynasty, more than 3,000 years ago. The first were awarded when the festival began in 1993.

Why did Shanghai build its Yangshan port on islands 30 kilometres out to sea?

Deeper water: silt kept the old river wharves too shallow for the biggest cargo ships, while the channel among the islands is about twice as deep. The bridge that carries the freight ashore opened in 2005.

In September 2013 Shanghai launched mainland China's first what?

Free-trade zone: regulators used it as a test bed for market-set interest rates and freer currency exchange. China's 14-year ban on video game consoles was also first lifted for makers inside the zone.