Shanghai Trivia
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43 free Shanghai trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
Shanghai went from a fishing village behind a pirate wall to the world's busiest container port, and this quiz covers the road between. It starts with the meaning of the name and the fishing tool behind Hù, moves through the 1842 treaty, the International Settlement and French Concession, the founding of the Communist Party, Shanghailanders and Jewish refugees, the PLA's arrival in 1949 and Deng Xiaoping's 1990 green light for Pudong. The skyline gets its share: the Bund and where its name comes from, the Oriental Pearl's 468 metres, the Shanghai Tower and its rooftop hotel, the maglev's 431 km/h, the world's largest metro, Expo 2010's 73 million visitors and Disney's biggest castle. There are questions on Yu Garden, shikumen houses, Nanjing Road, Nanxiang soup dumplings, Benbang cuisine, Shanghainese and Wu Chinese, Yao Ming, the Chinese Grand Prix and Fudan and Jiao Tong. Easy questions ask which river splits the city and what the name means; hard ones want the emperor who moved the customs house and the secret society that seized the Old City in 1853. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the city and its landmarks, and each question carries the sentence that supports it. Try our Beijing and China quizzes next.
30 of 43 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The two characters of Shanghai's name together mean what?
On the Sea
'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.
Q 02Which river divides Shanghai's historic centre from its skyscraper district?
The Huangpu
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.
Q 03Shanghai's one-character Chinese abbreviation, Hù, is traced to an old word for what?
A fishing tool
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.
Q 04Shanghai's first city wall, built in the 1550s, was intended to protect the town from whom?
Japanese pirates
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.
Q 05The 1842 treaty that ended the First Opium War and opened Shanghai to foreign trade is named after which city?
Nanking
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.
Q 06In 1863 Shanghai's British and American enclaves merged to form what?
The International Settlement
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.
Q 07In treaty-port Shanghai, who were the 'Shanghailanders'?
Long-settled foreign residents
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.
Q 08Which Japanese diplomat in Lithuania wrote transit visas in 1940 for Jewish refugees, many of whom ended up in Shanghai?
Chiune Sugihara
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.
Q 09Which leader permitted Shanghai to begin economic reforms in 1990, opening up Pudong?
Deng Xiaoping
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.
Q 10In 2010 Shanghai's harbour overtook Singapore's to become the world's busiest for what?
Container traffic
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.
Q 11As a 'directly administered municipality', Shanghai ranks level with what?
A province
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.
Q 12'Bund', the name of Shanghai's colonial waterfront, looks German but reached English from which language?
Hindi
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.
Q 13The Bund's row of early 20th-century buildings looks across the water at which modern skyscraper district?
Lujiazui
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.
Q 21Roughly how many visitors came to Shanghai's Expo 2010 during the fair's six-month run?
About 73 million
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.
Q 22What was the theme of Expo 2010 Shanghai?
Better City, Better Life
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.
Q 23Shanghai Disneyland opened in 2016 with which record among all of Disney's theme parks?
Q 14Shanghai'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
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.
Q 15The Shanghai Tower's glass skin twists about 120 degrees as it rises, chiefly to cut what?
Wind loads
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.
Q 16The proportions, core and columns of Shanghai's pagoda-like Jin Mao Tower all revolve around which number, thought lucky in China?
Eight
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.
Q 17The trapezoid gap at the top of the Shanghai World Financial Center has earned the tower which nickname?
The bottle opener
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.
Q 18Ming-era scholar Pan Yunduan began Shanghai's Yu Garden as a comfort for whom?
His ageing parents
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.
Q 19The Shanghai maglev, opened in 2004, links Longyang Road with which airport?
Pudong 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.
Q 20What adjoins Shanghai's older, mainly domestic airport?
A high-speed rail station
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.
The tallest castle
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.
Q 24Nanjing Road, Shanghai's main shopping street, is named after a city that was once capital of what?
The Republic of China
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'.
Q 25Nanxiang, a village swallowed by Shanghai's suburbs, is regarded as the home of which dumpling?
Xiaolongbao
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.
Q 26Which of these dishes is a signature of Benbang cuisine, Shanghai's home-style cooking?
Red-braised pork
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'.
Q 27The local language, Shanghainese, belongs to which branch of Chinese?
Wu
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.
Q 28What are Shanghai's traditional lane houses, each entered through a heavy wooden door in a stone frame, called?
Shikumen
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.
Q 29What did Yao Ming do for the Shanghai Sharks in 2009?
Bought the club
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.
Q 30Which Formula One race was first held at the Shanghai International Circuit in 2004?
The Chinese Grand Prix
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.