Shanghai Disneyland
Disney has magicked-up a spectacular theme park in Shanghai, offering a subtly Chinese take on Mickey. Six themed areas encircle Disney’s biggest-ever Enchanted Storybook Castle, with attractions including a TRON roller coaster joining high-tech reboots of old favourites like Pirates of the Caribbean. With an estimated 350 million people living less than three hours away, expect long queues for rides, arrive before 9 am if you plan to do it all in a day.
Shanghai Ocean Aquarium
Pudong is home to one of the largest aquariums on the planet, the Shanghai Ocean Aquarium. It proudly boasts the world’s longest submarine viewing tunnel, measuring a whopping 155 meters in length. It is also the only aquarium in the world to have a China zone, dedicated to showcasing local and endangered Chinese aquatic animals, such as the Chinese sturgeon, the Yangtze alligator and the giant salamander.
Shanghai Tower
China’s tallest building dramatically twists skywards from its footing in Lùjiāzuǐ. The 121-storey 632m-tall Gensler-designed Shanghai Tower topped out in August 2013 and opened in mid-2016. The spiral-shaped tower houses office space, entertainment venues, shops, a conference centre and a luxury hotel and ‘sky lobbies’. The gently corkscrewing form, its nine interior cylindrical units wrapped in two glass skins, is the world’s second-tallest building at the time of writing.
K Pro
China is crazy for KFC, with the fast-food chain constantly coming up with new ways to appeal to the local market. After launching a restaurant staffed by robots and selling traditional mooncakes for Mid-Autumn Festival, KFC has now gone healthy. Pudong is home to Shanghai’s branch of KFC’s healthy-eating concept K PRO, launched in 2018 in the hope of appealing to the city’s growing number of health-conscious consumers. Table service makes the store much more like a café than a fast-food joint. China is so often a testing ground for new concepts and ideas, it might not be long before this version of KFC is rolled out across the world.
Aurora Museum
Designed by renowned Japanese architect, Andō Tadao, the Aurora Museum is set over six floors of the Aurora building and houses a stunning collection of Chinese treasures. Artefacts and antiquities on display include pottery from the Han dynasty, jade dating back from the Neolithic to the Qing dynasty, blue-and-white porcelain spanning the Yuan, Ming and Qing dynasties as well as Buddhist sculptures from the Gandharan and Northern Wei period.
Bar Level 87
If you do not fancy paying the high ticket costs to scale Shanghai Tower, head to Bar Level 87. This is the bar and restaurant of the Park Hyatt Shanghai, located on the 87th floor of the Shanghai World Financial Centre. While you can get away with taking a quick look out of the windows without buying anything, treating yourself to a drink is much more rewarding. The cocktails taste better while gazing out at the vast metropolis below.