Photographing Shanghai while you visit

Having talked extensively to Julia on this subject and having listened to her conclusion that neither Salina nor Danna takes particularly good photographs, I hope this posting proves once and for all who takes the better photos. I also was using by far the oldest and lowest resolution camera.

Update: Eventually I lived in Shanghai and took many many photos some of which were posted to social media. I also collected the best photos and the best posts from my time in China. I’ve had to edit a lot of my old posts because screens have gotten larger and floating the images to the right has proven problematic. It is better to have your photos centred now and place them below the text. So most of the lower resolution photos I posted in 2005 are below the text now.

Two of these photos were taken in Yu Yuan which was a highlight of our visit. This is a Ming era garden and one of the best gardens in South China. This was Julia’s favourite place we went to in Shanghai. It was also the first place we went to following the Fodor’s itinerary.

Nanjing Lu is THE shopping street in Shanghai, but none of us spent any money here. It was more aimed at Chinese citizens perhaps. After living in Shanghai I switched my allegiance to Huaihai Lu for shopping.

Next is just one section in the 1000 Buddhas room of the Jade Buddha temple. You are not allowed to take a picture of the most famous Jade Buddha, but you can buy a postcard of it which I did.

Below is a picture of the Shanghai Museum as seen from People’s Park. This was supposedly the best museum in China, but I only got to see one floor of it. What can I say I wasted my time reading about the exhibits. It also has a huge bookstore where you can buy books but it has an attached gift shop which sells most anything. The prices are not cheap but the selection especially if you are interested in history books is good.

I’ve since taken many more photos of Shanghai at night after visiting again and moving there as my career continues to not go well since my MBA.

To get to the New Territories we took the tourist tunnel. It is very trippy, made more so by me using a slow exposure for some of my pictures. It is quite expensive so I recommend only taking it one way or not at all if you are on a tight budget.

Having this many photos and trying to get them all to align perfectly in all browsers especially in the latest version of WordPress is a challenge. I prefer to host images on Flickr these days, but in WordPress 5 the includes have been changed, I prefer the fancy JavaScript you can see in some of my other posts.

Below was the tallest building in Shanghai (at the time) and the moon. We went here to drink. On the 87th floor is “Cloud Nine“, the formerly highest bar in the world. To get there you have to take three elevators. They have a minimum charge of 120 RMB plus 15% gratuity per person. To celebrate and to make sure we made our minimum charge I ordered a Johnny Walker Blue. I then had a a Guinness. They don’t have a very good selection of beers especially if you want draft. The Guinness came in a bottle. They have a lot of wine and Scotch though, but not so much bourbon.

The final photo is a portion of a model of how Shanghai will look in 2010. Note the even taller building over by the Pearl Tower. If you go to the World’s Fair much of this should be complete. This model is in the Urban Planning Museum. It is quite impressive. The scale is wrong for 40K and is closer to Epic but still off.

I did return to Shanghai in 2014. I never went up the now tallest building in town, but I did go up “the can opener” several times to have a drink. I even went to Hong Kong and went in the tallest bar there, that was an expensive but memorable evening.

I went to Shanghai the first time with Julia who also blogged about our time there, Salina might have too, but she never did tell me where her blog is.

If you have any questions about Shanghai you’ve stumbled on the right blog. You can ask a question below. I’ve already written a tourist guide and more detailed advice on photographing the skyline.

This entry was originaly posted on December 28th, 2005, it was last edited on October 14th, 2024 and is filed under: Travel and tagged: China, Photos, Shanghai.