Shanghai Activities: Skywalks to Dumplings
Most first-time visitors spend Shanghai’s daylight hours looking up at towers from street level. A smaller set of activities put you inside the view instead: walking a guardrail-free glass ledge, folding your own dinner, or pulling a rope up the inside of a converted grain silo.
The Jin Mao Skywalk, 340 metres up
Jin Mao Tower’s 88th-floor deck comes with a separately ticketed extra: a 60-metre, 1.2-metre-wide outdoor glass walkway with no guardrail, wrapped around the building’s exterior at 340.6 metres. Each session runs about 45 minutes, with roughly 20 minutes actually spent outside on the glass. It costs noticeably less than the Shanghai Tower deck next door, and the view arguably beats it, since Jin Mao is the one tower of the three you cannot see from Jin Mao itself. Search Jin Mao Skywalk tickets on GetYourGuide .
Folding your own xiaolongbao
A hands-on class teaches the 18-pleat fold and the pork-and-aspic filling that makes a soup dumpling actually leak soup, rather than watching someone else do it through a restaurant window. Cook In Shanghai and similar small-group operators run classes most days, and everything you fold gets steamed and eaten at the end of the session. Book a Shanghai dumpling-making class on GetYourGuide .
Night cycling through the Concession and the Bund
Wheely Bike Tours has run evening rides through the former French Concession since 2008, threading quiet, plane-tree-lined backstreets before finishing on the illuminated Bund. A 3-4 hour ride covers far more ground than walking, and going after dark means the skyline is already lit by the time you arrive. Wheely Bike Tours’ own site lists current evening departures.
Climbing at Rock Hour, West Bund
Inside a converted concrete silo at the Gate M / West Bund Dream Center sits Rock Hour, an 1,100-square-metre gym built across six silo spaces of auto-belay, top-rope, and lead routes, plus a dedicated speed wall. It’s a genuine indoor option on a smoggy or rainy afternoon, no outdoor rock required, and it doesn’t need a car to reach.
Wakeboarding at Dishui Lake
Out at Pudong’s southeastern tip, the Shanghai Sailing Club runs sailing courses and cable-wakeboarding on Dishui Lake, a perfectly circular artificial lake most itineraries never reach. Metro Line 16 runs there directly; check Shanghai Metro’s own route planner for current line status before you go, since it sits well outside the central network most visitors use daily.
Verdict: pick two of these in one day, not four. The Skywalk and a dumpling class pair well as a single afternoon; night cycling and Dishui Lake both deserve their own half-day apiece.
Concrete tip: book the Jin Mao Skywalk for late afternoon. The queue thins out once the tour-bus groups leave, and the lower sun lights the other two towers from the side rather than washing them out overhead.
For the passive version of Shanghai’s skyline, see the sightseeing guide , and for a full day built around a mix of these, the 3-day Shanghai itinerary .