Shanghai Sightseeing: Towers, Bund, Yu Garden
One of Pudong’s three famous towers stopped selling observation-deck tickets years ago, and a surprising number of trip-planning pages still list it alongside the other two as though nothing changed.
The skyscraper duo, and the one that’s closed
Shanghai Tower’s 118th-floor Top of Shanghai deck sits at 546 metres, open 8:30am to 10pm with last entry at 9:30pm, standard adult ticket around ¥180. Oriental Pearl Tower charges roughly ¥199 for the two-sphere combination (the 263m deck plus the 259m glass skywalk) or ¥220 for three spheres, adding the 351m Space Module. The Shanghai World Financial Center’s 94th, 97th, and 100th-floor decks, including the glass-bottom skywalk it was once known for, have been closed since January 2023 with no announced reopening date. Skip it as a viewing stop; the building’s shops and the Park Hyatt inside still operate normally. Search Shanghai Tower and Oriental Pearl tickets on GetYourGuide .
The Bund beats all three, and it’s free
The Bund’s stone promenade is open around the clock and costs nothing, and the classic photo works best about 30 to 45 minutes before sunset: floodlit colonial banking facades on one side of the Huangpu, the lit Pudong skyline on the other, both in one frame. No paid deck looking at or from Pudong does that.
Yu Garden and its bazaar are not the same place
The ticketed Ming-dynasty garden runs roughly ¥30 in low season (December-March, July-August) and ¥40 in high season (April-June, September-November), closed Mondays with last entry at 4pm. The free Yuyuan Bazaar wrapped around it, with its shops, teahouses, and snack stalls, stays open every day, including whichever day the garden itself is shut.
M50, the art district almost nobody visits
A former textile-mill complex on Moganshan Road, M50 now holds contemporary-art galleries and studios, free to wander and genuinely under-visited relative to its quality. It’s Shanghai’s answer to Beijing’s 798 Art Zone, minus the crowds. M50’s own site lists which studios and galleries currently have shows open.
Verdict: do the Bund at dusk and the paid towers earlier the same day. The deck sells the daytime skyline; the Bund sells the lit-up night version, and stacking both into one day means only one round of queuing.
Concrete tip: check a tower’s ticket page the same morning you plan to visit. Same-day online tickets do sometimes run out on weekends and holidays, and walking up without one means a much longer wait in the on-site line.
For a hands-on alternative to standing on a deck, see the activities guide , and for how to fit all of this into a single trip, the 2-day Shanghai itinerary .