Wukang Road & the Former French Concession

The 1920s villa on Huaihai Middle Road where Soong Ching-ling — Sun Yat-sen's widow, later vice-chairman of the People's Republic — lived from 1948 to 1963, kept with her furniture, her cars in the garage and a lawn of camphor trees. Twenty yuan, closed Mondays, and one of the few small museums here that still requires a mini-program ticket (groups capped at 20-50 people; no daily cap for individuals).

The flat-iron apartment block of 1924 (Hudec's Normandie Apartments) at the fork of Huaihai Middle Road and Wukang Road — Shanghai's most photographed residential building. There is nothing to enter: it is a lived-in block with shops on the ground floor. The point is the view from the opposite pavement, and the police cordon that appears on that pavement whenever the corner gets too full.

A 1.2-kilometre plane-tree street of 1920s-30s villas and apartment houses, from the Wukang Building at its south end to Huashan Road in the north — the spine of the former French Concession walk. Two house-museums (Soong Ching-ling's is booked and ticketed; Ba Jin's is closed for restoration), a tourist information centre with maps and luggage lockers, and gates with plaques where the famous villas are private. Best done on foot in a morning.

Four hundred metres of the densest café-and-boutique street in Shanghai, one block north of Wukang Road, anchored by the Shanghai Dramatic Arts Centre at No. 288. This is where the city's fashionable young come to be seen on weekend afternoons; the street has no sights in the museum sense, and that is its appeal. With Wukang Road it forms a nationally listed 'tourism and leisure block'.

The garden villa at 113 Wukang Road where the novelist Ba Jin lived from 1955 until his death in 2005, kept as he left it — study, manuscripts, 40,000 books — and opened as a free house-museum in 2011. Small, quiet, and normally the one house on this street you can actually walk through. Normally: the last official word (October 2025) says it is closed for restoration, and no reopening notice has been found. Until one appears, plan on the gate and the garden wall.

A 1924 apartment house at 1331 Fuxing Middle Road with a mosaic-floored lobby and a semicircular portico, at the southern edge of the district opposite the Symphony Hall. Its ground floor is a music-themed bookshop-café: Xingfu Jihui from 2020, and since 12 April 2025 Muyunji Bookstore, which the city's 2026 bookstore guide lists at Room 101 with hours of 10:00-22:00. Go for the building and a coffee.

The district's own museum about itself: a 1930 apartment house on Fuxing West Road — the Cloister Apartments, named for the arcade linking its two wings, and nothing to do with any monastery despite the Chinese name — turned into five rooms on the history, architecture and residents of the Hengshan-Fuxing area. Free, but booking-only through the district's WeChat official account, and open only part of the week. Good for a rainy hour and for understanding why the streets outside look the way they do; frustrating if you have not booked.

The 'Little White House' of 1905 on Fenyang Road — a French-Renaissance villa built for a senior French Concession official, later Chen Yi's mayoral residence — now a working museum of Shanghai crafts: ivory and jade carving, embroidery, lacquer, with artisans at benches on the upper floors. Eight yuan, closed Mondays, and a midday break that most guides forget to mention.