Shanghai Museum
Five thousand years of Chinese art and culture under one roof.
The Shanghai Museum sits at the heart of People's Square — a striking circular building designed to evoke an ancient bronze ding vessel — and holds one of the finest collections of Chinese art and antiquities in the world. Opened in its current location in 1996, it houses around 140,000 objects spanning five millennia, from Neolithic jade carvings to Song dynasty paintings to intricate Ming and Qing dynasty furniture. For anyone trying to get a handle on the sweep of Chinese civilization, this is the single best place in Shanghai to do it.
The permanent galleries are organized by medium and period, and the depth is genuinely staggering. The bronzeware gallery alone — covering ritual vessels from the Shang and Zhou dynasties — could occupy a serious visitor for hours. Other highlights include the ancient ceramics gallery, tracing the evolution of Chinese pottery from earthenware to the luminous porcelain that defined the Ming period; the calligraphy and painting galleries, where hanging scrolls and handscrolls reveal centuries of artistic tradition; the coins collection; and a dedicated gallery of minority nationalities' art that often gets overlooked but is quietly one of the most rewarding rooms in the building. Labels are in both Chinese and English throughout.
The museum is free to enter, which makes it one of the great bargains in any major world city — but the trade-off is that it can get crowded, especially on weekends and public holidays. Arrive early, ideally when the doors open at 9am, to have the galleries to yourself. The ground floor café is decent enough for a coffee break but don't skip the museum shop, which stocks genuinely good reproductions and books on Chinese art that are hard to find elsewhere.