"Click the photo to view the full Shanghai gallery."
The bullet train from Hengdian did everything right — sleek, fast, quiet — and delivered us into Shanghai sometime after nine on a night that was still somewhere between ninety and a hundred degrees. What it could not do was get us the last few miles. We had assumed a DiDi from the station to the Bulgari would be the easiest ride of the trip. Instead we followed the signs down into the station's parking garage, where the ride-hailing cars queue — and found hundreds of people ahead of us doing exactly the same thing, in air that felt like a sauna. Worse, our app and our drivers' apps could not agree on where we were standing: the GPS pins simply would not synchronize, and car after car could not find us in the garage.
We stood in that heat for the better part of an hour. And then Shanghai introduced itself properly: a complete stranger, watching two wilting foreigners fail at ride-hailing, offered to share their DiDi with us. The driver — equally unbothered — dropped his original passenger at their destination first, confirmed we were bound for the Bulgari, and then drove us across the city to our hotel. Try that with an Uber in the United States. It will not happen.
The Bulgari finished the rescue. Our luggage — sent ahead from Hangzhou that morning, as readers of Day 13 will remember — was already in our room waiting for us, and the hotel had dinner sent up. We rolled in around eleven at night, fed, unpacked and utterly converted: Shanghai had nearly beaten us in a parking garage, and then two strangers and one very good hotel had decided otherwise.
Day One: Hiding in the Global Harbor
Shanghai in high summer runs on a simple strategy: be somewhere air-conditioned by mid-morning, and stay there. We slept late, took a DiDi out to Putuo District, and gave the day to the Global Harbor — a shopping mall the size of a small European city-state, dressed like one too: neoclassical domes, marble halls, painted ceilings, and corridors that seem to continue forever. It is less a mall than an indoor continent. We browsed, we wandered the long galleries, we had a light lunch, and we did not melt. After two weeks of temples, tea fields and film sets, there was something honestly restorative about a day with no sights to see at all — just Shanghai doing its everyday, extravagant retail.
The evening returned us to the Bulgari and its crown: Bao Li Xuan （宝丽轩）, the hotel's two-Michelin-starred Cantonese restaurant, set inside the restored 1916 Chamber of Commerce building beside the tower. A business contact joined us for dinner there — the kind of room where Shanghai deals and friendships both seem to happen — and it remains one of the great dining rooms of our trip. The full hotel review, as promised, comes separately; for now, know that the Bulgari earned its finale.
Day Two: A Garden, a Temple, and the River at Night
Day two began in old Shanghai: Yu Garden, built in the Ming dynasty by an official named Pan Yunduan as a retirement gift for his father — twenty years in the making, and very nearly the ruin of the family. It is five acres of pavilions, rockeries, koi ponds and winding corridors in the middle of the Old City, and we gave it the whole late morning: every pathway, the traditional houses, the shops and boutiques around it, and of course the famous Nine-Turn Bridge zigzagging across the pond to the Mid-Lake Pavilion teahouse — built, legend says, because evil spirits cannot turn corners.
From the sixteenth century we went straight to the third: Jing'an Temple, on Nanjing West Road, founded in AD 247 — older than the city of Shanghai itself — its golden roofs and upturned eaves rising out of a sea of glass towers and luxury storefronts. We walked the temple, then the shops and cafés around it, had a light meal, and then surrendered to the neighborhood's other religion. Directly around the temple, the malls stand practically across the street from one another — Réel, Taikoo Hui and Jiuguang among them — and we spent hours rotating through them, happily cool, while the city simmered outside. Shopping in Shanghai does not end. It merely changes buildings.
As the light began to go, we crossed the river to Pudong and walked the east bank as the skyline lit up behind us, taking our pictures looking back at the Bund — the best view of old Shanghai being, as everyone learns, the one from new Shanghai. Then we tried to go back. The return was the single most grueling ride of our seventeen days: an hour and a half in a DiDi, stuck in traffic in the tunnel beneath the Huangpu — and once we finally surfaced on the Bund side, another thirty minutes to travel three blocks. Three. Blocks. We gave up, got out, and walked to dinner.
Dinner was worth every stalled minute: Xie Jia Da Yuan （蟹家大院）, the famous crab house at 59 Guangdong Road, just off the Bund — Shanghai's temple of crab — crab roe, crayfish, and noodles in quantities that made the traffic a distant memory. Their signature bowl pours the roe and meat of a dozen hairy crabs over noodles, and it tastes like the city distilled: rich, golden, excessive, perfect. Afterwards we walked up to the Bund itself and strolled the waterfront in the warm night, photographing the grand old banking halls lit across the water from the towers we had stood beneath hours before — the two Shanghais, facing each other, both showing off. A DiDi home, and we called it a night.
[PHOTO: body-jingan-temple-lv-ship.jpg — Jing'an Temple's golden roof with Louis Vuitton's ship-shaped store and the Taikoo Hui billboards behind]
Day Three: From Rockbund Down the Great Nanjing Road
Day three belonged to the walk. We started in Rockbund — the lovingly restored 1920s quarter behind the Bund — with cafés and a light lunch, American-style, believe it or not, two weeks into China and suddenly homesick for a burger. The afternoon had a target: Songmont （山下有松）, the Chinese bag label whose Rockbund store we had been saving for this day, where I happily bought a few bags for my wife. Some souvenirs you research for weeks. Hers were worth it.
Then we walked. Down along the Bund and onto Nanjing Road, and then the whole length of the great pedestrian street — and nothing in two weeks prepared us for the sheer human river of it: crowds flowing both ways without pause, neon, flagship stores, the grand old department stores that invented modern Chinese retail a century ago, restaurants and malls stacked on both sides for over a mile. It is China's most famous shopping street and it earns the title every single evening. When our feet finally filed a formal protest, we escaped sideways into a mall and did some damage at the boutiques — JORYA （卓雅） among them — before dinner: Xin Rong Ji （新荣记）, the one-Michelin-starred Nanjing West Road house, just off Nanjing Road, where Taizhou seafood cooking gets the full fine-dining treatment. A DiDi home through the lit streets, and Shanghai day three was in the books.
Day Four: A Farewell Lunch, and the Long Way Home
Our last morning belonged to the hotel and the suitcases: a slow start, and the serious logistics of packing seventeen days of travel — plus, let's be honest, a meaningful amount of Shanghai shopping. Then we headed back to Rockbund one final time, to the Yifeng Galleria, the small boutique galleria just across from The Peninsula, for a farewell lunch at Yidao （逸道）: a serene, tea-obsessed Huaiyang restaurant on the second floor, where the attendants ask what you're looking for and, at the word "Yidao," simply smile and show you to the elevator. The cooking weaves tea through the meal itself — a quiet, elegant, very Shanghai goodbye, and one of the best lunches of our trip.
Back at the Bulgari, we checked out — and the hotel, in one final act of hospitality, opened its pool and spa to us for the afternoon, so our last hours in the city were spent cool and weightless instead of wilting in the heat with our luggage. In the evening our driver collected us for the ride out to Pudong Airport, and Shanghai let us go.
We flew Lufthansa home the long way — Pudong to Frankfurt, Frankfurt to New York, New York to Pittsburgh — the same airline that had carried us into China, closing the loop somewhere over two oceans. Seventeen days, seven cities, one very patient wife, and a camera roll beyond counting.
Shanghai Verdict: The City That Shows Off — and Shares
Four days in Shanghai taught us the city's two truths at once. It is the most overwhelming place we have ever been — the heat, the crowds, the traffic under the river, a shopping street with no end — and, at the moments that mattered most, the kindest: a stranger sharing a DiDi in a sweltering garage, a driver who simply added us to his night, a hotel that fed us at eleven and floated us through our last afternoon. Come for the skyline and the crab. Stay for the people.
The Final Takeaway: Shanghai rewards surrender. Don't fight the summer heat — copy the locals and build your days around the great indoor continents of malls, which are destinations in themselves; save the Bund for after dark, and see it from both banks. Pre-book your airport and station transfers: ride-hailing at the great rail stations can humble anyone, as our first night proved. And if you can end a China trip anywhere, end it the way we did — a few nights at a hotel like the Bulgari, on Suzhou Creek, close enough to walk to everything and pampered enough to recover from all of it. Seventeen days after we landed in China, we flew home from Pudong already talking about the next trip. That is the whole review, really.
Note: As with every hotel on this trip, the Bulgari Hotel Shanghai gets its own featured review, coming separately — first impressions only here, as promised back on Day 13.
📸 View the full Shanghai photo gallery → https://mrtravelagent.pixieset.com/shanghai/
— End of the Luxury Daily Journal in China. Thank you for traveling with us. The hotel reviews begin soon.
