Yuyuan Garden & Shanghai Museum

Yuyuan Garden

Yuyuan Garden, maybe the most celebrated classical Chinese garden in Shanghai, is located in the northeast part of the old town and has an area of about five acres. In 1559, a Ming official named Pan Yunduan launched the construction of this private garden for his father's pleasure. The construction lasted 19 years. Later, due to the decline of the Pan family, the garden gradually fell into disuse. Furthermore, several civil conflicts in the mid-19th century caused great damage to it. After several large-scale re-constructions since 1949, Yu Yuan was finally opened to the public in 1961. The garden each year attracts countless visitors from home and abroad.

Built in a style that Suzhou gardens often take, Yuyuan garden is characterized by an exquisite layout, beautiful scenery and artistic architecture. Each pavilion, hall, stone and stream in the garden can express the quintessence of South China landscape design from Ming and Qing dynasties.

The bounding wall in the garden decorated with dragon's heads and paved by scalelike tiles on top, looks like a huge wandering dragon. People named it Five-dragon Wall. More interesting is that each dragon in this wall only has four claws. Legend goes that when the wall was first completed in the Qing Dynasty, like the dragon in royal palaces, they all had five claws. The feudal ruler, regarded it as a sign of irreverence and rebellion, and then cut one of the claws of each dragon.

Shanghai Museum

Shanghai Museum is to the south of the People's Square in the downtown area. The construction area of the museum is about 40,000 square meters, and attracts many visitors.


The Shanghai Museum building has a circular upper storey but square ground floor. Seen from a distance, the entire structure is just like an ancient Chinese bronze, providing you with a very different impression of the building. 


What makes Shanghai Museum different from others in the world is that it integrates traditional culture and spirit into the whole construction in an exquisite way.

Shanghai Museum has an immense collection of Chinese ancient art. There are altogether, over 120,000 precious cultural relics stored in this museum, including bronzes, chinaware, calligraphy, paintings, bamboo and wooden lacquer works, and so on. T

he most distinctive collections are bonzes, chinawares, calligraphy and paintings. Shanghai Museum is renowned for its rich collections and their high quality. It is ready to welcome all from home and abroad.