Upcoming Walks & Events

MARCH 2026

WALK DESCRIPTIONS BELOW

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MARCH 2026

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WALK

Sunday March 1, 2pm

Lane Life, Art Deco, and the Ghosts of Rue Bourgeat (Changle Lu)

RMB 200 members, 300 nonmembers

Rue Bourgeat, today’s Changle Lu, is one of the city’s classic avenues, lined with plane trees, historic architecture, and a rich tapestry of tales. It’s changing, though, and fast. But much still remains of this microcosm of Old Shanghai: Art Deco architecture, lanes that twist and meander towards hidden treasures, dappled streets, and oh, the stories! Wealthy tycoons, struggling refugees, powerful gangsters and glamorous film stars. Secrets, scandals, and the ghosts of a lively past!

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WALK

Saturday March 7, 10am

Eileen Chang’s Shanghai

RMB 300 members, 400 nonmembers, includes private bus

No one captured the soul of 1940s Shanghai like Eileen Chang– the city, society, and the interior lives of young women like her, coming of age during a wildly turbulent time in a rapidly changing China.

On this tour, we’ll trace her legacy throughout the city, visiting the places that featured in her life and her books and share snippets from her writing to illustrate how she captured a city and an era. We’ll share her own extraordinary story, which is woven throughout her fiction: a wicked stepmother, distant mother, aristocratic, opium-addict father, and a philandering, collaborator husband. She wrote nearly a century ago, but she’s had something of a revival among Shanghai’s young single women of today. Come find out why.

You don’t have to have read Eileen Chang’s books to come on this tour—it’s a great opportunity to discover her. But if you’d like to know more, join us at book club later this month, when we’ll read and discuss her collection of short stories, Time Tunnel.

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WALK

Sunday March 8, 10am

The Women of Old Shanghai (Bund edition)

RMB 200 members, 300 nonmembers

In honor of International Women’s Day, we’ll walk in the footsteps of the trailblazing women of old Shanghai. Women like Yan Shuhe, founder of the Women’s Bank; Gracie Gale, owner of Shanghai’s most famous bordello; department store heiress Daisy Kwok, who founded a fusion fashion salon; journalist Edna Lee Booker, who braved battlefields for scoops; Emily Hahn–writer, lover of a Chinese poet—and more. We’ll see where they lived, worked, and played, the institutions they created, and talk about the unique environment of old Shanghai that allowed them to blossom.

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ST PATRICK’S DAY WALK

Saturday March 14, 4pm

NEW St. Patrick’s Day Walk: The Irish in Old Shanghai

RMB 200 members, 300 nonmembers, includes tasting

Details to follow

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OUT OF THE CITY

Sunday March 15, 9am

Old Shanghai Movie Magic: Shanghai Film Park

RMB 350 members, 450 nonmembers, includes private bus, lunch, and entry tickets

In the spirit of Oscars season, we’re taking a road trip to see the film sets where Old Shanghai movies are made.

“Old Shanghai,” after all, is one of the most popular Chinese film genres, and it’s recreated in astonishing detail in this suburban film park. A working tram runs down a 1930s Nanjing Road, lined with shops like Sincere’s. A cathedral soars, a young man in a scholar’s robe calls from a vintage phone box. There’s a shikumen in this corner, Moller House over there, and the famous Angel of Peace rises above the fray. A museum exhibition features the famous film stars of Shanghai’s Golden Age, and we might even run into a film shoot! A truly immersive Old Shanghai experience.

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WALK

Saturday March 21, 10am

Tycoons, Traitors, and Tobacco: Yuyuan Road East

RMB 200 members, 300 nonmembers

Yuyuan Road is the latest photo op spot for internet influencers, but tucked away behind the leafy streets and hipster cafes are the hidden histories of this historic street, one of Shanghai’s 64 preserved roads. It was a quiet oasis where you could build a sprawling estate, stash a concubine or two, and plot revolution. We’ll visit Yuyuan Lu’s lanes and villas, designed by Chinese architects for a Chinese elite in a glorious medley of styles: Spanish, Art Deco, neoclassical, Chinese. They became homes of real estate magnates, banking families, a notorious traitor, the king of Chinese jazz, and so many more.

We’ll cover Yuyuan Lu West on March 28.

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BOOK CLUB

Saturday March 21, 7pm

March Book Club: Time Tunnel by Eileen Chang, translated by Karen Kingsbury and Jie Zhang

RMB 100 members, 200 nonmembers

The translators will join us for the discussion

Can we ever get enough of Eileen Chang, the quintessential Shanghai writer? Chang died in 1995, so it’s an unexpected pleasure to see this new collection of stories and essays from every part of her life, from wartime Shanghai to Hong Kong and her last years in America. A special treat for this book club meeting: translators Karen Kingsbury and Jie Zhang will join us to discuss Chang, her writing in English and Chinese, and translating an icon.

“Genesis,” left out of the two volumes of stories with which Chang made her name in the 1940s, shows her transfixing eye for visual detail and aptitude for brilliant verbal description, even as it looks forward to the improvisatory, open-ended approach to narrative she developed in later years. “Blossoms Afloat, Flowers Adrift” addresses the perils and uncertainties–the vertigo–of exile, while in the late masterpiece “Those Old Schoolmates They’re All Quite Classy Now,” Chang looks back across the better part of a lifetime to the world she came from and the changes that have come with the years.

Essays like “A Return to the Frontier” and “New England Is China,” both written in English, broaden our wonder at the effervescent and melancholy genius of a transformative modern writer.

Available on Kindle. Hard copies are not available in China.

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WALK

Saturday March 28, 2pm

Revolutionaries, Cabarets, and Collaborators: Yuyuan Road West

RMB 200 members, 300 nonmembers

In the second part of our Yuyuan Road walk, we’ll continue our stroll behind the leafy streets and hipster cafes, in search of the hidden histories of this historic street. This section of Yuyuan is a marvellous mix of Old Shanghai: the missionaries’ secret door of hope, housing for Japanese executives; underground revolutionary lairs, a mansion for a mistress and a Victorian Gothic castle for a collaborator; homes of literary figures, a rocket scientist—and the villa that housed a notorious cabaret.

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SHANGHAI HISTORY SERIES

Sunday March 29, 2pm

REVOLUTION IN THE AIR (1911-1927)

RMB 200 members, 300 nonmembers

In 2026, Historic Shanghai started a new series of walks to help make sense of Shanghai’s history. Each Shanghai History walk covers a period of the city’s history in chronological order. For the full list of walks, see the Shanghai History Walks post.

Revolution’s in the air! Join us as we explore the epic drama of Shanghai’s revolutionary legacy in the latest Shanghai History Walk.

Sun Yat-sen’s Qinghai Revolution has succeeded, the Qing dynasty’s fallen, and China has a new republic. Its foundations are shaky, though, so enter the warlords, some of the most colorful characters in Chinese history (wait til you meet the Dog Meat General!). Meanwhile, events abroad are impacting this cosmopolitan city: the dramas of World War I, Japan’s growing interest in colonizing China, and the October Revolution in the Soviet Union, which inspires young revolutionaries in China to form their own Chinese Communist Party in 1921. Two years later, the new Communist Party and the leaders of the new republic join forces to oust the warlords, and in 1926, set out on the Northern Expedition, which arrives in Shanghai in 1927. But the alliance ends tragically, with an era-defining massacre …

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