Xintiandi: Restored Shikumen Lanes in the Old Concession

Xintiandi (新天地, Xīntiāndì — "New Heaven and Earth") is where developers took two blocks of crumbling shikumen (石库门, shíkùmén) lane housing in 2001, gutted the interiors, kept the grey brick and stone gateways, and filled them with restaurants, boutiques and cocktail bars. Purists called it a theme park. They are not entirely wrong.

But the architecture is real, and this is the clearest place in Shanghai to understand shikumen — the hybrid house type that combined British terrace layout with Chinese courtyard gateways and housed most of the city's population for a century. The brickwork, the carved lintels, the narrow alley widths are all authentic. The ¥20 ($3) Shikumen Open House Museum on the North Block furnishes one house as it would have been in the 1920s, right down to the tin bath and the shared kitchen, and it takes 25 minutes.

What you should not do is eat or drink here without checking prices. Xintiandi is one of the most expensive few hectares in China: a coffee is ¥45 ($6), a main course ¥150-300 ($21-42). The equivalent meal in the lanes around Jianguo Road, fifteen minutes' walk south, costs a third of that.

An hour is enough. Combine it with the free CPC First National Congress Memorial on the corner of Huangpi South Road — the 1921 house where the Communist Party was founded, sitting incongruously beside a Starbucks.