Shanghai Photos -- National Geographic's Ultimate City Guides

Relaxing
Photograph by Justin Guariglia
Easy Rider Shanghai-style, a motorbike-taxi driver awaits customers in parked comfort.
Misty City
Photograph by David Butow
Classic Shanghai scene: Misty drizzle lends a lustrous sheen to the neon lights and colonial facades of Nanjing Road, one of the world’s busiest shopping streets.
Acrobats
Photograph by David Butow
Young acrobats perform at the Shanghai Centre Theatre, on Nanjing Road West, one of the many performing venues in the city.
Ice-Cream Parlor
Photograph by David Butow
The galvanic energy of Shanghai’s Nanjing Road lights up the windows of an ice-cream parlor, itself a fairly new phenomenon in this land where dairy foods aren’t traditional fare.
Dance Club
Photograph by David Butow
Not their fathers’ China: Young Shanghainese move to the rhythm of the night in one of the edgy new dance clubs that pepper 21st-century Shanghai.
Migrant Workers
Photograph by David Butow
A mural of pastoral woodland gives migrant workers from China’s countrysides a touch of home at a Shanghai construction site.
Advertising on the River
Photograph by David Butow
Advertising takes to the Huangpo River in buy-buy Shanghai, where boats outfitted with large screens float out product pitches along the Bund.
Art Gallery
Photograph by David Butow
A scene straight out of New York finds a wine server making the rounds at an art-gallery opening along Shanghai’s fashionable Bund.
Nonconformity
Photograph by Justin Guariglia
Colorfully mismatched socks make a striking fashion statement on a modern-day Shanghai street, a sight unthinkable during China’s conformity-driven Cultural Revolution.
Dance Lessons
Photograph by Justin Guariglia
Open-air dance lessons—here along Shanghai’s Bund—have proven popular in China since the lifting in 1976 of a Cultural Revolution ban on public displays of personal emotion.