The Former French Concession The former French Concession is, for many visitors, the highlight of a visit to Shanghai, delivering much of what this fabled city promises. It also becomes the city’s hottest and hippest neighborhood, where trendy bars and clubs multiply like mushrooms after a rainstorm. Shanghai’s idiosyncratic push-pull between new and old, development and preservation, takes a special form in the French Concession, making it an absolutely unique urban experience.
The area still holds something of the alluring mix of scrappy Shanghainese street life, shopworn European colonial charm, Art Deco edifices, hidden brick courtyards and film noir intrigue that have, along with the proud stone edifices of the Bund and the twisting alleys of Shanghai’s Old City, long defined "Shanghai" in the Western popular imagination.
The good news for tourists is that the trend has been as much toward renovation as toward demolition and new construction, allowing entrepreneur-driven hives of nascent hip like Taikang Lu in the south to develop as a solid alternative to the glitz of Huaihai Zhong Lu to the north, the mega-mall mania of Xujiahui in the west and the theme-park historicism of Xintiandi at the eastern end of the old French Concession.
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