Despite the fact that a settlement exited here on the banks of the Huangpu River of at least 1,500 years, Shanghai is really a modern-day boom town — the biggest and most successful boom town in history.

Named as a Treaty Port open to foreign trade in 1842, Shanghai started growing rapidly…and didn't stop growing until the Japanese invaded the city during World War Ⅱ, about a hundred years later.

During that century, Shanghai was miraculously transformed from an obscure Chinese river port into one of the largest and most significant cities in the world — a city big and creative enough to have spawned its own urban culture, its own spoken dialect, its own cuisine, even its own haute couture fashions.

Today nearly ten million people live in the Shanghai metropolitan area, and while other PRC cities may be more historic, strategic or politically important, Shanghai is till the Big Town — China's New York, Paris, London and Tokyo all rolled into one.

Ancient China is on show at the excellent Shanghai Museum, and the old riverfront business district called The Bund is well worth seeing, but the main attraction of Shanghai is the amazing vitality of the city itself.

Shanghai experiences temperature extremes, with temperatures soaring above 30℃ in summer, and freezing winter weather.