Xintiandi is one of Shanghai's most talked-about neighbourhoods — and also one of its most genuinely contradictory. Built around a restored cluster of shikumen (stone-gate) longtang houses from the early 20th century, it was reimagined in the late 1990s as an upscale pedestrian district of restaurants, boutiques, and bars. The result is a place that looks like old Shanghai but functions as a very polished, very expensive version of the present. That tension is part of what makes it interesting rather than merely pretty.
Neighbourhood