Shanghai for families

Best museums

Shanghai's 12 most worthwhile museums sit on both banks of the Huangpu — anchored in the Huangpu district around the city's central institution, jumping the river to Pudong for at least 1 national-scale art collection, and reaching out to a building in older Shanghai that tells a 20th-century European story from a Chinese vantage. The list mixes a state flagship, an urban-planning hall organised around the city itself, a quieter art museum and a history museum, a natural-history collection, the founding-site museum of a political party, a contemporary kunsthalle, a sprawling science-and-tech complex, a tiny pavilion-museum, and a sculpture park that closes the list on a deliberately unhurried note. We have ordered the 12 for a visitor with finite time: the indispensable first, the rewarding-but-particular last. Skip the impulse to do all 12 in 1 weekend; pair 2 per day, eat well between them, and you will leave with the rare sense of Shanghai as a layered place, not a skyline.