Susan's Shanghai Blog - Week 3Walking Tour

This week, we spent the morning at the YuYuan Garden. This is a cool little garden in the middle of the Old City and is considered one of the finest Chinese gardens in the region.

The garden was first established in 1559 as a private garden created by Pan Yunduan, who spent almost 20 years building a garden to please his father, a high-ranking official in the Ming Dynasty, during his father's old age. Like many things, it fell into pretty bad shape but then was taken over by the government, restored, and opened to the public in 1961. It was declared a national monument in 1982.

The garden takes up about 5 acres of space and is enclosed in tall walls. Insice, there are several areas that are laid out with lots of temples and paths. I'm not going to cover each and every picture that we took, but just to let you get a view of it.

This is the front entrance and the first temple. Most of the temples that you will see follow the same kind of format and architecture.

After that first temple, you get to the Rockery and fish pond. They have built up this area out of rocks and they have waterfalls and everything.

The square outside of the Garden

I've hesitated taking pictures of food, but here we made an exception. These are steamed Shanghai dumplings, which are different than other types of steamed dumplings. They have a broth inside and there is a specific technique on how to eat these.

Susan next to the TeaHouse lake, because there is a former tea house that is now a restaurant.

Here is a street around the square that is outside of the garden. TONS of shops (mostly tourist ones) and TONS of people.

Here again you can see the JinMao tower (left) and Shanghai World Financial Center (right). These are 2 blocks north of our apartment.