Yu Gardens: A Field Guide

Yu Gardens, or as it is locally known, Yu Yuan, is a beautiful place with a strong history and a self-contained community of cafes, restaurants, bars, shops and even food stalls. In the vicinity of Yu Gardens you’ll find a temple, a politically important tea house, housing for low income residents and cheap, knock-off fakes.

Yet, this cultural hot spot has been taken as a tourist trap in recent years, and people are unable, due to the throngs of gawking tourists, to see the beauty and history behind this epic old town city center. They go there to buy ‘I Love Shanghai’ shirts and miss the fact that the stalls and shops selling souvenirs have probably been there for generations selling a multitude of different items and only recently capitalizing on the Shanghai tourist boom.

Yu Gardens was once the center of the city, with the shopping and market square at the epicenter. The execution grounds were here, and the Chenghuang Miao Daoist Temple survives to modern day. You can have your qi centered and your yin and yang analyzed at the temple, or just burn a bit of incense and meditate on the cycle of life. There were podiums for local theater entertainment, and in the canter, the actual park where the lake houses (even to this day) a tea house.

Any real visit to Yu Gardens should not just include a tour of the central lake, the back garden area of the massive (newly renovated) shopping alleyways that weave around the small lake. The Temple should be viewed if possible, and if you have time, take a stroll around the Gardens in a wide circle, you’ll find where the locals still shop for clothing, fabric and food. In the evening, locals walk around in pajamas talking, playing chess or simply gossiping like their ancestors did in the same location a hundred years prior. These fringe alleys are also where you will find cheaper goods that are not tourist-centered. You’ll find, to the north, a mega complex hidden by its non ostentatious look. Inside you’ll find small stalls selling everything from wigs to candles, shoes and dolls. Bargain hard in the dingy ‘malls’ around Yu Gardens, but take into account that this is the real deal, the modern take on the same merchant-based trade that existed when Shanghai was evolving from a small fishing village into the largest city in China.