Xujiahui
徐家汇
The Jesuit heritage heart of Shanghai and the cradle of Chinese cinema and Western-style painting: the 1906 neo-Gothic St Ignatius Cathedral, the 1872 observatory with an unbroken climate record, the 1847 Jesuit library, the Tushanwan orphanage art school, and the French-Concession arts villas of the Hengfu southern edge. Flat, museum-dense, metro-served citywalks.
Xujiahui (徐家汇) takes its name from Xu Guangqi, the Ming scholar who worked with Matteo Ricci on the first Chinese Euclid and whose family land sat at the meeting of the Zhaojiabang and Puhuitang creeks. From the mid-19th century the Jesuits built here a self-contained mission quarter — an observatory (1872), a library (1847), a cathedral (1906) and the Tushanwan orphanage whose art workshop became the cradle of Chinese Western painting. A century later the same ground became the home of Shanghai's film studios, and the French-Concession villas to the north-east became museums of crafts and symphonic music. The result is a single flat district where six small museums sit within a kilometre of each other, most of them free, several of them bookable-only. This area's flagship walk threads them into one line; it is the most bookings-and-hours-dependent route in the catalogue, and the most rewarding on a rainy day.
