WhereLore — The Story Behind Every Place

SHANGHAI

A waterfront built by competing empires, now read as one continuous skyline of stone and ghosts.

Farmland within living memory — now the skyline the world pictures when it pictures China.

Plane trees a foreign government planted still shade the city's most romanticised streets.

A private Ming-dynasty garden built as an act of devotion — and the bazaar that grew around it.

A working Buddhist temple sheathed in gold, ringed by the luxury that grew up around it.

An Art Deco slaughterhouse whose ramps and bridges are now an architecture pilgrims photograph.