[.ca] Lonely Planet Shanghai City Guide (ISBN 1740593081)

This book is worth it's weight in gold!:
A friend of mine and I visited Shanghai May-June 2004. Reading this book beforehand was incredibly useful. It does, however, seem to give the impression that the e.g hotels and nightclubs it enlists are the only ones at these price levels, but we found heaps more. Not unexpected in a city of 13 million people. We both agreed the book is worth it's weight in gold. Traveling in China where hardly anyone speaks English or are able to read the western alphabet can be a tedious task. Getting this information on location might be feasible for Chinese speaking travelers, but practically impossible for forreigners. Read the book in total beforehand! Make notes! We had so much fun in China, and we owe much to this book. It should have included more on the Chinese language (pronouns, a short dictionary etc) and more extensive information on Hangzhou. ...and don't eat the ¥180 meal in the Oriental Pearl Tower. It's absolutely horrible and the service is below street-corner-eatery level. - Peder -

Ok but so far out of date its not useful:
First, I should point out that most (~70%+) of LP¡¯s Shanghai guide is just reprint of what is in their larger China guide. No need to get both. While the condensing, arrogant, and at time sophomoric attitude that characterizes LP¡¯s china guide in general is absent here it is unfortunate that this guide is so far out of date that it could just as well be about another city. Its high time for a new edition. An example; the book talks about a development, ¡°xin tian di¡± that is worth keeping an eye out for some time in the next ten years. (Xin tian di was completed years ago).

A Shanghai starter kit:
Shanghai changes so rapidly; any guide that is written on this city will be half way out of date by the time it sees publication. Keeping this in mind, this is a swell guide book. I used this book about a year and a half ago to negotiate my way around Shanghai for 7 weeks. It served in a pinch for most of the major landmarks in the city; additionally, it was an ok guide for the nightclubs and restaurants. (chances are, the club and restaurant info is getting a bit outdated by now...) This book will give you a good jumping off point for exploring an amazing city. You may, however, wish to buy a detailed Shanghai map before you go.

Standard Lonely Planet quality but needs to be updated.:
This is a decent guidebook but I must confess that I like Lonely Planet and I'm very familiar with their format. If you use this along with another guidebook and a really good map then you will be fine. Be warned that Shanghai is a very dynamic city and it is constantly changing. This edition is already out of date so Lonely Planet needs to release a new version ASAP. Overall, it gives you good background about Shanghai and I wouldn't go there without it.

One of the few, one of the good:
It is refreshing to see a travel book that is as well integrated, considering the publisher is undergoing a transformation in their editorial dept to include costlier photos. The book's descriptions are diverse in central city, suburbs, provincial environs, as well as covering common aspects of China travel. Lots of practical advice and categorizing tourist expenses into budget, medium priced, & first class. This book has 22 pgs of photos and 9 maps with marked key lists. The photos go well beyond the media touristy stock photos to include children, people at work, everyday scenes, empty freeways, but no massive bicycle or bus traffic jams which I'm sure exists. About the first half of the book included general history and descriptions, getting there, and getting aclimated. Then the back half of the book has specific discussions on diverse topics from the usual hotel, eats, and entertainment, to shopping, expat & gay bars, and children's activities. There are many warnings that all things in Shanghai are expensive, more than the US. There are day excursions to famous Suzhou (Venice of the East) and Hangzhou (West Lake) which are very touristy with the natives. There is only one visit "off the beaten path" to Putuoshan, an island and overnight ferry about 150mi SE. The book is well made to stand the rigors of travel, bound in signatures, so pages and maps won't drop out after the spine has flexed with rough use, or maps can be carefully razored out for separate pocket use. The 8-page language section has the essentials, including the word for toilet and toilet paper and the men and women characters on p57. I wonder if pronunciations can also be given in Shanghainese dialect as it appears to be Mandarin. The most objectionable format issue was the 6 pages of publisher's advertisements (p212-218) which were stuck between the glossary and index, and maps with site lists at the end. These adverts should be placed in the foreword or left out. And the inside of the front and back covers are non-functional, adverts in front and metric conversions in back. They could have been maps and not-to-be-missed sites. And the metric conversions did not include conversion of area, esp sq meters to sq ft and sq km to sq miles. Having read Yatsko's New Shanghai (0-471-84352-0, 2001), which has no maps and only 4 pgs of stock pixs, I was anxious to see more. I was pleasantly surprised. When trying to locate the famous Fudan University, however, I was disappointed that there was nothing in the index, which is a scanty 4 pages, with only a few Chinese locations. After scanning the map's key lists which are not indexed, the only Fudan U entry was the last entry on the last page. This turned out to be wrong. In the Harvard U based Let's Go China (0312270348, 2001, p281), I found an obscure reference to take Bus 910 to Wujiaochang, a NE suburb as discussed on p63. Only after looking at the MapQuest-like city map at ShanghaiGuidedotcom did I find Fudan U's location, whose own website had a campus map in Chinese and no street address or directions, a common mistake with website designers. Wujiaochang is a traffic circle, like in DC and Boston. Fudan U is just west of it on Handan Lu. Fudan U could have been marked on Map 3, which includes Tongji U and Shanghai Normal U. This area needs to be emphasized of its location and proximity to the Pudong SEZ. As a reader of the author's prior co-authored book, Odyssey's Uzbekistan (962-217-582-1, 99), I considered it excellent in photography and description guides and sidebar stories. As a feature LP has a website to support its books, however the support area is not linked from the home page. Only after searching LonelyPlanetDotcom was I able to locate the upgrades area, but they did not have any updates for China (Taiwan, Japan, and Central Asia had Acrobat PDF files). This book was written within the round-eye tourist and expatriate's perspective. For the squinty-eye overseas Chinese, those able to blend-in and reading and speaking Mandarin, Taiwanese, or Cantonese, I'd like to see your coverage broadened to include dirt-cheap accommodations and native business interests, especially in the Pudong SEZ and other high-tech areas similar to the Zhongguancun SEZ in Beijing. Or at least include a detailed list of resources, websites, or tourist guides written in Chinese.