Hongkou

Hongkou's historical character is shaped by two distinct foreign presences. The area north of Suzhou Creek became the main zone of the Japanese concession and later settlement after the Meiji era, and many of the commercial streets retain a structural resemblance to interwar Japanese commercial districts — low-rise, tight, with covered arcades and narrow shop frontages.

Overlaid on this is the history of Jewish refuge. Between 1933 and 1941, around 23,000 European Jews — primarily German, Austrian, and Polish — found shelter in Shanghai, which was at that point one of the few places in the world requiring no visa for entry. After the Japanese occupation of the International Settlement in 1941, these refugees were confined to a roughly one square kilometre 'restricted area' in Hongkou. The Ohel Moshe Synagogue, built in 1927 by the earlier Sephardic Jewish community and used by Ashkenazi refugees during the occupation, now functions as the Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum with substantial documentation of this period.

Duolun Road Cultural Street, a short pedestrian lane connecting to Sichuan Road North, was a gathering point for left-wing writers in the Republican period, including Lu Xun, who lived nearby for the last years of his life. A bronze statue of Lu Xun marks the corner where he would walk; the former residence is preserved as a museum a few blocks away.

The Suzhou Creek area immediately south of Hongkou, which spent decades as an industrial waterway, has been progressively cleaned and its banks landscaped into a riverside walk, reconnecting Hongkou to the central city along the water.