Shanghai: City Guide (Lonely Planet City Guide) [Paperback]

Let me begin by confessing that I love LP guides. I have used them for 30 years and have visited more than 60 different countries. Having said that, I have some reservations about recent editions of these guides, including this one.

The authors of this guide do an outstanding job of providing large amounts of practical information in a highly readable format. Even if one is on a guided tour or officially hosted trip, this guide (like other LP guides) provides useful historical, cultural, and other background information to enhance one's stay. The authors are always entertaining, and sometimes wickedly funny.

The same authors also have written an abbreviated "Shanghai Encounter" guide at about half the retail price, but I would opt for the full guide reviewed here, even for a short visit.

The text is modular rather than linear in format, first grouping information by neighborhood and then grouping by activity (eating, drinking, shopping, etc.). Much of the useful information is in boxed texts scattered throughout the book.

This format makes a good index essential, and that is my first complaint. The index to this edition is skeletal at best, and it is in a frustratingly modular format. Rather than having a full alphabetical listing by subject, this guide has several sub-indices by topic.

Yuyuan (the garden), for example, is a major station of the tourist cross in Shanghai, yet it is not listed in the index, which has only two "Y" listings -- "yoga" and "youth hostel".

Instead, one must know that Yuyuan is in the "Sights" sub-index, and then is in the "Parks and Gardens" sub-sub-index. What a nuisance! Since many topics are split into modules and boxed texts scattered through the book, finding essential information can be problematic when the index is so poor.

One of LP's strengths has always been its cartography. No other guidebooks, in my experience, have better maps or more extensive geographical information for independent travelers.

The tragedy of this guide is that key locations on the new maps are printed in pale blue ink, which is almost invisible against gray backgrounds and disappears completely when copied. (The same pale blue is also used for the Chinese vocabulary words at the end of the text and for various section headings and place names throughout the text.)

The days of reading one's LP guide, choosing an itinerary for the day, then relying on a Xerox of the pertinent map (or vocabulary words or place names) are now gone. One will have to carry the guide everywhere if one wants to use the maps or vocabulary words, and even then one may have trouble seeing a (pale blue) keyed item on a gray background -- it's like playing "Where's Waldo" in miniature.

There is a pull-out map, but this is rudimentary, contains little useful information, and is easily misplaced. The guide itself does not even include a subway map (essential in Shanghai), which only appears in a sketchy format on the back of the pull-out map.

Download a good Shanghai subway map before you leave home, and try to obtain better information on bus routes, which are numbered for use by Westerners, but are only poorly described and scattered in this guide.

One strength that this guide maintains is that every major name, location, and sight appears in both Roman (Pinyin) and Chinese script. This is very useful for what my wife and I call "point and go" travel, which we suggested to LP after visiting China many years ago.

Transliterations never seem to work (the Pinyin used currently is atonal and a phonetic disaster for English speakers), but with this guide one can simply point to the name in Chinese characters and then be pointed in the right direction by friendly locals.

In summary, the authors of this guide do an excellent job (5 stars), but the LP cartographers, indexers, and designers do a miserable job (no stars).

One additional caveat: A new edition will be needed before the 2010 World Expo opens in Shanghai -- this guide does not include this information yet.

I spent roughly two weeks in Shanghai and this book made my life a lot easier. On the other hand however, I have used lonely planet books that have better descriptions / suggestions, so there is definitely room for improvement. I say purchase this book and another.

when a book that is hardly a year old manages to have just about every entry price wrong that tells me that they have not bothered even checking basics. LP seems to be busy pumping out books and getting as much mileage off their name while ppl are still buying travel books. They should at least do their homework.