Shanghai's Nanjing Road 10/20/06

The #1 shopping street in all of China, Nanjing Road features modern stores, international boutiques, cafes, restaurants, silk shops, hotels, office towers and of course, plenty of neon lights. This pedestrian street is packed with international and Chinese tourists numbering in the tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands every day. As Westerners, the one feature that really stood out was the fact that nearly every block had a McDonald's or a KFC. There were literally 6-8 McD's over a 1-2 mile stretch--which definitely takes away from the charm.









In colonial Shanghai, Nanjing Road West was known as Bubbling Well Road, the domain of carpet salesmen and clairvoyants; Nanjing Road East, built largely as a pathway to successive horse-race tracks, became dominated by silk shops, luxury hotels and huge department stores.