Shanghai's hinterland — the Yangtze delta — is dense with classical canal towns and historic gardens, all reachable in under an hour by high-speed rail. Suzhou (25 minutes by train) is the obvious one: a world heritage city of Ming-dynasty scholar gardens and silk workshops. Hangzhou (45 minutes) sits around the famously beautiful West Lake. The smaller water towns of Zhouzhuang, Wuzhen and Tongli preserve canal-and-bridge layouts that look exactly like Ming dynasty paintings — best visited as half-day trips on weekdays before the bus tours arrive. Nanjing (1 hour) is the old Ming capital, with city walls, Sun Yat-sen's mausoleum, and the sobering Nanjing Massacre Memorial.
Closer to home, and far quieter, Xinchang is a Ming-Qing salt town in southern Pudong whose old street and stone bridges have escaped the tourist polish of the bigger canal towns — an easy, unhurried half day for anyone who has already seen the famous ones.
