Lujiazui and Zhangyang Road Shopping District

The Lujiazui and Zhangyang Road shopping district (小陆家嘴-张杨路商圈, Xiǎo Lùjiāzuǐ-Zhāngyáng Lù Shāngquān) is Pudong’s main shopping area, set among its best-known towers. A visitor goes for the skyline and the malls at its foot, and can add a walk east along Zhangyang Road. The commercial district is a recent one: it was built after 1990, on a riverbank that had been farmland and warehouses.

Shanghai’s 2022–2035 commercial plan names it one of the city’s 29 city-level commercial centres, about 1.7 km² with some 1,000,000 m² of planned shop and mall floor space. It is also one of the centres the plan groups into an ‘east international consumption cluster’ around the Bund and Lujiazui.

The name Lujiazui is older. It was a sandbar projecting into the Huangpu, called after the home and family graves of Lu Shen (陆深), a Ming-dynasty official. The State Council approved the Lujiazui Financial and Trade Zone in 1990 as part of the opening of Pudong. The whole zone covers 31.78 square km, and the core, known as Little Lujiazui (小陆家嘴), about 1.7 square km: the Huangpu River on the west and north, South Pudong Road on the east and Dongchang Road on the south.

The towers give the district its look. Chinese Wikipedia dates the Oriental Pearl Tower to 1994, the Jin Mao Tower to 1998, the Shanghai World Financial Center to 2008, the south and north towers of IFC Shanghai to 2009 and 2010, and the Shanghai Tower to 2016. The shopping runs beside them. Super Brand Mall (正大广场) opened on 18 October 2002 and is described by its operator as China’s first true one-stop shopping centre. Chinese Wikipedia also names the IFC mall and Huarun Times Square among the core malls. The older end of the district lies on Zhangyang Road (张杨路), about 7.4 km long, which began in 1958 as a rural road of about 1,680 m and became a commercial axis in the 1990s. At the crossing with South Pudong Road, Shanghai No. 1 Yaohan (第一八佰伴) opened on 20 December 1995 in the New Century Mansion (新世纪商厦), with about 140,000 square metres of floor area.

A 2024 city action plan for upgrading shopping districts describes Lujiazui as part of an international-level consumption cluster combining commerce, tourism and culture.

Getting around: Lujiazui station (Lines 2 and 14) is the closest to the towers. Century Avenue station serves Lines 2, 4, 6 and 9, and Line 6, which opened in 2007, runs under Zhangyang Road.