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Hongkou, Shanghai — Area Guide & Where to Stay
Hongkou is a district of Shanghai in the city's northern urban core, a museum-dense ward on the Huangpu bank.
About Hongkou
Where to stay in Hongkou
Where you base yourself shapes the visit — here's the character of each area.
Hongkou keeps its beds within reach of its museums. The district sits in the northern urban core of Shanghai, so a room here can put the Rockbund Art Museum, the Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum, or the Lu Xun quarter a short walk from your door. Pick your patch by mood.
Each corner of Hongkou leans a different way, from the riverfront galleries down at the Huangpu edge to the quieter memorial streets in the north.
About Hongkou
What are the main landmarks in Hongkou?
The district crowds its draws together. Within Hongkou you can reach the Rockbund Art Museum, the Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum, and the Shanghai Lu Xun Museum, while the Shanghai Postal Museum, the Shanghai Railway Museum, and the Memorial Hall of the 4th National Congress of the Communist Party of China gather the district's civic and transport history within a few streets of Shanghai's northern core. The Monument to the People's Heroes rounds it out.
What is the history of Hongkou?
Hongkou carries the memory of arrivals. This part of Shanghai's northern core sheltered thousands of Jewish refugees in the Tilanqiao streets during the war, a story the Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum now keeps, and the writer Lu Xun spent his last years in the same lanes that the Shanghai Lu Xun Museum records. The district remembers both.
Where is Hongkou?
Hongkou lines the northern core of Shanghai. This inner district holds a subtropical, humid pocket of the city, its streets running from the Huangpu bank up toward Baoshan, with Yangpu on the east and Jing'an on the west.
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More areas in Shanghai
Updated July 2026