Why it looks like this

Before Shanghai was Shanghai, this was the centre: Songjiang prefecture governed the whole region, and its old town — with a Tang-era pagoda and canal lanes — prospered on cotton long before the treaty port boomed downstream. Locals call it 'the root of Shanghai'.

Modern planning gave the district two new identities: Songjiang University Town, one of China's largest campus clusters, and Thames Town — a 2000s 'One City, Nine Towns' experiment that built an English market town, complete with church and cobbled square, as a suburb centrepiece.