Shanghai Museum holds more than 120,000 artifacts representing almost five millennia of continuous Chinese civilization. The Building was designed by Shanghai architect Xing Tonghe to represent a ding, or ancient three-legged bronze vessel. It also incorporates the sacred geometry of Yuanqiu, the circular altar at the Temple of Heaven (Tiantan) in Beijing, with a square base (representing the earth) surmounted by a circular superstructure (representing heaven). It was completed in 1996, and has five floors with a total area of more than 39,200sq.m (420,000 sq ft).

Shanghai began life as a fishing village, and later as a port receiving goods carried down the Yangzi River. From 1842 onwards, in the aftermath of the first Opium War, the British opened a ???oncession??in Shanghai where drug dealers and other traders could operate undisturbed. French, Italians, Germans, Americans and Japanese all followed. By the 1920s and 1930s, Shanghai was a boom town and an international byword for dissipation. When the Communists won power in 1949, they transformed Shanghai into a model of the Revolution.