The Shanghai People’s Square is a lovely urban park in the middle of the city similar to Central Park in New York. It’s quite a clean and nice park with lots of people and birds to watch. This place used to be the horse racing scene of Shanghai but after the new communist People’s Republic of China took over in 1949 and outlawed gambling and horse racing, this place took on many changes and is now a park and home to many prominent buildings including the museum of Shanghai.
The Shanghai Museum is a museum of Chinese art and shaped to mimic a ding 鼎 which is a type of ancient Chinese pot or vessel. The building has a round top and a square base, symbolizing the ancient Chinese perception of the world as “round sky, square earth”.
There are more than 1000 pigeons in the People’s Square and I had fun feeding them that afternoon. Lots of children were chasing the birds around as well.