People’s Square Area

People’s Square is located at downtown Shanghai in the northwest of the Huang District.

Rebuilt in 1994, people’s Square ,the city’s transport hub,has put on a new face, calling on people from all over the world.

Since 1949,this former racecourse has become the city’s center of politics,economics,culture and art with a mixture of architecture in Shanghai Museum,the magnigicent City Hall(called people’s ,Mansion),Shanghai Grand Theatre,Shanghai Urban Planning Exhibition Hall and Shanghai Art Gallery, facing each other across wide open boulevards flutering with Chinese flags,People’s Square forms the equivalent fo Beijng’s Tiananmen Square today.

A large music fountain named “Light of the Huangpu River”,tens of thousands of square meters of lawns,six groups of bas-relief creatively reflecting the history of Shanghai,The Rising Sun and Bright Moon Squares,the spacious and brightly lit underground shopping mall attract visitors with the graceful bearing of new shanghai.

On both sides of the 600 meters wide People’s Avenue are 5.5 meters wide

green belts and 6.5 meters wide passages for non-motorized vehicles. In the middle of the square is a 320 square meters round fountain , a land scaped lawn of 80,000 square meters.In the west part of thr square are kept nearly 1,000 pigeons.A bird in the hand usually turns out to be a feathered friend on the lookout for a handout from visitors to People’s Square.After taking up residence at the square,the plump pigeons have proven to be a greatly popuplar attraction.

Befor liberation In 1949,the open space of people’s Square and People’s Park in the heart of the city was racecourse.The history of Shanghai has long been enwined with horse.Horse racing used to be a popular pastime among foreigners in old Shanghai.The city’s first racecourse appeared in 1850,several years after the Opium War and Shanghai was carved up into foreign concessions.

Horse racing was a British obsession.The racecourse in Shanghai was investment by six British men,who leased 5.3 hectares of land near Central Henan Road ,paved a road around it to serve as the racecourse, built a garden in the center for British residents living along the bund.,The original footpath was converted into a promenade .At that time nobody could know this tiny footpath wound later become the thriving Nanjing Road.As the city grew,Land prices rose steeply,and the race club owners sold the land and moved westwards.But events repeated themselves,and before long,they sold the second racecourse , making another tidy profit.

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