Chase Red Memories and Revolution Spirit Day Tours in Shanghai

Tour Itinerary

Arrival and Welcome to Red-Shanghai

Your guide meets you on arrival at your hotel, the airport, or a train station, holding a "Your Way Holiday" sign, and sets out the day before you move. The route runs through the streets where the Communist Party was founded, so your guide opens with the short version of how Shanghai, split between foreign concessions and Chinese-administered districts, became the setting for the 1921 congress. You travel between stops by car, and the guide handles tickets and timing.

The First National Congress Site

Your first stop is the site of the First National Congress of the Communist Party of China. On July 23, 1921, thirteen delegates met in the dining room of this brick house, then inside the French Concession, and declared the founding of the Party. The meeting broke up under a police scare and finished days later on a boat on South Lake near Jiaxing. The restored meeting room and the adjoining exhibit hall now lay out photographs, delegate records, and documents from that summer. Your guide walks you through who attended and what was decided.

The Second National Congress Memorial

A short drive brings you to the site of the Second National Congress, held in 1922 at the former Fuji Girls School in the old French Concession. It was here that the Party adopted its first full Constitution and set its line for organizing workers and linking with the Communist International. The present building is a memorial and museum whose cases hold reproductions of those early documents next to photos of the delegates. Your guide explains what the 1922 meeting changed about the structure of the movement founded a year earlier.

Lunch of Squirrel Fish and Braised Pork

At midday your guide takes you to a local Benbang restaurant for two dishes tied to old Shanghai kitchens. Squirrel-shaped mandarin fish, song shu gui yu, arrives as a whole fish deboned, scored into loose flakes, deep-fried until the edges curl and crisp, then coated in a bright sweet-sour sauce of vinegar, sugar, and tomato. Braised pork belly, hong shao rou, follows: pork cut into cubes and cooked slowly in soy, sugar, and spice until the fat softens and the sauce takes a dark lacquer sheen. Your guide orders, explains the sweet-salt balance of the local style, and adjusts the dishes to what you prefer.

Longhua Martyrs Cemetery

After lunch you go to Longhua Martyrs Cemetery in Xuhui, the burial ground for revolutionaries executed in Shanghai between the late 1920s and 1949. The site grew around the Longhua Prison, where Nationalist authorities held and shot writers, students, and Party members, and many buried here died young. A path lined with headstones leads to the central Martyrs Monument, and visitors can lay flowers at its base. Your guide reads the names and short biographies on the markers so the people behind them stay specific rather than abstract.

Shanghai Revolutionary History Museum

Next is the Shanghai Revolutionary History Museum, whose galleries trace the city from the treaty-port era through the 1949 handover. The collection moves through strikes, student protests, and the underground networks that operated inside the concessions, using original notices, personal belongings, and recorded testimony from people who took part. You pass the exhibits in order, so the sequence from wartime resistance to the collapse of the Nationalist administration reads as one story rather than separate cases, and your guide fills in the local context behind each room.

Lu Xun Memorial Hall

The last site is the Lu Xun Memorial Hall in Hongkou, built around the tomb of the writer. Lu Xun, born Zhou Shuren in 1881, spent his final decade in Shanghai and died here in 1936; the hall preserves his study, manuscripts, letters, and first-edition volumes from his years in the district. He gave up medicine for writing after concluding that literature would rouse readers faster than a clinic could, and the fiction he produced made him a reference point for critics of the old order. Your guide connects those works to the revolutionary currents you met earlier in the day.

Day Close and Transfer

The tour closes at the memorial, and your guide collects the tickets and runs back over the day, from the 1921 founding room to the graves and the museum galleries, so the sites line up in order. From there your driver takes you back to your hotel, the airport, or a train station, timed to your departure. Tell your guide before the drop-off if you want more time at any stop, since the order and pace can be adjusted on the day.

What does this red-memory day tour cover?

You visit the site of the First National Congress of the Communist Party, the Second Congress memorial, Longhua Martyrs Cemetery, the Shanghai Revolutionary History Museum, and the Lu Xun Memorial Hall, with a Benbang lunch between stops. The day runs six to eight hours with a private guide.

Where does the tour start and end?

Your guide meets you at your Shanghai hotel, the airport, or a train station, based on what you book, and the closing transfer returns you to whichever of those you need.

Is this tour a fit if I am not into political history?

The stops are historic buildings, a cemetery, and museums tied to the founding of the Communist Party and to the writer Lu Xun. If you want a waterfront-and-gardens day instead, a classic Shanghai sightseeing route fits better; if you came for the modern-era backstory behind those buildings, this tour goes deeper than a standard one.

How much walking is involved?

The route alternates between indoor exhibit halls and open cemetery and memorial grounds, spread across the day. The paths are level, and you can ask your guide to slow the pace or shorten the walk at any stop.

What will I eat for lunch?

Lunch is at a local restaurant serving Shanghai Benbang dishes, most often squirrel-shaped mandarin fish and braised pork belly. Vegetarian, no-pork, and no-fish requests can be arranged with notice before the day.

Do I need to book the entry tickets myself?

No. Your guide handles entry to the congress sites, the museum, and the memorial, builds queue and security time into the schedule, and carries the group booking so you only need a valid ID.

Price Per Person in US Dollars