Tuesday · August · 11 · 2026
“Happy the man, and happy he alone, He who can call today his own.”
— John Dryden
Sun & daylight
The sun rises at 05:18 and sets at 18:43 in Shanghai today, giving 13h 25m of daylight. Solar noon is at 12:00.
05:18
Sunrise
12:00
Noon
18:43
Sunset
Midnight
00:00
Sunrise
05:18
Solar noon
12:00
Sunset
18:43
Solar midnight
00:00
Daylight
13h 25m
Daylight runs about 14h 10m around the June solstice and 10h 6m around the December solstice.
Daylight saving time
Shanghai does not observe daylight saving time. Clocks stay on UTC+8 all year, so the local time never shifts with the seasons.
Public holidays
China has 1 public holiday in August 2026.
Architecture
Shanghai keeps three cities in view at once: the colonial bund, the Pudong skyline built to answer it, and the creek-side factories now being taken apart and reused. Most of its recent architecture belongs to the third.
Completed 2021
Ennead Architects
An astronomy museum in the Lingang district, laid out without a straight line. Ennead Architects arranged the building as three curved arcs around a central void and made the geometry work as an instrument, with an oculus that tracks a disc of sunlight across the floor through the year. An inverted glass dome sits over the main hall and frames the sky directly. A museum about orbits is set out by them rather than decorated with them.
Completed 2021
Thomas Heatherwick
A retail and cultural complex on a bend of Suzhou Creek, on the site of a disused factory. Thomas Heatherwick ended each of a thousand structural columns in a planter, so the frame stops at the roofline as a field of trees instead of a parapet. The mass is broken into two stepped hills that leave the older creek-side buildings visible. Structure and planting are one system here rather than one added to the other.
Completed 2019
David Chipperfield
A museum on the Huangpu bank in the West Bund arts district. David Chipperfield set three low galleries in a pinwheel around a glazed central hall, so the building has no single front and can be entered from the river or the road. Glass fibre reinforced concrete panels give a flat, even surface that stays quiet against the water. It anchors a district that was industrial land ten years earlier.
Completed 2015
Gensler
The third and tallest tower at Lujiazui, standing beside the two built before it. Gensler wrapped a round inner tower in a second skin that turns through a hundred and twenty degrees as it rises, which cuts the wind load enough to save a quarter of the structural steel. The gap between the skins holds nine stacked atria used as sky lobbies and gardens. The twist is a structural decision that happens to also be the silhouette.
Completed 1999
Skidmore, Owings & Merrill
An office and hotel tower at Lujiazui, the first of the district's three. Skidmore, Owings & Merrill stepped the shaft in setbacks whose proportions follow the tiers of a pagoda, tightening as it rises. The hotel occupies a barrel atrium that drops thirty storeys through the upper shaft. It set the pattern the rest of Pudong followed, which was that the skyline would be argued in tall single objects.