There are night cities, and then there is Shanghai. A new set of aerial films, shot by China Photography and LaLin Photography, sends a drone gliding through the city after dark — and the result looks less like a documentary and more like a establishing shot from a science-fiction film. It is easy to see why Shanghai keeps getting compared to Blade Runner's Los Angeles: towers stacked into the haze, neon and LED washed across glass, and the Huangpu River cutting a black ribbon through it all.
The footage lingers on the two halves that make Shanghai's skyline so unusual. On one bank sits the Bund, the historic waterfront promenade lined with colonial-era buildings — solid, stone-faced, and lit in warm gold. Across the river rises Pudong, the futurist counterpoint, where the Oriental Pearl TV Tower stands 468 metres tall with its distinctive spheres stacked along a concrete spine. Few cities on earth let you stand in one century and stare straight into another, and Shanghai's riverfront does exactly that.
Shot entirely at night, the film gives the city an almost weightless quality. The familiar daytime density softens into glowing lines and reflections, and the drone's low passes between skyscrapers capture a scale that is hard to grasp from street level. Even if you have walked the Bund yourself, seeing it from a few hundred metres up — the river traffic, the illuminated towers, the sheer spread of the metropolis — recalibrates your sense of the place.
For travellers, the practical takeaway is simple: Shanghai is a city best seen twice in one day. The Bund is free, open around the clock, and at its atmospheric best from sunset onward, when the Pudong skyline lights up across the water. The Oriental Pearl Tower offers observation decks of its own if you want the view in reverse, looking back at the colonial waterfront. Add in the fact that Shanghai's metro runs late and the riverside is easily walkable, and a night of skyline-gazing costs almost nothing beyond dinner.
If the film does its job, it will do what good travel footage always does — move Shanghai up the list. For anyone drawn to big, electric, after-dark cities, this is about as good as it gets on the planet.
