Yu Garden (Yuyuan, 豫园) is two hectares of Ming-dynasty garden that Pan Yunduan began in 1559 for his father and finished in 1577. It sits inside something much bigger and louder: the Yuyuan bazaar, a free-to-enter block of rebuilt Ming-style streets, shops and snack counters that most visitors walk through and take for the garden. It is not the garden. The garden has a ticket, a wall and a Monday closure. The bazaar has none of those, and a markup.
That distinction decides most of the visit. Below: what the ticket costs and how a foreigner gets one, what is inside the wall, when the crowds thin, the night openings and the Lantern Festival, and what to eat on the way out. Every figure is checked against sources dated 2025 or 2026; where they disagree, we print both. For the rest of the city, see things to do in Shanghai.
- Ticket
- ¥40 (1 Apr–30 Jun, 1 Sep–30 Nov) / ¥30 (Jul–Aug, Dec–Mar)
- Hours
- 9:00–16:30, last entry 16:00
- Closed
- Mondays, except public holidays
- Metro
- Yuyuan Garden, Lines 10 and 14, Exit 1 or 7
Checked 4 Oct 2026 Prices from WanderInChina (Feb 2026) and Babagoes China (Feb 2026); hours from GoAsia (3 Oct 2026) and China For Travelers (Sep 2026). Two sources give an 8:30 opening, and Trip.com (Jan 2025) charges ¥40 in July and August. We found no official notice that settles either point.
Yu Garden tickets: price, booking and the passport question
There are two ways in. The official one is the “Shanghai Yu Garden” WeChat mini-program or public account, where you reserve a dated ticket. The other is the ticket windows at the north and south gates. Resellers sell timed tickets with two entry windows, 9:00–12:30 and 12:30–16:00, and some English-language guides call advance booking mandatory. The evidence does not back that up. A guide updated on 2 October 2026 describes queuing at the gate and buying a ticket there, and WanderInChina says tickets are “technically available at the booth, but lines can be brutal.”
Our reading: booking ahead is not required, but it gets you out of the gate queue, which matters most on weekends and holidays. Reseller listings open about 14 days ahead, according to one source.
Bring your passport. China For Travelers and The China Journey both say foreign visitors need it to buy a ticket and to enter. GoAsia says the rule is not applied to everyone, but nobody reports a photocopy or a driving licence being accepted. At the window you pay in RMB cash, UnionPay or a mobile wallet; The China Journey reports some counters refusing foreign cards.
Children under 1.3 m go free. Students pay half with ID, and a 2025 reseller calendar lists ¥15 for seniors and students against the ¥30 adult rate.
Checked 4 Oct 2026 Booking channels: China For Travelers (Sep 2026), GoAsia (Oct 2026). Gate purchase: Trvlogue (2 Oct 2026), WanderInChina (Feb 2026). Passport: The China Journey (Aug 2025). Time slots: Musement, Pelago, Taketours listings. Concessions: Trip.com (Jan 2025), Dahepiao (Mar 2025).
The bazaar, the Nine-Zigzag Bridge and the outside of the Huxinting teahouse are all outside the paid wall, and so is the City God Temple (¥10, incense included). If all you want is a photograph of the bridge and the teahouse roofs, you do not need a garden ticket.
What is inside the wall
Whitewashed walls split the garden into separate courtyards, and the walls are part of the show: their grey-tiled ridges rise and fall and end in dragon heads. WanderInChina points out that the dragons have three or four claws, not five, since five belonged to the emperor. It is the kind of detail you only notice if someone tells you to count. These are the parts worth slowing down for.
Sansui Hall and the Grand Rockery
Sansui Hall (三穗堂) adjoins the Grand Rockery and is the garden’s ceremonial hall; the building you see was reconstructed during the 1950s restoration, according to The Paper. The rockery is piled from yellow huangshi stone and dates from the Ming. Chinese press credits it to the rockery master Zhang Nanyang, while Wikipedia hedges with “possibly”. Its height is given as 12 m by Wikipedia and CultureTrip and 14 m by WanderInChina; CultureTrip adds that about 2,000 tonnes of stone came from Wukang in Zhejiang.
Dianchun Hall
Fujian merchants built Dianchun Hall (点春堂) in the early 1820s. From September 1853 to February 1855 it was the headquarters of the Small Swords Society, the rebels who held Shanghai’s walled city, and The Paper describes it as the only surviving site of that uprising. Everything else in the garden is about poetry and leisure. This room is about a siege.
The Exquisite Jade Rock
The Exquisite Jade Rock (玉玲珑) is a single porous boulder about 3.3 m tall and roughly five tonnes, riddled with holes. WanderInChina counts 72 of them; we found nobody else who counted, so treat the number as folklore. It stands in front of the Hall of Jade Magnificence (玉华堂), furnished with Ming rosewood furniture according to Wikipedia, and also rebuilt in the 1950s.
The Inner Garden
The Inner Garden (内园) was laid out separately in 1709, as Ling Yuan, and recreated in 1956. WanderInChina describes it as quieter and denser than the main garden, with an old stage and bamboo.
Checked 4 Oct 2026 History and dimensions: Wikipedia; The Paper (25 Feb 2022) on the 1950s reconstructions, Zhang Nanyang and Dianchun Hall; CultureTrip on the rockery stone; WanderInChina (Feb 2026) on the dragons, the 14 m figure and the Inner Garden.
Huxinting teahouse and the Nine-Zigzag Bridge
The teahouse in the middle of the pond began as a pavilion built by Pan Yunduan. It was rebuilt and renamed Huxinting in 1784 and became Shanghai’s first commercial teahouse in 1855, according to the city government. It closed for restoration in October 2023 and reopened on 10 July 2025 (Xinhua). The city says about 40% of its daily visitors are international.
Tea is where the numbers fall apart. We found four current prices: from ¥45 per person (DisneyBlog, June 2026), ¥80–100 a cup or pot (WanderInChina, February 2026), ¥120–380 for afternoon-tea sets (an aggregator, 2026), and a Monday offer of a pot of tea with a vegetarian bun for ¥10, reported by China Daily in August 2025. None of these is an official price list. Read the menu before you sit down; it also protects you from the scam described further down.
Checked 4 Oct 2026 History: Shanghai government (15 Aug 2025); reopening: Xinhua (11 Jul 2025). Tea prices conflict, as listed; no official price found.
When to go, and when not to
Yu Garden is busy most of the time, and the official counts show how busy. At 14:15 on 20 February 2026, during the Spring Festival holiday, 25,662 people were in the Yu Garden area at the same moment (The Paper). On Saturday 20 June 2026 the area counted 138,000 visitors over the day, up 122.6% on a year earlier (Shanghai Observer). Those figures cover the whole Yuyuan block, bazaar included, not just the paid garden.
For the garden itself, three guides give the same advice: be at the gate when it opens on a weekday, or come in the last hour before the 16:00 last entry. WanderInChina says the first 45 minutes are close to empty and the crowd arrives around 10:00.
The off-peak months, July–August and December–March, are ¥10 cheaper; for what the weather does in each, see the best time to visit Shanghai.
During the 1–7 October holiday, Yuyuan Garden station runs one-way entry and exit. Its Line 14 platform and East Nanjing Road station (Lines 2 and 10) close from 16:00 each day until the end of service; Line 10 at Yuyuan stays open (Guangming Daily, 28 September 2026; the same rule applied in 2024). SmartShanghai’s Golden Week list tells residents to skip both Yu Garden and the Bund. If your dates fall on a Chinese public holiday, move Yu Garden to another day.
Checked 4 Oct 2026 Visitor counts: The Paper (20 Feb 2026), Shanghai Observer (21 Jun 2026). Holiday metro rules: Guangming Daily (28 Sep 2026). Timing advice: WanderInChina, Babagoes China, China For Travelers.
Yu Garden at night
The paid garden closes at 16:30, but there has been an evening option. On 8 August 2025 Yu Garden launched its first public night tour, “Yu Xiang Shan Lin”, with five light-and-shadow shows along the route, 24 lighting points and guided groups of up to 20. Tickets were ¥150–218, sold through the “Shanghai Yuyuan” WeChat account or the South Gate office at 279 Yuyuan Old Street. The 2025 schedule ran from about 18:00 to 21:50, on more evenings a week from May to October than in winter, although the city’s own page contradicts itself on whether Tuesdays and Wednesdays were included.
We could not confirm that the night tour is running in 2026, and one guide updated on 3 October 2026 says evening visits are limited to the bazaar. Check the WeChat account before you plan an evening around it.
The free part is simpler. The bazaar and the Zigzag Bridge are lit from about 17:00–18:00, depending on the season, until around 22:00.
Checked 4 Oct 2026 Night tour: Shanghai government (29 Jul 2025), Yangzi Evening News (10 Aug 2025). A travel blog quotes about ¥60; we use the official figure. 2026 status unconfirmed. Bazaar lighting: Trvlogue (Oct 2026), The China Journey (Aug 2025).
The Yu Garden Lantern Festival
The Yuyuan Lantern Festival (豫园灯会) has been on China’s national list of intangible cultural heritage since 2011. The 2026 edition, for the Year of the Horse, ran from 26 January to 3 March and spread across six zones from Yuyuan to the Bund and the Bund Finance Center. Adult tickets were ¥80, with timed entry to the folk-art zone. Regular days ran 16:00–22:00 and the peak days around the New Year 14:00–22:00, with no lighting on New Year’s Eve itself. When the area reaches capacity, police close the surrounding streets to traffic.
The 2027 edition, for the Year of the Goat, has no announced dates as of 4 October 2026. Chinese New Year falls on 6 February 2027; the 2026 festival opened about three weeks before the New Year. We will update this page when the 2027 dates and tickets are published.
Checked 4 Oct 2026 2026 dates and price: The Paper (26 Jan 2026), China Daily (28 Jan 2026), Xinhua (27 Jan 2026), ChinaBound (17 Feb 2026) for hours. The Paper gave the closing date as about 2 March; three others say 3 March. Heritage listing: ihchina.cn.
Eating at Yu Garden
Nanxiang Steamed Bun (南翔馒头店), on Yuyuan Road by the Zigzag Bridge, is the famous one and carries a Michelin Bib Gourmand listing. It charges different prices on different floors. The ground-floor takeaway window sells pork xiaolongbao for ¥26 for eight (DisneyBlog, June 2026) or about ¥25 for twelve (China For Travelers, September 2026). Upstairs, six crab-and-pork dumplings cost ¥75 by one account and about ¥40 by another, and WanderInChina puts the third-floor rooms at roughly four times the takeaway price. Expect a 45–60 minute queue at mealtimes; Michelin’s own advice is to come before 10:30.
Across the bazaar, prices run 20–30% above the blocks around it (WanderInChina). Our Shanghai food guide lists xiaolongbao and noodle shops away from the crowd.
Canada’s official travel advice for China names Shanghai’s Bund for this one: a friendly stranger, often a “student” practising English, invites you for tea, and the bill comes to thousands. A SmartShanghai reader reported a ¥2,980 bill in October 2025 after being approached on Nanjing East Road. Yu Garden is a short walk from both. Turn down invitations from strangers and never order where no prices are shown.
Checked 4 Oct 2026 Nanxiang: Michelin Guide listing; prices from DisneyBlog (Jun 2026), China For Travelers (Sep 2026), WanderInChina (Feb 2026), which disagree. Scam: travel.gc.ca, SmartShanghai (13 Oct 2025).
Accessibility and how long to allow
Yu Garden is hard going in a wheelchair or with a pushchair: cobbles, high door thresholds, steps over the rockery and narrow passages. WanderInChina calls it “extremely difficult”; China For Travelers says the main paths take a stroller but not much else does. We found no official accessibility statement.
Allow 60–90 minutes for the garden alone, 45 if you are rushing, and two to four hours if you add the bazaar and the City God Temple.
Checked 4 Oct 2026 Accessibility and durations: WanderInChina (Feb 2026), China For Travelers (Sep 2026), GoAsia (Oct 2026).
Is Yu Garden worth it?
Yes, on two conditions. It is the only Ming garden left in the city, it fits into half a morning, and it is 10–15 minutes on foot from the waterfront (see our guide to the Bund), so it slots into the first day of a three-day Shanghai itinerary without a detour. The conditions: go at opening, and keep walking past the tea-shop touts in the bazaar.
If Suzhou is on your route, the sums change. Suzhou’s classical gardens are on the UNESCO World Heritage list, they are larger, and Suzhou is about 25 minutes from Shanghai by train; the Suzhou itinerary covers them stop by stop. In that case Yu Garden becomes optional, and the bazaar around it is the first thing to drop. More on the city as a whole: the Shanghai travel guide.
Yu Garden Shanghai: quick answers
Is Yu Garden in Shanghai free?
The garden is not: ¥30 or ¥40 depending on the month, and children under 1.3 m go free. The bazaar, the Zigzag Bridge and the area around the Huxinting teahouse are free.
Is Yu Garden closed on Mondays?
Yes, except on public holidays. The bazaar stays open.
Can I visit Yu Garden at night?
The garden closes at 16:30. A ticketed night tour (¥150–218) ran from August 2025; we could not confirm it for 2026. The bazaar is lit and free until about 22:00.
How long do I need at Yu Garden?
About 60–90 minutes for the garden, and half a day with the bazaar and the City God Temple.
We have not visited Yu Garden ourselves. Figures come from the sources named under each section; see how we check.