About Shanghai Zoo

Shanghai Zoo

Shanghai Zoo, formally the Shanghai Zoological Park, is the main zoological garden of Shanghai, located at 2381 Hongqiao Road in Changning District near the Hongqiao area and administered by the Shanghai Forestry Bureau. It is one of the two main zoos in the city, the other being the Shanghai Wild Animal Park in Pudong, and it occupies a site with an unusual past: before it held animals it was livery stables and then one of Shanghai's largest golf clubs. Covering about 74 hectares, the zoo exhibits more than 6,000 animals of over 400 species, in primate, carnivore, herbivore, bird and amphibian zones. Its best-known residents include giant pandas, golden snub-nosed monkeys, South China tigers and Yangtze alligators, alongside gorillas, giraffes, kangaroos and many other species from around the world. Unusually for a major zoo, its landscape still preserves the layout of the former golf course, with broad lawns and about 100,000 trees of nearly 600 species, so that a visit feels as much like a walk through a historic park as a tour of animal houses. The zoo is a member of the World Association of Zoos and Aquariums, known as WAZA, and combines display with scientific research, breeding and public education.

From Livery Stables to Golf Club

The ground on which Shanghai Zoo stands was first developed as livery stables in 1890, serving the horse-drawn transport and riding needs of the growing treaty-port city. In 1914 the stables were purchased by a consortium of merchants, and in 1916 the site was converted into the Hung-Jao Golf Club, named in the older romanisation of Hongqiao, the district in Shanghai's western suburbs where it stood. The club became one of Shanghai's largest golf clubs, its fairways, lawns and planted trees shaping a landscaped green space in what was then the city's rural fringe. Like many other foreign-owned clubs and properties in Shanghai, the golf club's land was resumed by the new government in 1953, after the Communist Party took over Shanghai in 1949. That transfer ended nearly four decades of golf on the site, but it preserved the landscape itself. When planners came to create a public park and then a zoo here, they inherited mature trees, open grassland and water features laid out for sport, and, remarkably, much of that original golf-course design has been basically preserved to the present day, giving the modern zoo its spacious, garden-like character.

Xijiao Park and the Birth of the Zoo

In 1954 the former golf course was opened to the public as Xijiao Park, a name rendered in English as Western Suburbs Park, reflecting its position in Shanghai's western outskirts at the time. The Xijiao Park name has proved durable: decades after the institution was renamed, many local residents still refer to the zoo by its old name. The animal collection developed in stages. In 1959 a series of animal enclosures was built and the park was expanded, shifting its character from a landscaped public park toward a zoological garden. Through the following two decades the collection grew as Shanghai itself grew, and the park's role as the city's principal place to see wild animals was formalised in 1980, when it was renamed the Shanghai Zoological Park, the name it carries today in its full form, Shanghai Zoo for short. A later addition to the site was a Ferris wheel built in 1992, which remained in operation until its decommissioning in 2024, a small marker of the zoo's parallel role as a leisure park for Shanghai families across several generations.

Scale, Landscape and Layout

Shanghai Zoo covers about 74 hectares, with figures of 743,000 square metres commonly cited, and animal display buildings covering some 47,237 square metres. Its defining feature, besides its animals, is its greenery. The zoo holds a total of about 100,000 trees of nearly 600 species, and its green areas and lawns include some 100,000 square metres of open grass, much of it following the fairways of the old golf course. Swan Lake is the emblem of this ecological approach: its natural reed clumps and shade trees provide a setting in which pelicans, geese, black swans, night herons and other waterbirds live in a scene designed to feel like a fragment of wild wetland rather than a cage. In recent decades the zoo has set itself the goal of becoming an urban ecological zoo, gradually transforming older enclosures into visually open, habitat-style exhibition areas. For visitors, the layout is organised into zones for primates, carnivores, herbivores, birds, and amphibians and reptiles, set among the lawns and tree avenues, so that moving between animal areas means walking through one of Shanghai's larger urban green spaces.

The Animal Collection

The zoo houses and exhibits more than 6,000 animals. Sources vary slightly in how they count the collection: the candidate record gives over 400 species on display, while the zoo's own summaries describe 600 species native to China among its holdings in some accounts and more than 6,000 individual animals overall. The Chinese collection is the heart of the zoo. It includes the giant panda, the golden snub-nosed monkey, the South China tiger, the Yangtze alligator, also called the Chinese alligator, the hoopoe, black bulbul, great hornbills and Bactrian camels. The South China tiger has a long association with the zoo, which began keeping the subspecies in 1958, only a few years after the park opened. To that native core the zoo adds animals from every continent: chimpanzees, gorillas, giraffes, polar bears, kangaroos, ring-tailed lemurs, common marmosets, spider monkeys, African wild dogs, olive baboons, mandrills, Canadian lynx and maned wolves are all listed in published collection summaries. That breadth, pairing China's flagship species with a representative world collection, is what distinguishes Shanghai Zoo from a purely regional menagerie.

Primates, Pandas and Big Cats

The primate zone is one of the zoo's strengths, reflecting both China's own monkey fauna and the great apes. Golden snub-nosed monkeys, among the most distinctive and endangered primates in China, are star exhibits, and the collection also includes gorillas, chimpanzees, mandrills, olive baboons, ring-tailed lemurs, marmosets and spider monkeys. The giant panda, China's national treasure, anchors the carnivore area in popular accounts of the zoo, where pandas are exhibited alongside red pandas and the big cats. Among the cats, the South China tiger holds special significance: it is one of the most critically endangered tiger subspecies, native to the forests of southern China, and Shanghai Zoo's keeping of the animal since 1958 gives it a place in the long, difficult history of trying to sustain the subspecies in captivity. Lions and leopards complete the large-carnivore displays, while smaller predators and bears, including sun bears in published listings, round out the zone. For many visitors the combination of pandas, golden monkeys and tigers in a single visit is the zoo's defining draw.

Birds, Reptiles and Herbivores

Beyond the mammal houses, the zoo's bird areas range from the open water of Swan Lake, with its bar-headed geese, black swans, Dalmatian and great white pelicans and mallards, to aviaries holding species such as the orange-headed thrush and an outdoor bird garden. Published visitor guides list ostriches, peafowl, flamingos, mandarin ducks, red-crowned cranes, African penguins and macaws among the birds on display. The amphibian and reptile zone includes the Chinese cobra, the Aldabra giant tortoise, the Chinese giant salamander and the Yangtze alligator, the small crocodilian native to the lower Yangtze that is one of the zoo's signature native species. The herbivore zone presents the large grazing animals suited to the zoo's lawns, including giraffes, zebras, antelopes, Bactrian camels and kangaroos, with scimitar-horned oryx also listed in collection summaries. A native animal area has been described in guides as showing South China tigers, leopards, leopard cats, oriental storks, Chinese water deer and raccoon dogs, underlining how much of the zoo's identity rests on the fauna of China itself.

Research, Breeding and Conservation

Shanghai Zoo presents itself as more than a display collection. Its published mission combines providing areas for amusement and leisure with opportunities for visitors to increase their knowledge of animals, and with scientific and technical research intended to help people better understand and protect animals. As a large, long-established municipal zoo administered by the Shanghai Forestry Bureau, it participates in the coordinated breeding and management of endangered species through China's zoo networks, and its membership of the World Association of Zoos and Aquariums places it within the international zoo community and its standards for animal care and conservation. The species it keeps most prominently, the giant panda, golden snub-nosed monkey, South China tiger and Yangtze alligator, are all animals for which captive breeding and public awareness are recognised parts of national conservation strategies. The zoo's long continuity on one site, with records of individual species' keeping stretching back to the 1950s, gives it studbook depth and husbandry experience that newer parks cannot easily replicate, and its ecological-zoo redevelopment programme is aimed at matching its enclosures to modern welfare expectations.

Shanghai Zoo and Shanghai Wild Animal Park

Visitors sometimes confuse Shanghai Zoo with the city's other major animal attraction, and the distinction is worth making. Shanghai Zoo, in Changning District in the west of the urban area, is the older, municipal zoological garden, founded as a park in 1954 on the former golf course and renamed in 1980. Shanghai Wild Animal Park, by contrast, opened in 1995 in Pudong, about 35 kilometres from the city centre, as China's first national-level wild animal park, with a drive-through safari. The two institutions are complementary rather than competing: the zoo offers a traditional, garden-based collection reachable easily from central Shanghai, strong in primates, native Chinese species and landscaped grounds, while the wild animal park offers safari-style viewing across a larger, more open site. Together they make Shanghai one of the few Chinese cities with two major, differently styled zoological attractions. For residents, the Changning zoo remains the everyday institution, the place of school trips and family weekends, still widely called Xijiao Park by locals who grew up with its earlier name.

Visiting Shanghai Zoo Today

Today Shanghai Zoo remains one of Shanghai's most visited family attractions and one of the best-known ecological gardens in the city. Its address at 2381 Hongqiao Road places it near Hongqiao's transport hub, and most visitors allow half a day to a full day to cover the primate, carnivore, herbivore, bird and amphibian zones at a walking pace through the lawns and avenues. The experience differs from that of a compact modern zoo: distances are generous, shade is plentiful, and the preserved golf-course landscape means picnics on the grass and a lakeside pause at Swan Lake are part of the visit, not distractions from it. Seasonal changes in the planting, from spring blossom to autumn colour among its nearly 600 tree species, reward repeat visits by local families. After more than half a century of development since the first enclosures of 1959, and seventy years since Xijiao Park opened on the old fairways in 1954, Shanghai Zoo stands as both a working zoological collection of more than 6,000 animals and a piece of Shanghai's social history, a green survivor of the treaty-port era turned to public use.