Lonely Planet Shanghai: City Guide Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)This guide is so close to being excellent but for some unknown reason Lonely Planet has decided that it is not necessary to list the names of sites, restaurants and the streets on maps in Chinese characters. This has been a complaint with all the previous editions, so I was hoping when pre-ordering this for a mid-May trip that they would remedy situation....but no, that would make too much sense. As reviewers of previous editions have pointed out 99% of cab drivers cannot read the "English" spellings of Chinese places. As a result, we found ourselves stuck having to have Chinese friends or hotel concierges go through and translates all the names in the book.....makes you wonder why you bought the guide in the first place. The maps have some Chinese names, but probably only for about 10% of the streets, and often not enough for cab drivers to figure out where to go. It boggles my mind that this guide could have so much good and insightful information yet leave out the basic of most basics. In the end we ended up having all the Chinese names written into the guidebook by hand (so we manually had to do what LP should have offered in the first place). Heck, maybe I should just Ebay our much more useful version of the guide. Aside from this major (and I mean major) fault the guide is very good. My only other complaints is that the text is microscopic (I am guessing 6 or 8pt), which helps make the book light, but also difficult to read. Also, the map keying system is just bizarre in that listings direct you to a map page but not the specific location where that listing is on the map....for that you have to go to a separate index page which then gives you the location on the map.
So in the end, I find it hard to recommend a guide that you will most likely have trouble getting around with unless you speak the language. It is just completely unacceptable for LP to leave this basic information out and why I can only give it 2 stars. Please learn from your mistakes Lonely Planet.


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Lists the newest, best restaurants, clubs, and shops, hand-picked by Shanghai resident, Damian Harper. Chinese script for city maps. Mouth-watering food chapter and easting listings.

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