Learn Chinese in Shanghai, China
Location
China: Shanghai
Description
Our school is located in the heart of city. We provide high quality Chinese courses and a professional friendly learning environment. We organize accommodations for our international students and we arrange many culture activities and excursions to ensure that our students can enjoy not only the Chinese language course, but also the vibrant city of Shanghai.
Our teachers are all university educated and we offer a cultural activity program each week but remains optional.
Highlights
Shanghai is probably the most evocative city for an outsider in the whole of China. Beijing may be more purely, mysteriously Chinese but only Shanghai offers such a heady brew of half-digested images and preconceptions.
For the second city of the world's oldest surviving ancient civilization, Shanghai is surprisingly new. Literally 'On the Sea', Shanghai is a port city on the Huangpu River, where the Yangzi River empties into the East China Sea.
The area was marshland until the Song Dynasty (AD 960-1126), when refugees from Mongol and other northern nomad invasions settled the area. By 1291, Shanghai had become a county capital.
The growing city got its wall in 1553 (prophetically, against Japanese pirates) and a customs house in 1685. Shanghai was only thrust into the spotlight in June 1842, when a British seaborne force captured it during the First Opium War. One of five cities pried open to Western colonial trade by the Treaty of Nanjing, Shanghai gained foreign districts controlled by the colonial powers - the British and American Concessions (soon combined as the International Settlement) and the French Concession.
This hybrid city boomed as the focus of Chinese colonial trade and Qing Dynasty China uneasily coexisted with Western power for almost a century.