In the forest of steel and concrete that is Shanghai, urban fairy tales come to life at sunset.
Location
Qingpu Dongdu Frog City is situated a short distance from Dianshan Lake Avenue Station, Metro Line 17, in the heart of Shanghai’s Qingpu District.
Night-time urban exploration
I was staying with an artist from Zhujiajiao when, one evening, she came up with an idea: “Let’s go and see a ghost shopping mall.” We quickly packed our backpacks and jumped on a bus to the metro line I had already used to get to downtown Shanghai. It dropped me off near a street food stall. Around the corner, there was a gate to climb over.
I learned that in China, there are no blind spots for Big Brother cameras. “Don’t worry, it’s just an abandoned ruin,” she told me. “As communists, there is no private property: if it’s empty, it belongs to everyone.” I didn’t really believe this story.
She climbs over the gate in a flash and lands on the other side. I wait for the street to clear a little, then jump over.
I land on a suspension bridge that once connected the street to the underground parking lots. I freeze: dim lights below. Night workers on guard. I signal to her that we can’t go through with it with people around; who knows how urbex works here, so I don’t want to take any chances. She insists, shrugs, and goes ahead.
I enter the dark corridors, flashlight in hand. Shadows move on the lower floors. Giant frog statues, motionless like guardians of a lost kingdom. Round, greenish eyes staring into the void, illuminated by my beam of light. A little further on, a suspended whale, the wreckage of a playground that will never be filled again.
We descend to the basement parking lots, and I hesitantly leave the guard post: empty, not a soul in sight. The first of many hybrids: abandoned in theory, alive with ghostly presences and workers.
The Hidden History
Dongdu Frog City was created as a “creation-themed” commercial park, a mix of shopping and entertainment attractions featuring frogs. Designed in the 2000s during the boom of Chinese mega-malls, it opened between 2004 and 2007 in Qingpu, Shanghai. It covered approximately 290,000 square meters of artificial waterfalls, lakes, theatres, and fake hills.
But decline came quickly. Fierce competition from new giants and e-commerce ate away at physical stores. Shops such as KFC, Starbucks, Jack & Jones, and C&A closed one after another. Operational for less than a decade, by 2017, it was already an empty shell. A relaunch project in the 2020s (planned since 2015, delayed by Covid) briefly revives it: it opens in 2024, even attracting the filming of the Chinese movie Good Stuff (好东西, 2025) as mentioned in a Reddit post, with scenes set in the shopping streets and leisure spaces.
Urbex location:
