About a kilometre to the southeast of Xujiahui is Longhua Park, now officially named the Longhua Cemetery of Martyrs (daily 6.30am-4pm; ¥1 for the cemetery, ¥5 for the exhibition hall) to commemorate those who died fighting for the cause of Chinese Communism in the decades leading up to the final victory of 1949. In particular, it remembers those workers, activists and students massacred in Shanghai by Chiang Kaishek in the 1920s - the site of the cemetery is said to have been the main execution ground. The area contains a glass-windowed, pyramid-shaped exhibition hall in the centre with a rather propagandic memorial to 250 Communist martyrs who fought Chiang's forces. Large numbers of commemorative stone sculptures, many bearing a photo and a name, dot the park, including one directly behind the exhibition hall with an eternal flame flickering in front. The fresh flowers brought daily testify to the power that the memories of these events still hold. The cemetery is a short walk south from the terminus of bus #41, which you can take here from Huaihai Lu near Shanxi Lu or from Nanjing Xi Lu near the Shanghai Centre.

Right next to the Martyrs' Cemetery is one of Shanghai's main religious sites, the Longhua Si (daily 5.30am-4pm; ¥5), with its associated seventeen-hundred-year-old pagoda, on which building work began in 242 AD by a lord from the state of Wu. The pagoda itself is an octagonal structure, about 40m high, its seven brick storeys embellished with wooden balconies and red lacquer pillars. In 977, a monk installed bronze wind chimes that could be heard on the Huangpu River into the nineteenth century. Until the feverish construction of bank buildings along the Bund in the 1910s, the pagoda stood as the tallest edifice in Shanghai. What you see today has been restored after a long period of neglect - Red Guards saw the pagoda as a convenient structure to plaster with banners. In recent years, an ambitious re-zoning project has spruced up the pagoda and created the tea gardens, greenery, and shop stalls that now huddle around it. The temple complex is slightly later in date than the pagoda (345 AD) and is now the most active Buddhist site in the city, with large numbers of new monks being trained. Although it has also seen reconstruction, it is regarded as a prime specimen of Southern Song architecture. On the right as you enter there's a bell tower, where you can strike the bell for ¥10 to bring you good luck. On Chinese New Year, a monk gongs the bell 108 times, supposedly to ease the 108 "mundane worries" of Buddhist thought.

An extra kilometre south (bus #56 down the main road, Longwu Lu, just to the west of the Longhua Si site) will bring you to the Botanical Gardens (daily 7am-4pm; ¥6), whose leafy trees and chirping birds can serve as a respiteful day's escape from the city hubbub. Among the more than nine thousand plants on view are two pomegranate trees said to have been planted in the eighteenth century during the reign of Emperor Qianlong, and still bearing fruit despite their antiquity. Take a look as well at the orchid chamber, with more than a hundred different varieties on show. In spring 1999 the gardens hosted the World Plant Expo.