Located next to the Yu Garden and also known today as the Yu Garden Market, the City God Temple was built in the fifteenth century during the Ming Dynasty. Originally a temple built to honor the Han statesman Huo Guang (68 B.C.), it is a busy market today, specializing in traditional arts and crafts. Outside, however, it still looks like a temple.

One hundred years ago, as more and more pilgrims came to worship in the temple, many peddlers began to open shops near the City God Temple. Slowly, a popular, old-fashioned market came about. Today, around the temple and in a circumference of one-third of a mile there are more than one hundred small shops and restaurants. It is not only an ideal shopping place for Shanghai residents--they can find things unobtainable elsewhere and they dine at their favorite restaurants, but also an 'Must' tourist and shopping center where visitors loitering among a cluster of shops, restaurants and recreation facilities invariably find themselves making a tour of discovery of local folklore and Ming and Qing architecture.