Before you rises one of Shanghai’s most iconic cultural landmarks, the Shanghai Concert Hall, its elegant façade inspired by classical European architecture evoking the golden age of the 30s, when the city was already a thriving cosmopolitan centre. Designed by Chinese architect Fan Wenzhao and inaugurated in 1930 as the Nanking Theatre, it was one of the few venues of its time built specifically for Western music, and over the decades it changed names and roles — first a cinema, then a concert venue — before becoming the Shanghai Concert Hall in 1959. But its story didn’t end there, because in 2007 it was literally moved, the entire six-thousand-tonne structure lifted and transported sixty-six metres to make way for the Yan’an Expressway, an extraordinary engineering feat that raised the building by one metre seventy, shifted it eastward and set it down again with millimetre precision, preserving both its history and its remarkable acoustics. Today this thousand-seat institution continues to welcome leading orchestras and soloists from around the world, and behind its white columns and neoclassical portico you step into a sonic world of rare purity where classical music, Chinese tradition and contemporary innovation coexist in harmony.